Sorry for the lack of updates...

I (Ray) was supposed to have started a series on modifying the GWT compiler, but I had to fly out on an emergency recently because my mother has fallen gravely ill and is intensive care and I spend most of my time at the hospital now. Everything has been delayed, the blog series, the next version of Chronoscope, the launch of Timepedia, by weeks. Sorry for the delay.

-Ray

Top 16 missing features from iPhone

Don't get me wrong, I love my iPhone, but the following annoyances, bugs, and missing features really bother me. And for a $600 device, I expect Apple to address this in future firmwares.

1. No MMS. Inexcusable really for a modern phone. MMS isn't just about trading photos, because...

2. No ability to exchange vCard or iCal either over MMS, Email, or Bluetooth, because...

3. The iPhone doesn't appear to support vCard or iCalendar. Really, try inviting yourself to a meeting with Google Calendar and the ICS invites will show up as unusable attachments. Not the end of the world, except...

4. iPhone Mail won't properly show the HTML Invite of a Google Calendar invite! You get the subject line, and unusable attachments, and that's it. Embedding a multipart/alternative inside a multipart/mixed seems to be too much for it. So for now, you're stuck with first, checking email with Mail.app, accepting an ICS invite and getting it into your phone via iSync. Hope no one invites you to important meetings on the road.

5. Again, Bluetooth profiles supported seem pretty paultry. No dialup network tethering, no print service, no OBEX exchange, and so on.


6. VPN L2TP only supports shared secret identification and doesn't allow Machine Certificate.

7. Can't use iPhone to haul files around. You know, being able to use it as a USB drive and sync some files or use Bluetooth File Exchange would be nice, which just about every other phone supports.

8. No gestures for text selection. So, you can position the cursor, but if you need to delete a sentence or word, you have to just press the delete button a few dozen times. You can't cut/copy/paste text either. Double-tap word selection and triple-tap sentence would be nice, and would not interfere with the zooming in any application except Safari text fields.

9. no iChat, no jabber, no AIM, no bonjour, well, nothing but email and SMS. And since neither Flash nor J2ME is available, pretty much no hope of third party development of these -- except for web-based hacks which are likely to chew up battery life with HTTP traffic vs idling a TCP socket.

10. Mail application does not support full range of configuration that Mail.app does (e.g. choosing between IMAPS and STARTTLS, picking SMTP/IMAP ports, etc)

11. Landscape mode available in far too few apps. I like the landscape-mode keyboard, but it is not available in Mail, or SMS, or practically anywhere else except Safari.

12. No speed dial? Wouldn't it be nice if double-taping the home button from sleep wake would take you right into the Phone app so you could hit a speed dial number, or better yet, allow double-tap-home to be configured to go to the favorite app screen of your choice (e.g. recents?) Apple talks about how great it is that the buttons are so configurable being virtual instead of plastic, but why not let the enduser have more control over screen UI layout and macros?

13. No Flash...I know, it's coming most likely. Still, very irritating.

14. No Java (J2ME). The iPhone eats up 500M of RAM for the OS, and he says Java is a hog? With J2ME today, on many phones, you can send/receive SMS from Java code, you can open sockets, you can open bluetooth connections, you can access the file system, you can control the camera, record sound, play video, access PIM databases, make accelerated 3D rendering calls, access accelerated 2D sprite/tile logic, the list goes on. I am onboard with the AJAX programming model, great, but AJAX alone can't cover all application classes, unless they massively embellish the Safari JavaScript API to attain feature parity with the various J2ME JSRs.

15. If no Java, then come up with an Objective-C secure sandboxed alternative that allows more access to native iPhone widgets. AJAX developers can't achieve a seemless native-look-and-feel by using HTML rendering, because the iPhone native widgets are relying on Core Animation as well as access to native data. A Java or Obj-C layer could. A Javascript layer cool, if, and I mean, *IF* Apple put serious work into extending the Dashcode API to encompass a hell of alot more functionality than they do today. Without Flash and without Java, even something as simply as writing a game with sound effects becomes hard. I guess the only alternative is to load up a bunch of quicktime objects into the webpage. Sheesh.

16. Last, but not least, Mobile Safari and AJAX. Yeah, it's the 'full web', right? Not exactly.

a) Safari chews up mousedown, mousemove, mouseup, and other DOM events before the browser gets them to implement scrolling and zooming. So, for example, maps.google.com scrolling doesn't work on iPhone. Great, they have a native app that deals with scrolling and zooming already on the iPhone, but what about other web pages that need these events?

b) Any element or frame with overflow: scroll is treated as overflow: clip. That is, with the exception of top level window, you cannot have scrollable regions anywhere else within a page. Safari has no concept of 'focused' scrolling. You'd expect that if you tap an embedded FRAME/IFRAME/DIV and it had scrollbars, that you could scroll them by dragging your finger. Ooopps! They obviously need a mechanism to support scrolling when there are multiple scrollable regions. And the response cannot be 'well, only browse pages designed for iPhone in the first place!' because that's the WAP "mobile Web" argument, which Steve Jobs himself has ridiculed. I want the FULL web experience on my iPhone.

c) Safari should let the browser DOM event handlers get fit dibs at the event. If they call event.preventDefault(), it should CANCEL the default finger-drag-scrolls-whole-window. Would this allow some poorly designed web pages to disable zoom and scroll? Yep.

The iPhone is a magnificent phone. But I feel it is much like the PlayStation 3 - about the same price, underdeveloped firmware, and lacking third party support. A year later, the PS3 firmware has added DLNA, background downloads, enhanced RGB, BluRay, new AVC codecs, Folding@Home, and lots of other features.

Let's hope that the iPhone's lack of features is not a conscious decision to eschew those features, but merely the result of rushed deadlines to get a stable device out before they could finish every feature in their roadmap.


-Ray