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Who loves iPhone app and feature ideas? I do! I thought I’d write up a blog post about some. A few are mundane but have unique implementation details I haven’t seen elsewhere, and some are completely unusual and hopefully clever. I’ve provided mockups, mostly unaided by Interface Builder, so forgive occasional sloppiness. Anyway, let’s begin with the dullest of the dull:

Tasks - A visual to-do list.

All implementations of to-do lists, suggested or produced, have sucked awfully. There’s one reason - nobody wants to go through five dialogues to add a task. I want to address that.

Anyway, here’s the main screen. It shows the stuff relative to today - the tasks due today, followed by the undated tasks. The alternate views are Date and List, Date simply showing a list of all future tasks, List for you to manage shopping lists and other “expandable” tasks, which are a bit like a folder of individual tasks that are marked complete when everything inside them is.

But the main thing that’s exciting is the add screen. See that? The important parts are color, icons and a sketch area. We start with the standard input field, if you want to type a name for the task. This is completely optional, though, and it can just as easily be replaced with a colour or icon as a method of recognising the task. The colour bar you see is an abstraction of what a more boring and hierarchical to-do app might call “categories”.. but in this case it’s up to you to decide on them and remember what they represent. For instance, blue might be used for work, green for banking, yellow for schoolwork. A sketch pad will also be there, allowing you to finger-paint a picture of what your task is about, and this picture will appear on the main screen alongside your to-do entry. And for even quicker pictorial representation of your task, a number of icons will be available. In my example there are 16, but pressing the “…” button would expose another 48.

The point of this redundancy is to help make the to-do list usable in real life, so that if you suddenly remember you need to go to the bank, instead of tap-tap-tapping “Go to the bank”, “financial”, “add”, you can just tap the green colour and add that. Of course, if you think you’ll forget that because you need to go to the bank in the next two weeks and not later that afternoon, you can always type the name too. I think that’s the best way for a tasks app to work.

Oh, and that sharing thing? I stole it from this Macworld article. Basically you should have the ability to send and receive tasks from friends, add commentary to tasks, or simply view their to-do lists if they allow. This could either be done via a sync-to-server method or perhaps email. The tasks app could check the MobileMail database and if a specially formatted email arrived, it’d ask to import the task. This would make the to-do list app interoperable with the rest of the world, as email is fairly universal.

We just have to keep in mind that this sort of app should not be an exercise in displaying a simple CoreData store and pleasing OCD freaks who spend their time cataloguing and sorting and filling out all the data on their task lists without actually doing the tasks. The app needs to be quick, dirty and useful, something a Real Person would not hesitate to whip out the minute they realise they need to set a reminder for themselves or grab an extra item when they go to the shops that night. Minimal user interaction, minimum organisation.

Diary - A life recorder.

This is an out-there idea that I think could have some great applications. I also think it’ll be shot down by some for crazy privacy and security reasons, but fuck them. The app runs as a background task, doing the following throughout the day:

• Taking photos
• Recording sound
• Checking where the phone is located
• Checking when the phone is moved
• Logging calls, SMSes and email
• Monitoring the music you play

i.e. an awesome thing for stalkers. The purpose, though, would be stalking yourself, and sharing that information with others. It’d also help you meet up with friends and learn things about your own life. How so?

Well, let me start with how it does these things. There would be a background service that’d check things periodically - say, 15 minutes by default, but it’d be adjustable. It’d have to notice who you speak to, via phone, SMS and email, and it would do this by reading the database of all those apps. Other easy parts would include the monitoring of songs played, and the usage of the Core Location thing Apple is offering that allows developers to look up the location of the phone based on GPS, phone towers and visible Wi-Fi networks. So imagine, every 15 minutes, the phone checks for all this new activity, pings Core Location to ask “where am I?” and puts this in a log. Simple, right?

So there’s a dull little iPhone history application, with a neat location logger. But this is about monitoring your life, and the phone can do a better job than that. The interesting parts are the photo-taking, movement monitoring and sound recording, which would also be hard to implement. Imagine that at each of these 15 minute intervals, the phone also takes a photo, runs a program that checks if it’s black or dark (photos of your pocket are discarded) then keeps the interesting ones taken while you’ve been browsing songs or holding the phone to your head or putting the phone face-down on a surface. Similarly, the phone should analyse and record moments when the person is walking (tons of movement), in the pocket of the person while they sit (low movement) and when it’s on a table while the person is sleeping (stationary, at night). Also, at every interval where the phone checks up on life around it, it should record 5 seconds of audio, analyse whether the noise is silence, worthless noise, or something with the characteristics of music or speech. If it is deemed interesting, the phone will keep recording and keep checking every 30 seconds until it stops being interesting, and so throughout the day the phone could collect conversations you have, TV and radio, lectures, and other such occurrences.

Okay, a lot of effort, but for what result? This:

A neat little timeline that takes all of the interesting “entries” in the diary (single photos, location changes, calls made etc) and smudges them together into readable, interesting ways, Facebook mini-feed style. If you touch the entry with photos, you can view them full-screen, if you touch the sound, it plays, if you touch the geographical location, it shows as a point on a Google map of where you travelled that day. Each of the sub-screens provides details on when the item was recorded, where it was, etc, but the focus is on making an interesting timeline and not just generating a sequential list of what was recorded. As I mentioned, Facebook is the model here, it will group photos together and muddle a little with chronology to make things make more sense to people reading it. This app should do similar things.

Sharing would also be a great function for this app. At a specific interval, it would upload the timeline to a web service, and friends you allow could follow your day while sharing their own. While it is an iPhone app, the phone should allow you to share your day and archived days via a regular webpage. The friends button on the bottom of the screen would be the way to access the aforementioned friends list, where you can view some or all of their daily log. Perhaps the app should also let you meet people close to you, so that once you are within a few km of each other, the app adds them to a “Nearby” section on the friends list.

Finally, statistics could be offered, in lists and charts. I have no mockup, but some ideas are:

• Average or total time spent in certain locations
• Average time spent walking, sitting, and without the phone
• Most communicative time of day (calls, SMS, sent email)
• Most commonly played song while sitting, walking or travelling via car\bus\train
• Average start of day, average end of day (i.e. from the point the phone starts moving in the morning to the time you last move it at night)

Of course, mere graphs of “active hours” would be interesting, as would usage stats that check how often you send messages, make calls, etc. But with such a rich set of information I think you could generate great stats pages that would be interesting to people.

So there’s an idea. Yeah, you’d have to charge your battery nightly, but small sacrifice for something super neat, right?

iPhone VOIP - Free calls, transparently and automatically.

Ok, so I originally used the lack of this feature to explain why the iPhone is going to be the new Razr and nothing more. While it got more hype than the Razr, so far what I said has rung true.

This feature is the way Apple can sell the phone for $600 again if they want to, and sell 20 million this year if they felt like it. I bet it breaks a lot of contracts they have with the phone companies, but it’d still be a clever thing to do.

The marketing is simply “free calls at home, work or school.”. The technology is a transparent VOIP client that works automatically, has minimal UI, and Apple footing the bill for all calls using the service.

It starts with the phone being a bit smarter about Wi-Fi. When joining a Wi-Fi network, it would do the following to determine a “reliability level”:

• Check current Wi-Fi signal strength
• Check the history of this signal - is it a familiar name? Has it dropped out while on a call before?
• Run a quick speed test to see if the connection is capable of placing calls

It would then use this data in the only real UI this function would use:

Please forgive the horrible mockup, I couldn’t find a way to get a blank popup dialogue thing to write over, so I rushed it. So: there’d be an option available for this popup to never appear, so that the user can force cell calls all the time, or Wi-Fi calls when the connection is deemed moderately or highly reliable. Asking the user like the dialogue there should be the default, though, I think.

What of this delay, then? Well, if your Wi-Fi drops out after you’ve started your VOIP call (which is going through Apple’s servers just like a Skypeout call goes through Skype’s), you hear a recognisable beep, the phone screen says “Reconnecting”, and in 3-5 seconds you are talking again. The person called hears “Please hold” and some music for the same 3-5 seconds. Perhaps the music will be selectable!

How would this work? Well, Apple’s server would notice that the iPhone is no longer sending packets from that IP address, and it would immediately start sending the called person the “please hold” signal in place of the iPhone’s input. Then, once this message was playing, it would immediately place another Skypeout-like call to the iPhone that just dropped out, and Apple would act as the bridge between both connections, i.e. it would be the computer calling out to both numbers, simply forwarding the sound between both phone calls. The iPhone would expect this call, and therefore transparently provide a “Reconnecting” screen and identifiable beep. The person called would not have to redial and would only think they were put on hold for a second before it reconnected.

As for Skype-like real Wi-Fi calls? I think Skype should make their own client. It’s more important that a transparent system of making normal calls free is developed. I think that this would be a runaway success and completely enticing to anyone who wanted to save massively on phone bills. The iPhone would not only be the luxury phone everyone wants, it’d be the economical choice that allows you to completely eliminate your phone bill at home, and slash most of your bill outside of the home, providing your work and\or school has Wi-Fi (as I am pretty sure tons of calls take place at workplaces or schools.)

I also think it’d make sense for Apple to do for free. Gizmo does it, and Skype kinda did it for a year, and those companies don’t nearly have as much money or revenue opportunities. Apple should buy Gizmo for their infrastructure, and bleed a hundred million a year on doing all these calls. They’d only need to sell another 5 million phones a year to cover that, if you assume they make $200 a sale. Of course, they will forgo all the kickbacks from phone companies, which will HATE this, but if it was offered for worldwide sale with this feature, it’d sell like crazy, as everyone wants to shrink their phone bill, even in the poorer countries that the phone may not have originally had a market.

As I said, Apple has to provide this. I can’t wait for Skype on the iPhone, but even if it supported Skypeout it’s not going to be the same unless it completely blends in with the process of placing a regular call. There are already phones that have that, and nobody cares that they use VOIP because it’s complicated and hardly transparent.

Pages - Word processing and notetaking.

This is the missing link when it comes to the iPhone replacing a real laptop. People use laptops to write and edit documents, and the iPhone cannot. But with a potential accessory, I believe it could. See the following prototype I developed, drawing inspiration from the 9-year-old Windows CE-powered Jornada 720:

This is the required accessory to use this program, as well as Numbers and Keynote (but those apps are too boring for me to discuss.) I mentioned it in an earlier post - I think Apple should develop something like a stowaway keyboard.

Basically take a wireless Apple keyboard, add a hinge in the middle, and something to hold the phone horizontally. I think that unlike Stowaway keyboards, the goal should not be for the keyboard to be pocketable, rather that it be light and easy to shove in a bag with minimal time spent unfolding, locking and arranging it. I also think it should have some alternate features - an internal battery, twice the size of the iPhone’s, in order to provide something like 8 hours of life in this mode, as well as some ports the iPhone does not offer. For instance, while it would use a dock connector to charge the keyboard’s battery, it would also include a USB port for printing (perhaps some flash memory in the keyboard would hold drivers), USB flash drives (for saving and opening documents from) and charging anything that can be powered by USB. It could also provide better antennas for the iPhone to use while attached, an improved microphone for voice recording, and a passthrough audio port if you want to listen to music as you work.

Apple could sell it as a laptop replacement that costs $120 + an iPhone. Like a Foleo that is priced realistically.

Anyway, it should be accompanied by a set of office apps. While email is covered by the included software, a word processor is a must, and what better software to use than Pages? I won’t go into crazy detail here, but I think it should let you manipulate the layout of a page only if those objects are already in the document (like a circle shape, or a text box) but otherwise focus on providing text editing stuff everyone needs. The point will be that while you can’t make a beautiful document on the phone itself, you can write a draft on the phone with the bare content laid out, then later make it gorgeous on your computer, then finally sync it back to the phone and do proofreading before you print it. So Pages for iPhone should give you something like spell checking, lists, header/footer, font size, bold, italics, etc, but not necessarily tables, AutoText and the ability to insert a Quicktime movie.

I suppose all this would necessitate copy and paste, wouldn’t it? I’ll let the fanatical masses who are somehow inconvenienced by this in the current software figure that one out.

Charges monitor - The phone bill as part of the phone UI.

This is a suggested part of the phone OS, it would be hard to do well as a third party app or extension. With it, you could view your accumulated call costs and remaining minutes (in Settings, somewhere), however, more usefully it could display information whenever you incur a charge. After every call or text, the status bar would slide in your balance of dollars\minutes, and a cute little red representation of what you were charged would float up past the status bar, drop onto the balance, and reduce it by that much. No other phone does this, but it seems like an entirely obvious feature. People could develop and update their own carrier profiles, so that a global database of carriers and plans would be available to use.

Sloppy animation, but you see, right? This appeared after a 1 minute 39 second call was made. Here are some alternative ideas:

In this picture, you see what would appear if your plan gave you minutes instead of a balance, an SMS count instead of a balance, or if you had exceeded your amount and every transaction added to your bill. I’m not sure how a data usage popup would work, the phone would have to sense when you were “done” with data for a while so as not to constantly bug you as you surfed the web or whatever.

Tweaks to the iPod app

Simplify Media is a great idea with an awkward UI. iTunes should offer this server capability, at least for personal use, and the iPod app should integrate support for connecting to the computer at home for streaming of audio and video.

Have you ever come home listening to something great, sat at your computer and got upset that you couldn’t just switch over to your speakers and continue listening to it without the headphones involved? Well, there should be some function to continue playback on the computer you’re tied to with Apple’s wonderful Remote app (iTunes Store link). Also, I think the iPod app is sorely lacking a feature to let you immediately browse all albums by the artist playing, as well as music that is considered similar to it (use last.fm to work that one out, or something.) I don’t know if I like this UI idea, but it’d be a way to do it. That is, have the buttons appear when you’re in the mode where the playback bar is visible.

By the way, does anyone remember the real iPod? It did this weird thing where you could glance at it and know what it was playing. With the iPhone you need to press a button. Since powering an LCD without a backlight is a trivial task for a big fat iPhone battery, and high contrast text is easy to read even in stressful conditions, let’s have this:

Oh, and while I’m here… the next iPhone needs an invisible aluminium iMac-like camera next to the earpiece, for 3G video calls and iChat\Skype video, haptic feedback, a super high DPI screen, an N95-quality camera, A2DP support, and a removable battery. It should also come in tasteful aluminium colours, or at least aluminium look - because the current glossy black and white is so dull. Thanks.