by Ole Teucher

[tweetmeme]I remember walking down the streets with my iPhone, when suddenly the iPod app crashed, because I had opened a complex website in Safari. That was back in 2007, in the early days of the iPhone OS. Back then the iPhone was a breakthrough device compared to my former cellphone, the Motorola Razr, or any other device on the market. A usable browser and email client on a cellphone? It felt like my biggest dreams came true, and I was using my iPhone like crazy. But it was still far away from being able to replace my Macbook Pro for a trip over the weekend. It was just too limited in several ways. Pretty much everything had to be done within mobile Safari, which was fine for a few hours, but not really comfortable enough to go through huge piles of information.

Since then Apple has released two major updates to the iPhone OS, and this month they gave us a preview of the next big update. Major updates? I think we all have experienced it several times, you upgrade an operating system or an application, but the changes aren’t really breathtaking. Sure, they add a few new features, fix a few bugs, but after all they hardly ever change how you use the application, or interact with the operating system. Not so with the iPhone OS.

Starting with a very limited feature set, the first two major updates really took the device to a whole new level. With iPhone OS 2.0 Apple introduced the AppStore, bringing us thousands of applications, and turning the iPhone into a portable gaming console. Suddenly reading RSS feeds on the iPhone became pleasant, and the perfect Twitter machine was born. The usability of the iPhone exploded, but it was still not good enough for me to leave my Macbook Pro behind, when I was going on a trip. Why? Mainly because all the great new applications were too isolated. If you stumbled upon a great article in Safari for example, it was still a pain in the ass to take out a little quote and post it to Twitter. Or if somebody sent you an email, and you wanted to process some of the information in it, you ended up tearing your hair out. I can remember borrowing my brother’s iPhone, to look up something on his iPhone, and write down the displayed information on my iPhone. It was a mess.

That changed with iPhone OS 3.0. There are still many people out there claiming that Copy & Paste is not an important feature. I think they’re completely wrong. Sure, everybody is talking about multitasking, but there’s no sense in multitasking, if you don’t have Copy & Paste to interact between the applications. With Copy & Paste you are able to let the applications interact, you can finally take all the information you’ve been gathering since 2.0, and make some actual use of them. That’s what turned the iPhone from a consumption only device into something you can actually get things done with. For the first time I was able to leave my Macbook Pro at home. Part of this was also ascribed to the new iPhone 3GS, which made everything a lot faster, but it was mainly the introduction of Copy & Paste.

Of course there were a lot of other features introduced since the iPhone was released in 2007, like turn-by-turn directions, in-app email or video recording, and the apps themselves gained a lot of usability through newly added developer APIs, with the introduction of iPhone OS 3.0. But it’s hard to argue against the App Store and Copy & Paste being the two outstanding features that changed the whole usage of the platform. This all leads us to one big question. What’s next, how can Apple take the iPhone to yet another level, and increase its usability, to make it an even better platform? To get an idea about that, let’s take a look at what Apple has introduced at their iPhone OS 4.0 sneak peak event, and, just as important, which features might be still missing.

The biggest feature request from the community before the event was multitasking, and I think it was a reasonable request. An internet radio app doesn’t really make sense, if you can’t use your device for anything else while it’s playing. Neither does an app like Skype, if people can’t call you on it, because the app isn’t running all the time. Another big benefit of multitasking is fast app switching. Right now you can copy&paste something from one app to another, but it takes some time to close the app you’re copying from, go to another app, navigate to where you want to paste your content, paste it in, edit it, and get back to where you came from. It works, but it’s slow. Too slow sometimes. There’s also a problem with games. When you get interrupted by a push notification, and leave the game to reply, you often have to start over from the beginning of your current level, when you re-enter the game.

These are major flaws in the current iPhone OS, and I think that Apple has found a great way to deal with these problems. To handle the fast application switching part, the OS simply pauses the applications when you leave them. This way they don’t reduce your battery life while they’re waiting for you in the background, and you can take off right where you’ve left them, once you come back to use them again. Being in this paused state, they can still receive push notifications, so you won’t miss any crucial information. For stuff like internet radio or VoIP, the iPhone keeps only the absolutely necessary services running in the background, while it pauses the rest of the app, when you leave the app to do something else. This way the energy consumption is reduced to a minimum, while you gain the experience of multitasking.

The big question here is what is allowed to run in the background, and what isn’t? Apple mentioned audio streaming, VoIP, background location, push notifications, local notifications, and task completion. The first five are pretty much self-explanatory, while the last one seems to be usable for various stuff. Apple’s example was uploading pictures to flickr. The way I’m reading this though, is that it has to be a task with a precisely defined end. So you could re-encode an audio sample you’ve just modified, but you couldn’t keep pulling a Twitter stream over and over again.

So where will we run into the limitations of this multitasking implementation? I think it’ll work just fine for most use cases, but it doesn’t cover everything. Take Pastebot for example, or any other clipboard manager. Wouldn’t it be great if it would save everything you copy into your clipboard automatically, without the need to go into the app every time you want it to save something? Of course I don’t know it for sure, but my guess is that it won’t work this way with Apple’s multitasking implementation. It’ll be faster to switch to Pastebot and copy your items with Apple’s new way to switch between apps, but it’s far away from being a perfect solution. Another example is video streaming. I was watching a football stream on my iPhone lately, which isn’t perfect on the small screen, but it’s better than nothing. Every time a push notification came in, I had to leave the app for about a minute to send a quick reply, and I had no idea what was going on in the game during this time. With true multitasking I could have at least heard what was going on in the mean time, with Apple’s implementation I probably won’t.

These are just two examples out of my head where Apple’s implementation probably won’t do the trick, and I’m sure we’ll run into many others, once the update becomes available. But does this mean it’s a bad implementation? I don’t think so. Battery life is bad enough already on the iPhone, so letting every application run in the background would run down your battery life way too fast. I think there’s no way to do this without some limitations, and we can still hope that Apple will provide additional background enabled services in the future. If you really want unlimited multitasking on devices of this category, go invent some awesome new batteries.

Apple has placed multitasking as the main new feature of iPhone OS 4.0, and I think it’s going to enhance the overall iPhone workflow a lot. This is probably the big feature I would look back to in another year, when I’d write the same article about iPhone OS 5. But let’s take a quick look at the other announcements, before we look at some things that are still missing.

Folders are a welcome addition to Apple’s very simple homescreen interface. Personally I think everything beyond 3 homescreens is just annoying, because it gets confusing, and involves too many swipes to get to the application you’re looking for. I’m no fan of Spotlight on the iPhone either, so being able to group barely used applications seems like a good idea to me. This also gives you the ability to dump all the Apple apps you don’t use into a single folder and forget about them, without wasting half a homescreen on them.

The email app on the iPhone has been enhanced, which is good, but nothing to applaud about. The updates were overdue, and they’re still missing out on stuff like full body email search. iBooks shouldn’t even have made it into their list of seven tent-poles, it probably won’t have any big influence on the iPhone platform. The improved business features are probably important for Apple and its business partners, but they won’t play a big role for the average consumer.

GameCenter should strengthen the iPhones position as a mobile gaming device, and even for a casual gamer like me, it seems to make sense to establish one big gaming network. Even if it’s just to get rid of the multiple logins I have to deal with right now. This could also make it a lot easier for developers to implement online multiplayer modes for their games. But I’m not a gaming expert, your mileage may vary.

Neither am I a marketing guru, so I don’t care too much about iAds. But Apple’s new marketing platform might turn out to be something big. Mobile advertising will probably become a very huge market, so I can see why it makes sense for Apple to get involved in this business. This might also have a big influence on future pricing on the AppStore, and help developers to make some money. But I’m no expert, and even the experts don’t really seem to know how this turns out right now. I just hope that mobile advertising will become less annoying than it already is.

Of course there are a lot of other improvements coming with iPhone OS 4.0. Over 1100 new APIs, and more than 100 user features, but I think there’s nothing groundbreaking in there to talk about. So let’s get on to what’s still missing in iPhone OS 4.0.

The first area I want to talk about is the iPhones user interface. Usually this is one of Apple’s strong suits, and they often come up with great solutions. A good example is the iPhones implementation of Copy & Paste, which has a very simple yet powerful UI. Unfortunately there are a few things that need Apple’s attention, first of all their notification system. The notifications are very useful, and I believe that they’ll continue to play an important role, in addition to the new multitasking capabilities coming in iPhone OS 4.0.

The problem is how you have to interact with them. They simply pop up over your currently running application, and interrupt whatever it is you’re doing. This isn’t a big problem if it happens every once in a while, but it’s getting really annoying when you have to deal with them all the time. It’s getting even worse when you’re on the phone, and their constant chirping and beeping is distracting you from your phone call. They are just too intrusive in their current implementation. Their second major flaw is their transiency. You can either deal with them right away, or the chances are that you’re going to forget about them, because there’s no single place in the OS to catch up with them later. And if multiple notifications come in within seconds, you have no chance see what they’re all about.

So I think Apple has to do two things, reduce their intrusiveness, and improve their accessibility. To achieve the first one, they could get rid of the splash screen. A more reserved alert in the status bar on top of the screen should be enough, optionally accompanied by an acoustic alert. Acoustic alerts should be automatically muted while you’re on a call, complemented by system wide quiet times. Getting notifications about Twitter mentions is fine, but not if they wake you up in the middle of the night.

If they remove the splash screen, they have to introduce another way to quickly see what’s going on. To do this they could introduce a new way to give you a quick overview of all your notifications, no matter if they’re push notifications, local notifications, new emails or text messages. This list could either be quickly accessible like an application via the new multitasking dock, or via another systemwide gesture. Additionally there could be an option to display all this information on your lockscreen. Right now you always have to unlock your device to see what’s going on, this would be an easy way to improve that.

The second area where I see a lot of potential for improvements is in the ways how applications interact with each other. As long as we’re talking about manually copying snippets from one app to another, it works pretty fine already. But let’s take a look at handling files. Apple wants to keep it simple, and they don’t want to give users access to the filesystem of the iPhone. But in this case refusing users access to the file system without offering a viable alternative makes things really complicated. There’s no way to transfer a bunch of files to your iPhone and access them with several applications. You can either email a file to yourself, and access it via mail, or other applications with build in email clients, or you can transfer files to single applications, often via a WiFi connection. But this is far from being a good solution. You can’t really edit a file in one application, and then hand it over to another one to do some further editing. To get a good idea of how flawed their current implementation is, read through Ted Landau’s piece on the document workflow in iWork apps.

We can get a hint at a possible solution for this problem by looking at how the iPhone is handles photos. All photos are stored in the camera roll, and 3rd party applications have access to them. This way you can edit photos with multiple applications, and easily share them with your computer when you connect the iPhone to iTunes. A similar approach to other documents could be done easily, and Apple wouldn’t have to give users full access to the file system for such a solution. It could all be done within one shared folder.

Sharing files is one thing, another thing is exchanging snippets of data automatically. TextExpander is an example that applications can already do this, but it has to be implemented by every single app that wants to use TextExpanders snippets. This is something Apple could provide as a service. Wouldn’t it be great if you could use TextExpander in every single app, or if you could access 1Passwords bookmarks from within Safari and any other 3rd party browser? I think you get the idea.

The third area I want to take a look at, is how the iPhone interacts with the rest of the Apple ecosystem. This is often named as one of the iPhones strong suits, yet there’s a lot of room for improvements. Right now almost everything happens over USB, and iTunes acts as a central hub to sync all your data between the iPhone and the applications on your Mac. Only your emails, calendars, contacts and bookmarks can be synced wireless via MobileMe. That is something Apple should take to another level, by introducing wireless syncing capabilities for all the other stuff too.

It would make listening to podcasts so much more comfortable, if my iPhone and my Mac would always be in perfect synchronization, without me having to hook up my iPhone to my Mac first. Of course it wouldn’t make sense to sync a 500MB video podcast over the 3G network, but over a WiFi network? Why not, if it’s doing it in the background when I don’t need the bandwidth. And the bandwidth usage to sync where I’ve left the video on my iPhone, to continue at the same position when I return to my Mac would be negligible. It would be taking Amazons Whisper sync to the next level.

Just think about the idea with the shared folder for files again. Wouldn’t it be a great solution, if you had this folder automatically synced over the air to a similar folder on your Mac? It seems to me that Apple has all this big potential lying around, without making any use of it. MobileMe seems to be destined to bring all of Apple’s products together, and connect them in a seamless way, but right now it just isn’t good enough.

One last thing. During the synchronization process iTunes is constantly making backups of your iPhone. This is generally a good idea, and those backups are working just fine when you’re upgrading to a new iPhone, and you want to seamlessly continue where you’ve left your old iPhone. But there’s no way to restore single applications, so if you want to restore just a few apps, but want to start fresh otherwise, there’s no way of doing it right now. I think Apple should try to improve this, especially when you think about the iPad, that should be able to perform backups without relying on iTunes to do it.

Right now the iPhone and iPad don’t seem to be able to live on their own, without being constantly nurtured by a Mac or PC. I’d love to see them become independent devices, that can seamlessly blend in with your Apple ecosystem, meeting on an equal level with your other devices.

Ole Teucher, a keen Apple watcher, shares his insights in 140 characters, his posterous blog, and even on the SA podcast. You almost do not have the right to dispute his opinion.