My iOS 6 Wish List

Everyone seems to be hitting the blogsphere with their predictions and wish lists for the next big version of Apple’s iOS.

I’ve seen a new 3D map interface, multiple users, Siri everywhere and lots of other ideas. Great! I like a good bit of advanced technology so keep the ideas coming.

But as an early adopter of the iPad, I have a few things on my wish list too that are a lot less advanced and significantly less interesting to the fanboys.

GMail Integration That Works

Like millions of other people, I use both GMail and an iPad. The iPad like most other devices comes with a number of different connection mechanisms for email, contacts, calendar, and tasks. Even better than that… it comes with an Exchange connector that works with GMail and does it all in a single set-up. Way better than trying to configure all of them separately. And it works.

Well, it did…

Somewhere in the iOS 4.x era the whole thing just broke. Email would no longer sync, it would hang and crash back to the desktop. Then calendar started hanging and crashing. And then the reminder app. And then Safari started behaving badly. In fact, the whole iPad started behaving pretty badly.

Easy you say. Delete and recreate the email profile. But if I tried to go into the email settings, that would hang too. If I turned off wifi and waited, I could get into the settings and delete the profile fixing everything. But if I recreate the setup, it’s broken once more.

Wow, that’s some bad luck, right? Seems not. According to the Apple forums this is a pretty common problem. Only advice is to completely reset your iPad back to factory settings.

After the 5.0 upgrade (which didn’t fix it) I was desperate so actually did the complete reset. And amazingly it fixed it! Suddenly my iPad was back! I lost some files stored in different apps, all my home page links to web sites, and had to completely reconfigure absolutely every app, but that was OK because my email, calendar, contacts, and reminders worked, right?

3 months later…

Oh no. It’s happened again. My lovely iPad is largely a brick. Emails sent via a different connector just disappear. It hangs all the time. I’m in misery!

5.1.1 didn’t fix it, but I’m hoping that iOS 6.0 does!

Reminders App That Lets Me Manage Tasks

I was really surprised when the iPad came out that there was no way to manage tasks. It seemed to me and many others to be a really obvious omission. After all, anyone connecting to a calendar using CalDAV might well have tasks in there too, because it handles both.

While not everyone wants or needs task management, those who use it really use it. We use it a lot. We keep work and home life organised by dropping things instantly into our task list so we don’t have to keep it in our brain. We then categorise, sort, flag, prioritise, and constantly reset the due dates on our tasks to our overloaded schedules.

So there was rightly some excitement when the new Reminders app was announced at the WWDC as part of iOS 5.

But what a let down. While it looks good, it suffers from an inability to organise, filter, or sort on any useful fields. The UI is clunky, make it hard to update tasks in common ways (how many dials do I have to touch to move a task from January 31 to February 1?) and just doesn’t satisfy.

After a brief play, I stopped bothering. It’s much easier to edit reminders on my Blackberry. How embarrassing is that Apple?!?

Web Browser That Doesn’t Forget My Pages

I love tabbed browsing. I’ve been using Firefox for ages and just love the fact that I can load lots of different pages and then switch between them quickly. It’s so easy! So quick! So useful!

Of course Safari has that too. Great! I load one tab. Load a second. Go back to the first…

Hey! Why is my first window reloading? I just loaded it and I know it doesn’t have an autorefresh. How about my second tab? It’s reloading now as well!

This makes absolutely no sense to me. I know that the iPad has main memory and storage memory. But I also know that lots of my apps use heaps more memory than Safari and don’t do anything as mad as reloading the page each time I look at it. Surely it should be able to get the information from the cache quickly, right? But no, it downloads it all again?!? I like my web pages fresh, but that’s just excessive and annoying.

It’s only really a mild annoyance on wifi, but a complete nightmare on 3G or slower and more expensive connections.

 

So that’s my minor rant on the subject of my iOS 6 wish list.

Please Apple, keep on innovating and producing great, flashy, fun hardware and software. But also, please don’t just drop and run. Remember your customers, listen to them on the Apple forums, and fix the things that are broken.

Facebook breaks their RSS feeds

Without warning today Facebook broke all their RSS feeds. If, like me, you rely on your favourite RSS reader to keep up with your entire life, this is a major tragedy.

It all started when I received this on my Facebook friends status feed today.

Facebook Syndication Error
This feed URL is no longer valid. Visit this page to find the new URL, if you have access: http://www.facebook.com/statusupdates/

I got similar errors from my Notifications and Posts/Links feeds. Each of them pointed me to a place to find the new URL that were completely useless. Bless them...

I did some hunting around and it seems that all that's happened is that Facebook has changed their authentication keys from a numeric to a longer alphanumeric. The RSS URLs are all unchanged other than that.

To find your new authentication key you can follow these instructions to get the Notification or Links RSS URLs within Facebook.

• Notifications: Go to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php and you'll find a new link at the top of the page.
  format: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=YourID&viewer=YourID&key=YourNewAuthkey&format=rss20
• Links: Go to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php and you'll find an RSS to My Friends' Links in the left column.
  format: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/share_friends_posts.php?id=YourID&key=YourNewAuthkey&format=rss20

The new News Feed/Status link is nowhere to be found on the Facebook web site as far as I can see. However I did manage to use the hints from the first 2 to fix the last one. You just need to change the authkey in your feed URL to get a new URL that works.

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_status.php?id=YourID&key=YourNewAuthkey&format=rss20

Are you missing other RSS feeds after this change? If so, let me know!

A tale of two technologies

It won't surprise anyone who knows me that I'm a big fan of technology. In high school I built my own speaker cases, linked them up to a Radio Shack mini-amp, and then wired that into a clock radio. I also owned a very expensive TRS-80 computer with a daisy wheel printer that sounded like a jackhammer as it printed my grade 13 English essays.

I had the good fortune recently to receive two pieces of up to date, high end technology. One purchased by me with my hard earned wonga, the other provided by my employer in order to keep me chained to the desk regardless of distance.

The two toys are an Apple iPad and a RIM Blackberry Curve 8900.

To say that I've had a different experience with each of these would be a massive understatement. The iPad has been a complete joy and become a valued member of the household while the replacement Blackberry is still waiting to have basic functionality restored/reinstalled after a week.

The Blackberry showed up first. My trusty old Nokia E51 had died after 3 years of abuse and the Blackberry was the smartphone on offer at the company shop. So that was that.

I hate it. I really do.

Of course it's different. It would have to be and I'd have to get used to it. But Briana has an iPhone 3GS. And that provided some preset expectations... I wanted to be able to install a lot of cool, free apps. I wanted a simple, intuitive email system for personal and work email. A great browser. Great contact management and calendar functionality linked with my work server.

Dream on. Very few apps. Useless and frustrating browser. The need to install brutally limited apps to do email (Gmail and NotifyLink) on a device renowned for it's email capability. A calendar that lets me create appointments but not actually allow me to invite anyone to them.

And then, 2 months in the trackball starts to act up. I try cleaning it, tapping it, and whacking it but nothing helps. So I end up having to replace the unit after only 2 months. Of course I take a full backup of the phone before I send it away to ease my way into the new device. I restore to find that it's reloaded my data but not my apps. It's remembered my wifi settings but not my Bluetooth. A week in with the new Blackberry and it still doesn't have any email apps installed and can't sync calendar or contacts with the server. What a waste of time.

Then came the iPad. Actually, I'm writing this article on it right now. My last article was written on it too. Just as an experiment. Today I'm using it because I happened to be sitting in the kitchen after dinner listening to music and drinking a nice glass of red and just fancied writing.

And that summarises everything I love about the iPad. Just because I fancy it.

I catch up with the news on the BBC just because I fancy it. I watch a film trailer because I fancy it. I check work or home email. I play a diverting game. I check the weather. I look up the actress from that film because I know I've seen her somewhere before. I write this blog. Just because I fancy it. When I fancy it. In my kitchen. Sitting in front of the TV. Whenever. Wherever.

Is it perfect? No. There are too many videos I can't watch because of Apple's silly Flash stance (I mean, who are they to throw around the word "proprietary"?). Why do I have to depend on a physical plug in to my Windows box for synchronisation when there's a perfectly good wifi network available?

But that doesn't mean that it isn't great (fast, great battery life, able to do many things well), convenient (always there, ready when you are), and frankly beautiful (it really does turn heads).

And while the v2 will have the Facetime video phone technology, a faster chip, and more memory, I certainly don't regret buying a v1 solution in any way. It doesn't feel like a v1 in any real way. You don't use it and feel that it's lacking. It does what you expect it to. Now.

Well, that's enough tech talk for now. Time to dial up that new album on Napster using my amazing Sonos system. But I'll leave that for another day...

The Value of Personalised Service

I recently experienced an incredible shock. I received personalised service from an unexpected source.

I'm a big believer in personalised service. Having sold and marketed customer relationship management (CRM) systems for many years I had the opportunity to discuss, theorize, and plan approaches to good personalisation in lots of different businesses. I could advise companies on how to manufacturer relationships and simulate a personal experience based on a massive collection of amalgamated and analyses data.

The fact is though that the best sorts of personalisation are personal. No surprise there.

I get lots of great personal service here in my village. I visit the butcher, bakery, convenience store, hairdresser, dentist, and dry cleaner with some regularity. They know my name, have a shared history with me, and can anticipate my needs. It's a relationship.

Pity the banks today. Big organizations with centralized call centres. No one visits the branch anymore. How do you build a relationship and keep it personal? And really, does it matter?

Well, that shock I mentioned earlier came from a bank. More specifically the Coastal Community Credit Union on Vancouver Island. I received a hand written note about my mortgage renewal. The envelope was hand written and hand stamped. The note included our first names. The writing was even elegant and easy to read.

Now CCCU isn't exactly the world's largest bank and they do pride themselves (in their marketing) on the level of service they provide to their members. While there is clearly a process behind this that identifies targets, pulls the details, and hands them to someone with legible writing, I think that this works for them for a couple of reasons.
- they are a smallish company with a limited number of customers
- they pride themselves publicly on their service levels
- they still have a pretty strong branch model so do actually touch customers

If I received a similar note from one of the big high street banks, I'd be pretty cynical about it because I'd know about the huge number of people they'd have writing things out verbatim in an office in Bangalore 6 Months ahead.

So does personalised service have a place in a large automated business? Absolutely, but only if it's in context. Otherwise it's just lipstick on a pig.

Why blog?

Oh great. Another blog. Just what the world needs.

Alternately... Oh great. I write all day every day so why on earth would I want to subject myself to yet another writing task?

Well, when I write in my day job I have to use someone else's voice. I do get to exercise my opinion via them (which often makes it more powerful) but I have to change the way I say it. Be more diplomatic. Use different words. Even change the sentence structure. All with the goal of utilising their own voice, even if it's one I've made up for them.

I've actually been published in a public article once: in an article I interviewed on but didn't actually write. So that was ghosted too!

But now I can write and have the words linked directly to my name. Is that a good thing? Perhaps. And we'll see if I can get this thing off the ground. After all, there's a good chance it could have the short, painful life of so many blogs which are sown, sprout and then whither and die without bearing fruit.

Time will tell.