Email Notification Icon

I check all my personal email on the iPhone. If I left my iPhone on my table and then come back to it, the only way to know if I have a new email is to

Wake up the iPhone
Slide to unlock
Enter Passcode (Yes I use it and recommend others do the same)
Check the Email Icon

Too many touches and taps. It is sooo much better if iPhone could show the email status on the status bar at the top. Something like this...

This would show me if I had any outstanding unread emails with just the Wake up of the iPhone.

Dizzy Bee by Igloo Games

One of the games that I fell in love with on the iPhone is the Dizzy Bee. It is super cool and make use of orientation features on the iPhone and also has very nice graphics and colors. More than anything I just like the game itself. Very simple yet very addictive. My goal is to complete all the levels with "CROWNS". This is how far I have come...

Accessing Address Book From Calendar

One of the distinct features I have noticed with iPhone's Graphical Interface is that it takes a zillion touch events to complete any given task such as adding a new contact, creating a new calendar event, etc.
Lets take creating a new calendar event directly on the iPhone. When I manually fill in an appointment...

Title: Meet Joe for Dinner
Location: 1234 Joe st, Joe City

Now the only way I can add the location currently is to Type the whole thing. I have that same address stored in the Contacts under Joe's name. It will be so easy if there was an option to pick the Address from Contacts. Something like...

Create your own iPhone ring tone

iPhone USB cable cracks

Just today morning I realised that my iPhone USB cable broke. It is not actually a break but a crack sort-of opening at the place where cable attaches to the USB pin. It also feels like hard may be due to overheat? Now I need to make a trip to the apple store to see if I can get a replacement.

Tetris on iPhone

I really liked this game on the iPhone. Great colors and fun to play. The curious minds we are, I pressed the "about" link and found the above content. It is so funny that Apple approved this, I am sure nothing wrong with the game but that is really cool.

Games on my iPhone 3G

Default Alert Setting

I use the calendar application quite a bit. One of the things that I need to do is to go through a number of screens to complete one entry in the calendar. One of the most commonly visited part of setting up an entry in my calendar is the Alert section. I almost have two alerts for every calendar item and doing it each time I create one is painful. Can I set a default setting somewhere? Apple, can we do this?

I got a iPhone 3G

Ahh... one of my friend was leaving to his country and wanted to desparately buy the 1st generation iPhone and pleaded me to sell me mine. Having got rid of it I went ahead and got a iPhone 3G. Looks nice. Just now tried the GPS feature while I was driving back and it was so awesome. Although it does not do turn by turn directions, if you have someone by your side while driving they can easily navigate with the help of the iPhone.

Email and SMS notifications

When I receive an email or sms and I donot notice or acknowledge it,
the email or sms icon on the home page gets updated with a number. Now
if my iPhone is locked then I need to unlock and look at the home on
these icons to alert me about it. Why not use the top bar. So iPhone
has this top bar that shows icons such as signal strength, carrier
name, wifi, edge, time etc etc. It will be great to have an icon like
an envelope to show that there are pending emails to check in the top
bar. This way if I wakeup my iPhone I can get alerted without
unlocking. Same is the case for SMS.

Back to top in iPhone Safari

So, I was reading this long webpage on my iPhone. Came to the end or
bottom of page. After that I wanted to go to a different page and it
took me some time go to the top and enter new URL since the only way
to go back to the top is to scroll the page up with your finger..... A
little boring journey. It would be so nice to add the feature as a
button that will take me to the top of the page.

Reminders for Birthday, Annv. etc in iPhone

While creating new contacts in iPhone, I can add their birthday, anniversary etc. The thing I noticed is that this information is not automatically populated into the calendar. So now I have to manually add a reminder in the calendar for that day again. Apple, Can you add this feature.. looks like a dumb request but is very handy.

iPhone Wish List Update 1

Okay here come few more

1. Custom Words to Dictionary
iPhone has the feature of word assist that helps in auto correcting spellings and also suggest the word you want to enter into a text. It is a neat feature and will be great if it was possible to define custom words. I do sms and also email a lot and some shortcuts to actual words would be very helpful.

2. Save Youtube videos
Sometimes it so happens that I end up playing the same video at different times and each time I press it on my Youtube Bookmark list, iPhone gets a copy from youtube wasting precious network bandwidth and also the phone resources. Is it not possible to store it in some propreitary format on the phone and may be clear after a week or so?

My iPhone Update Wish List

There has been much talk recently about the release of 2.0 version of the iPhone software. As I mentioned in my previous blog, there appears few things that are bothering me in the current version 1.1.4 (4A102). Hopefully some of these will get fixed in 2.0 version.

1. Alarm to play a custom mp3 song
I really like the Clock application especially the alarm option. I wish there was a way to set custom Sound (currently I need to select from a predefined set of sounds) to one of the songs in my iPod application.

2. Camera soft button vs the hard button and a timer option
The camera application has a soft button to click a picture. This makes it challenging to hold the iphone still while taking a picture. Most of my pictures came out slightly blurred. I wish they make the home button as the button to click for a picture. Another alternative is to allow timer option so that I set the time and just hold the camera. Yes.. yes this is good only for still photography but still is a good option.

3. Calendar Reminder Pop-up
I use calendar a lot to put in appointments and reminders. When iPhone notifies me it shows a pop-up but has no option to acknowledge the pop-up. What happens is that when I use the slider to unlock, the pop-up is gone and I need to go to calendar application and check it out.

4. A2DP
Being in California I need to start getting used to bluetooth headset/car-kits while driving and so recently I got a Motorola T505 bluetooth car kit. It is cool.. has a FM transmitter, in-built speaker, supports bluetooth handsfree and also A2DP profiles. Since iPhone does not support A2DP, I cannot listen to my songs via the FM using T505. Wish they put this into 2.0.

5. Volume
Of course more volume for the ear piece would be great.

Bye Bye Treo

I have been using Treo's starting Treo300 till Treo700p. I have also wriitten some programs for PalmOS with Ryan. Check out movierec and soundrec for treo.

Offlate I was tired of the instabilities of palmos running on my 700p and also the UI. So I decided to get a iPhone to check it out. There was a good deal with the refurb phone so I went ahead and got me one.

As of now it looks great. I guess there are a few things that are bothering me a bit but more about them in later blogs.

Welcome

After a long time I decided to go with the trend of blogging.

Welcome to my blog.