Apr 15
At the same time as making an iPhone directed website (Sleep/Wake Home) a more pleasant experience on a PC/Mac, I’m doing the same in reverse for another website.
ItOpens is a site that shows the opening lines of books and poems. It’s something that I first built about 10 years ago and last gave a makeover to in 2005. Its exiting layout fitted very poorly with the iPhone’s screen.
Rather than slavishly reconstruct what was already there, I redesigned everything from the ground up whilst retaining the same database. It proved to be remarkably easy and I’ve even put in some extra options (including a full text search) which wasn’t there in the original.
I’ve progressed with it to the point that I’ve now submitted it to Apple’ WebApp site. Hopefully it will join the other 4644 WebApps there soon, though there’s no guarantee.
Apr 09
Having watched the launch of iPhone OS 4 here, I have a few thoughts
Folders
Great. This was very high on my wish-list, and the UI seems very simple and intuitive (and will presumable also be doable in the iTunes UI on the PC/Mac). However a simple sum leads me to suspect a limitation. We are told that the number of Apps that can be installed will go up from 180 (11 screens at 16 plus 4 at the bottom) to 2160. This latter figure implies that the maximum number of Apps that you will be able to put in a folder will be 12 (2160 divided by 180).
In practice, this shows up two limitations: firstly, the obvious one, that if you have more than 12 apps in a particular category you will need to split them over multiple folders (leading to a variation on the swishing backwards and forwards looking for an App that we all experience now).
The second, less obvious limitation is that the true practical limit on the number of apps is likely to be much less than 2160: for every App that you can’t or don’t want to categorise into a folder you “lose” 11 from the total; for every folder that isn’t full with 12 Apps, you will lose the shortfall from the total. Of course I don’t suppose that 2160 will be the actual top figure any mote than 180 is now: we will presumably still have the extra invisible screens to the right (does anyone know if there us a maximum number of these?). And of course the iPad’s ability to have more than 4 items in the dock (5?,6? I don’t have an iPad to hand, in fact I don’t have an iPad at all), changes the sums.
Regardless of what the new practical number of Apps is, the introdution of folders is likely to lead to more Apps being installed on the average iPhone/iPod/iPad (I’m going to abbreviate that to ‘iP’ in future). This in turn is likely to move people towards using the search facility (Tip: change the order of search results to put Applications first – Settings App: General/Home/Search Results) . Hopefully the search will throw up folders as well as Apps, so with a bit of thought about the naming of folders, you’ll have a simple menu system.
As Steve Jobs didn’t mention it I don’t expect folders to be able to contain folders, but maybe in a future version.
More iPhone OS 4 musings later.
