Here I am, typing on the iPhone into Wordpress’ blogging app, and wishing more developers were quicker on the uptake when it came to the iPhone’s impending improvements. For instance, I just tried getting the landscape keyboard to appear. It did, with a pretty heavy lag time. Also, saving my entry and then going back into it made half of the entry text seem to disappear. It’s remedied by playing with the app, but it’s certainly annoying. However, copy and paste works wonderfully across most main and third-party apps (exception of Tweetie, so far). Of note, I just did some copying and pasting for the HTML code for the picture featured in the third paragraph. Now I have the main code in my Notes app so I don’t have to remember it.
The iPhone is now able to send multiple photos at once! This is something that came too late for me at a critical time. Recently before the 3.0 upgrade, I had to email pics from my phone to a manager at my work, and it was embarassing to send them one… at… a… time! Now you can clutter your family’s inboxes with pictures much more efficiently. How cool is that?
The search feature, both on the phone itself and on its main apps, is a great addition. I typed in a few test words on the main search and I found stuff I didn’t know existed on my phone or on the mail servers! If you’re like me and have pages and pages of apps, the main search can also double as a app launcher, once you configure the search settings. Search in the iPod app is also awesome. I loved just typing in the first two letters of a song and playing it instantly. (pictured to the left is a search I did for the Wordpress app. Saved me quite a few swipes!)
Other improvements were either a hit or miss at times. YouTube’s app got an overhaul, and it was much needed. I can’t tell you all how many times I’ve wanted to log in with my username without having to navigate YouTube through MobileSafari. All of my favorites are saved in the app now, and I have easier access to my vids in case the need arises. However, the shake-to-shuffle feature is one that I quickly learned to turn off. The one day I used it, I forgot about it and started dancing to a tune, only to have my good time cut short by another track cutting in unexpectedly because of me shaking my admittedly skinny booty!
There’s one smaller feature that I like that wasn’t really talked about in the main 3.0 documentation. When playing music, you can hold the time scrub bar, and drag your finger down for finer scrubbing control in the song. This helps in not having to fight so hard to get to a particular timeframe within a long track.
There’s other improvements that I haven’t fully played with yet, but I know I’ll love when the time comes. Being able to rent a movie on the fly, without having to connect the phone to the home computer first, will be very interesting and cool. I don’t use the calendar app as often as I should, and there’s new stuff in there I haven’t gotten to use yet. However, I did get to use the Push Notification service, courtesy of AOL’s speedy update to their instant messenger. It worked like a charm, even when the phone’s display was off. I can’t wait to see how the other app developers will use the new features.
Now, we just have to sadly wait until AT&T gets off of their butts to enable MMS messaging! Cheers!
