iPhone Madness

People are complaining that Apple is playing tough guy on third party developers by not taking into account unknown hack apps when providing updated iPhone software. I’m sorry, but if you hacked the phone and expect everything to work smoothly when updating…best of luck to you. Don’t upgrade your phone if you want to keep your third party stuff.

I’m sure there will be a replacement unlock hack in the next few days or weeks and everything will go right back on those iPhones.

Sure I miss the voice recorder and screenshot app but honestly, it’s not that big of a deal to me.

This leads me to my next point about this recent iPhone Madness.

The reason there isn’t a UI Guidelines Document is because Apple can’t even decide on the UI basics for the phone. Case in point, here are the locations for the EDIT button found in the following apps:

Phone (Contacts Screen): Top right corner
Phone (Favorites Screen): Top left corner
Mail (Inbox screen): Top right corner
Safari (Bookmarks): Lower left corner
SMS: Top left corner
Calendar (event page): Top right corner
Photos (home screen). THERE IS NONE. The user has NO way of removing an entire album in one click.
Clock (World): Top left corner
Clock (Alarm): Top lefft corner after one has been created.

Now let’s talk about EDIT mode.

In Mail’s message list you can either swipe across the message line from the middle to the right edge and it will reveal a delete button. You can also press the EDIT button located where again? Bet you can’t recall right away unless you scroll up to cheat.

In the Clock’s Alarm screen? There is no swipe method. Only the EDIT button allows this. Once you do press the EDIT button, the Mail-esque UI appears.

SMS? Swiping does act like Mail’s DELETE Reveal button. However, creating a new SMS message is in the top right corner, whereas Mail’s is in the lower right.

Calendar has several views. List does not allow the mail swipe. Day provides no DELETE or edit mode other than tapping on the iCal-like event bubble. In month mode, you have to tap the event in the list below to see the detail screen with the EDIT button located where?

iPod:
Videos home uses Mail Swipe.
Songs and Playlists: unable to delete from the iPhone. You also can’t even change the name of a song if you found a typo after you synced it from iTunes.

Think fast. Where is the EDIT button in the More screen? Top right? No. Top left.

If you as a developer are wondering why there is no SDK for the iPhone, you might have to wait just a little longer until Apple gets on the same page about this stuff first. Then maybe they’ll figure out a way to lock out certain APIs that would mess with the core phone and carrier functionality.