Please. Fix. That.

iOS: Mail's "Load All Images" button

This has been fixed! Option to load images is at the top of the message.

Observed in iOS 8 (β 3).

I typically configure my email apps to not automatically load images. On occasion a spam message gets through the winding maze of spam filters put in front of them and I'd rather not reward the sender with any kind of verification that their arrow met it's mark.

When I do want to look at the images in an email message, I click a button to do it. For the Apple Mail app, that button is at the top-right corner of the window. Load Images, it says, and that's what it does. For iOS, you get a message with images and it just looks kind of broken. Large patches of the email are missing content and with no explanation to be seen... not until you scroll aaall the way to the bottom. Ah, there it is:

...a "button" to load images for this message. OK. Tap. Now, scroll aaall the way back to the top and start reading again with the context of the images.

Why is this button at the bottom? If there are suppressed images, shouldn't I be given the choice to display them at the top of the message? Maybe like this:

Ah, better.

Apple: please fix that.

iOS, OS X: Reordering for Playlists

Observed in iOS 8 (β 3) and iTunes/Mac (11.2.2 (3)?).

Both the iOS Music app and the iTunes app on OS X suffer from this bug: you can't order your playlists. No, I'm not talking about the songs in a playlist, but the playlists themselves. I'd like to have easier access to some of my more frequently used playlists, but they're unhelpfully ordered alphabetically:

Oddly enough, my "90's Music" smart playlist is at the top in iTunes, but at the bottom of my smart playlists on iOS. But nevermind that-- I want to order them manually.

Apple: please fix that.

iOS: Figure out where to put your media player controls

Observed on iOS 8 (β 3).

Here are three different screens on iOS. All of them allow you to control whatever media you have playing (in my case, an excellent remaster of Distintegration):

From left to right: the Music app's "Now Playing" screen, the iOS control center and the lock screen.

Three contexts. Three very different locations for the play controls. Can this be a little more consistent? At least keep them on the bottom half of the screen so they're easier to reach?

I'd also appreciate some distance (or simple removal) of the volume controls.

Apple, please fix that.

iTunes: Swiping Gestures Gone Bad

Observed as recently as iTunes 11.2.2.

The iTunes Store has a really annoying usability bug around swipe gestures. Go to the home tab of the Movies part of the store and you'll see a number of content "wells"... many of these are side-scrolling areas where you can view the movie posters. For each of those, you are able to use two-finger swipes (on a trackpad, single-finger swipes on a Magic Mouse) to scroll these left and right to view more content.

But, the very same gesture is used to navigate backward and forward through the store (similar to how it works in Safari for browser history). What makes this so bad is that the gesture does different things based on where your mouse cursor is.

Here's a screen shot to illustrate the problem a little bit:

There are three regions highlighted above:

1. This one will cause you to navigate backward to Music, since the scrolling region can't scroll to the right any further.
2. This area does not scroll, so swiping here will also make you navigate back to Music.
3. This area can scroll some more (you can see there's more content to the left), so a swipe here will scroll that region and will not navigate back to Music.

This is madenning. It means I have to pay attention to where the mouse cursor is resting any time I use these gestures. And if it is resting on a scrollable region, I need to also observe where the scroll bar position is, so I know whether the gesture will result in scrolling that area versus moving me to a different page (and even more tricky, since OS X doesn't show the scroll bar in a resting state).

Apple's Multi-Touch Gestures article documents all of them and even calls out the exception for the "Swipe to navigate" gesture:

Note: If there is horizontal content to scroll, this gesture will first scrolls (sic) to the end of content and then it will move to the next page.

So what's the solution? I would recommend following the pattern used on iPad: drop the forward/backward history navigation for the iTunes app and switch to tabs for different areas of the store or just simple forward/backward buttons if necessary. Stop doing two things with the same gesture.

I made a short video to further illustrate the problem:

(This video should be viewed full-screen so you can see what's going on a little better.)

Apple: please fix that.

iTunes: Allow streaming of full trailers and short, free videos

Recently, I was browsing the iTunes TV catalog and decided to take in a one-minute video for HBO's True Detective series. So I click on the play button in iTunes to watch the trailer. Then, a gripping 30 seconds later, it stops. Why? Because iTunes is only showing me a preview of the trailer.

Here's an illustration of the problem:

This is stupid.

There are bright folks over at Apple, but I guess they haven't figured this out. So here's a simple algorithm for iTunes to implement:

1. Is the video free?
2. Is it less than 5 minutes?

If both conditions are met, just allow the video to be shown in it's entirety without requiring the user to download it to their iTunes library.

Apple, please fix that.

iOS: Bluetooth mouse pairing

Okay, hear me out. I don't think Apple would ever bring an actual mouse pointer to the iOS user interface. I hope not-- it might bring the beach ball cursor with it. And touch isn't going to take a back seat to the mouse on that platform. But I think there's still room for a mouse. I'm talking about games.

First person shooters are so much better with a keyboard/mouse combination. Sure, they're kinda playable with a decent game controller, but us die-hards will always prefer the "WASD" keys and a trusty gaming mouse over anything else. If Apple were to think of the mouse as a game controller, they might just warm to the notion of allowing them to pair with iOS devices (as they do for keyboards).

At the same time, I think Apple would be right to reject apps that would try to require a mouse to operate. You wouldn't want to allow apps to ignore touch altogether since it's the primary input method. But as a supplemental input device, I think the mouse would work well for certain apps.

Perhaps they are working on this already... Cringely thought so. Let's hope this year's WWDC and iOS 8 has a fix for this.

iOS: Support for importing music, video

It's ridiculous that, in 2014, you cannot add music or videos to your iPhone or iPad without using iTunes. Let me talk about my brother a bit. This story involves him.

I recently gave my brother an iPad I used to use. This follows a long tradition of ours: my handing down older PC computers I had retired from my stable. But, I ran out of those many years ago having switched to Macs. He wouldn't want a Mac (new or old), but was happy to take the iPad off my hands. He's a PC user, and yes, has iTunes... but, he uses iTunes 10.3 and not going to upgrade to iTunes 11. Period.

Well, that's a problem, since iOS 7 on this iPad requires iTunes 11 to sync. But iTunes 11 doesn't use the Coverflow UI anymore, so it's no good. So, herein lies the problem he faces: how to get his music onto this iPad. Here are his options for doing that without using iTunes sync:

• He can download music previously purchased from the iTunes Music Store. An aside: this would work, except that this iPad is currently in transition and in the 90-day waiting period Apple requires when changing the Apple ID on a device used to download music. I think he may have another week to go before he can download his past purchases, which, really isn't much... most of his music has been ripped from CDs or comes from other sources (Amazon, namely).
• Download music previously purchased from Amazon's MP3 store. This works, but the music is siloed in the Amazon Cloud Player app and isn't added to the music library on the device (that's something that iPad Music app exclusively manages).
• Play music through things like Pandora, Spotify and iTunes Radio. This works, but requires WiFi access which he has at work, but not at home.

He's frustrated by this complexity. His son has an Amazon Kindle Fire and he was able to load music onto it from a USB flash drive quite easily. "Can't I just do that with the iPad?" Nope.

There's a similar situation for video. There's a movie-length video that's in the public domain and he wants to add it to the iPad. Can he just download it with Safari and add it to the video library (like you can on a "regular" computer)? Nope. Can it be imported from a USB flash drive using the iPad Camera Connection Kit? Well, yes and no... I was able to import the video (after naming it with a lowercase, "8.3"-style filename from a folder named "DCIM"), but it went into the Photos app as if it were a personal video... there's no way to load it into the iPad Video app's library.

Why are these hoops there and why must we jump through them? Some are probably there due to contracts with music labels and movie publishers, but I bet some are there to encourage users to use iTunes to manage their media. It is, after all, far easier to get media to these devices if you buy that media from the iTunes Music/Movie stores.

Getting a MP3 into your music library (or a video into your video library) on an iPad or iPhone should be as easy as tapping on a link to download it from Safari, or to open an attachment from an email message. At least, that's how easy it is on a Mac. You should be able to connect to a USB flash drive or hard drive and import the media you want from there, too.

Why engineer barriers for the consumer? Apple, please fix that.

OS X: Please let me hide all running apps

Something I run into often enough, so it deserves to be blogged.

I use the "Hide Application" OS X command a lot. I rarely ever minimize a window. I prefer to hide the whole app. I try to keep my laptop screen pretty focused, since it's a smaller space to work. So I often use the "Hide" shortcut key (⌘H), to hide the current application and will repeat that a few times to clear the deck.

But OS X won't allow me to hide all of my apps. No, one has to remain unhidden. Even though you can't truly hide the OS X Finder app entirely (the desktop and any icons on it remains on-screen). But hey, I'd even be fine with hiding everything but the wallpaper and Dock.

The annoyance from this "one app must remain" rule is that if you hide the last unhidden app, it either: won't let you (new as of Mavericks), or will unhide the last hidden app (prior to Mavericks). This is never a welcome behavior. Never.

And, if you hide the last app on a given desktop with any full-screen apps running, it will pan over to an adjacent full-screen app (one of the 200 new features in Mavericks, I think). Why?

I guess what I should be doing is selecting the app I really want to use and use the "Hide Others" command, which will hide everything but that app. Yeah, okay, I can. But still, this seems like a silly, arbitrary rule to me.

iOS: Search for the Settings App

One of the best features for a new user on OS X is search. You can search for so much! Of course, there's Spotlight search to search for documents, mail, contacts, applications and so forth. Another awesome feature is a search field in the Help menu (Shift+Cmd+?) to search for menu options and application help. But one of my favorites for teaching a new user how to configure their Mac is search in "System Preferences".

It makes quick work of locating just where to go to set up a printer, or add a mail account, or any number of other settings for your Mac.

SO WHY ISN'T THIS AVAILABLE FOR iOS?

This should have been present when iOS was first released, but here we are at version 7 of iOS and still no search for the Settings app. Is it because the location of settings is obvious? No. Is it because there are just not that many settings? No.

In fact, there are so many settings in iOS, the group of "General" settings is not even on the screen when you first launch settings: you have to scroll to get to them. I count 35 rows in the Settings app before you even get to the third-party application-specific settings. This. Needs. Search.

Apple, please fix that.

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This blog is for long-form posts, but the bite-sized gripes go to Twitter. Follow the pleasefixthat user there to catch them all, including retweets from other annoyed Twitizens.