I think that it could be useful to have a simple app that does only one thing…
It dial the number of your most used contact… your girlfriend or your mom… one tap and it dial…
It must have a method perhaps in the settings panel to set wich of your contact is your favorite…
Something like speed dial…
Don’t know if it already exists…
[UPDATE] It already exists… it’s called QuickDial (iTunes Store Link)
I think that application that use a drill down interface could be made more efficient implementing a two-finger scroll that do back-forward action… If you are in the deail of a contact you shoud be able to go back to the list with a two finger scroll up… easier than trying to find the button in the upper left corner that usually do the job… and if you dont take off the screen your fingers you could also go back to the detail…
It could be useful more with applications that show deep hiearchies (more than the canonical 3 level hierarchy)
Perhaps some kind of gesture could be implemented to change the position of an item in a hierarchy… think about something like spring loaded folders in Mac OSX Finder…
You tap on an item to select… add a second finger to start the move operation… drag left to go up on or more level… drag up or down to scroll in the upper level … drag right to enter another branch of the hierarchy and release your fingers to drop the item where you need it to go…
Feasible? don’t know… if someone wants to try to implement it…
I wrote some months ago to the guys behind Delicious Library 2, the cataloging application that has now finally been released, asking if they where to release a client application to be used on the iPhone. They answered that they had thought about it… and they did not gave me other details.
Now I would like to write down here how I would like that client app to be made:
It could be possible to make a client application for a game (racing game or similar would be the best example) that provide the accelerometer input to your mac to control your car. We have just seen in the WWDC2008 keynote some games on the iPhone that use that input. Providing it to a game could be funny… You move your iPhone to steer, accelerate or decelerate holding your left or right thumb on the screen and change gear with a sudden pitch (rotation forward and back – or back and forward on the x axis). You could also have an area on the iPhone to pause the game…
I hope the image is clearer than what I have written down…
I don’t know if it’s technically feasible but perhaps using the data from accelerometers on the iPhone and with the help of something to stitch the iPhone to your hand a 3D joystick could be made. I mean something to control an application or a game on your Mac like you do with a Wiimote… It comes to mind that if it could be made by mean only of accelerometers the guys at Nintendo would have not used the IR sensors together with the accelerometers…. Just another silly idea perhaps…
I was thinking about an application like a Voice Notes app that records what you say in the iPhone microphone. It could also try to discover (via Bonjour) a Speech Recognition service on your home network (hosted on your home mac/pc) that could convert your recorded audio in text format and send it back to the Voice Notes app, ready to be associated with the recorded audio to make it easy to do a keyword search on your voice notes. I think the Voice Notes app already exists… I have found something from erica sadun…
This time an idea for a User Interface to tag images… as you can see from the picture is something like a stack of cards, you put your finger on the iPhone surface and drag (or even better you throw the picture towards the tag you want to apply to the image). If you want to assign multiple tags you make the drag move with two fingers, otherwise the image disappear and the next image is made visible from the stack.
Other details, like managing tags or set of tags, remain to be thought about… perhaps you can tap on a tag to choose from a library of tags or from several set of tag groups.
Perhaps it needs a bit of testing on a real device.
Buttons are at the moment fake ones… One could be to choose from different stacks of images
Three finger drag could be used to scroll through images…
I was wandering if it could be possible to implement in an application, that has to display for example an image, a kind of zoom like the one depicted in the flash below.
You need 3 fingers to use this zooming mode… (assuming you’re using your right hand…
I is for Index finger
M is for middle finger
R is for ring finger
a ipothetical use could be described like this:
1) you put your Middle finger on the iPhone, dragging (not showed) let you pan the image.
2) when you want to zoom in you have to put your Index finger on the iPhone and hold. you have continuous zooming.
3) if you release your Index finger zooming stops.
4) to zoom out you can put your Ring finger on the iPhone and hold. you have continuous zoom out.
I think that panning while holding down your Index or Ring finger could be possible…
I was thinking about an application that could be very handy when reading a book or similar… you can see it in a mock-up at the bottom…
The steps are the ones depicted in the mock-up
1) empty app doing nothing
2) you have used the iPhone camera to take a photo of a page where there’s a word you don’t know the meaning (English is not my natural language, so it happens often…) – here we could have to solve several other problems: focus, lighting, etc…
3) the app process the image and isolate the words… the red lines makes a grid that separate them…
4) you can just tap on a word and click on one of the green buttons on the bottom to choose the action… (Defina, Search, Save Note)… the app may ask you additional info depending on the action you choose…
5) if you have chosen “Define” it just sends the part of the picture you have selected to server part of the application that have some kind of OCR – the server part should have to be open somewhere in your network, maybe your laptop (we may think that a connection has already been made by mean of Bonjour or other technology). The server part process the image, find the definition of the word and send it back to the app on your iPhone…
Additional ideas: this could be used to collect notes, urls from magazines, addresses…
Problems:
lighting and focus for taking the picture?
which kind of OCR app?
I think that being able to transfer content (urls/documents/photos/videos) should be easiear between a mac and an iphone/ipod. A sharing application using bonjour could be made… one on the mac and one running on the iphone. If I’m reading a pdf or a document, I would like to have a “Send to iphone” option in the Services menu… the pdf is sent to the iphone and i can continue reading on it starting at the page i was on… Similar behaviour could be created for other type of media…
