In my last post, I finished up the second row applications by giving my impressions of the Maps and Weather capabilities. This post will be concerned with the applications on the third row: Clock, Calculator, and Notes (the Settings will be covered in a separate post).
Clock: The clock application does a good job for which it is intended. I found it easy to add cities as long as the city is one listed in the built-in list. However, a nice to have would be the ability to look up virtually any city (or town) in the world using the Internet (or Maps) and be able to set up a clock for it. That said, there is a robust choice of locations to choose from that are built-in.
Adding a clock is easy. When there are multiple clocks, the user can use the edit button to rearrange the order of cities. Rearranging the order is easy. In the edit mode, simple tap with the finger, drag,and place in the order you want. Apple, why don't you make this capability available in all of your applications? It just doesn't make sense.
The format of the clocks are easy to read with analog on the left and digital on the right. All-in-all a good application. A few tweaks and it could be a great application.
Calculator: There is not a lot to say about this application. It's your basic calculator with a memory function. Since I often have the need to calculate in the billions, it has limited use for me. To make this a must have application, I would like to see a larger display register (say 100 billion?), and at a minimum basic financial functions. To be an appealing application for students, a square root function is a must. If Apple really wants to make this a differentiator, supply a menu where you can choose the type of calculator: basic, financial, scientific, trig, electronics, hex/octal, time, and conversions. Apple, make us want to use it.
With that said, the buttons are large enough and are easy to manipulate. It just doesn't do enough.
Notes: As you will see, I tend to be a little demanding of the Notes application simply because there are no alternatives on the device (I suppose you could use email, but as you will see in a future post, it shares most of the same shortcomings). For capturing brief thoughts, snippets of information, lists, and similar items, Notes is more than adequate. The auto-correction feature improves typing speed and output quality. However, it doesn't catch everything and a separate spell-check function would be a great plus. Similarly, typing with the device vertical almost forces the user to one finger entry as the keyboard is small. Two fingers are possible if you position the iPhone horizontally, but that capability is not available in the Notes application. Apple, enable landscape mode for this application so the user has access to a larger keyboard suitable for true two-finger manipulation.
My list of notes is getting quite large. It would be nice to have some type of organization capability such as folders to categorize, store, and retrieve notes. As the title is too long and the first words are the same (as in the title of these posts), it is difficult to differentiate among Notes without opening them. Again, if the application worked in the horizontal or landscape mode, longer titles would show in the index list.
Hopefully, at some point Apple will provide a simple word processor for the iPhone. Until then, the ability to upload a note to an application such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets or Zoho and then be able to manipulate the document in those Web-based applications would be a giant plus. The problem with Web-based applications is that disconnected from the Internet (such as on an airline flight), the applications do not work. If Notes were beefed-up with basic formatting and spell-check, it could serve as a good draft application if enabled to easily interface with a Web-based application. However, even if Notes had this capability, there is an issue that would still have to be addressed in the Safari browser. That will be discussed in a future post.
In my upcoming posts, I'll start tackling the bottom row applications-- Phone, Mail, Safari, & iPod. In the meantime, if you have additional comments or suggestions for Apple, please let me know.
Walter W. Casey, Ph.D.
Sent from my iPhone
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