Apple Dogfooding

Apple has been seeing great success with Safari on the iPhone, but there's always room for improvement. On a recent trip to Chicago, I wanted to visit a local Apple retail store. The problem is that there are 7 of them in Illinois and I couldn't really tell you right off which one was close to me.

I was easily able to hit the retail site in Safari and figure out the store I wanted to visit, but then the gotchas started. The iPhone doesn't have copy/paste. Google Maps on the iPhone is superb, but you have to get the address in there. To transfer addresses from the web to Google Maps you have to play a game to have the people around you each remember a portion of the address and feed it back to you once you are on the maps screen.

I'd expect Apple to integrate this a little tighter. Perhaps they embed some geocode or microformats that Safari would know to pass to Google Maps. This is the kind of delight feature that Apple fans have come to expect ;)

Update
I found a workaround. It still isn't ideal, but better than nothing. With the address onscreen in Safari, select the search icon. You can now type in the address that you can see through the shaded screen. When you search, Google will give you the Google Maps link at the top of your search results. If you select that link in Safari, the iPhone will launch Google Maps within the iPhone, not Safari. This is what I want, but with the extra step of reentering the address. As Josh mentioned in the comments, a context menu like you get in the desktop Safari with the option to "Search in Google" would be an even better answer. The end game is still a one click map-to-this.

Stupid Shopping on the Web

While trying to buy some items at Home Depot, I came across this not-so-helpful message.



Ok, the software is smart enough to know that item isn't available and to tell me, but isn't smart enough to not add it to my cart in the first place? How about disabling the "add to cart" for items that aren't available. I guess there could have been a chance that the item became unavailable in the time it took to load the page and for me to add it, but I doubt it.

Chapters and the iTunes Store

When the iTunes store first opened, you could buy continous mix CDs from DJs, but you only got the individual tracks. This sucked because of the lack of gapless support in both iTunes and the iPod. They've since added gapless support, or so they say. I still thinks it sucks because it only works about 20% of the time for me. The gap is gone, sure, but usually they cut the tinyest bit of the music too. You probably won't notice it in a live show, or perhaps even a mixed album, but you hear it in DJ mixes, especially if you have a DJ brain and can't turn off the counting in your head.

So gapless playback is poor, but the iTunes store has made this better by giving you a free continous mix, all in one track, along with the individual ones. Electric Calm 3 is one example of this. The problem with these all-in-one files is that you can't jump between the tracks like you are able to on a CD. We know that Apple has a tool to add chapter markers to files. Is it that they don't work on protected files? I decided to find out.

I made a copy of my purchased Electric Calm 3 file. I then whipped up a quick XML file with some chapter points to apply to the copied file. ChapterTool was called, and after a long delay, ChapterTool tells me status: ok. Cool, time to try it.



Sure enough, it plays just fine and the chapter marks are fully functional. This really makes me wonder why they don't do this from the start. It would make the file far more useful. Well, I guess I have the power to do it myself now. Time to write some code to auto-generate the necessary XML file.