Touch Me Baby (part II)

Apr 1, 2008 08:02PM | by Jim Frost in Mobile

Yesterday I went through some of my history with PDAs, a long-winded way of getting to the point of all of this: How does an iPod Touch do as a PDA?  Prior to mid-January Apple crippled or omitted entirely all of the PDA functions, presumably to keep it from cannibalizing the cash-cow iPhone.  Thankfully they came to their senses and put them back, although early adopters had to pay about $20 for them, which seems kind of rude to me but is apparently becoming par for the course for Apple.

So, the Touch is now a full sibling to the iPhone.  How does its PDA functionality stand up to use in the real world?

Everyone has covered the user interface used in the iPhone and iPod Touch, and so far as I can tell they all lavished praise on its interface.  If you want to read that kind of review, check out this one and this one.  More realistically, I find that the interface is really only utilized to its fullest in a few places, notably the excellent Safari web browser and the photo viewer.  Elsewhere, including all of the PDA functions, the use of the multitouch interface is quite limited.

The Notes Application

Back before I had a laptop I used to use my Palm as a notebook.  I got very good at the handwriting scheme and even bought a Newton keyboard and an adapter so I could type things into it.  Over the years, though, I mostly gave up on that and these days I use the feature only for the occasional reminder.  Even so, I managed to jot down lots of quick memos that accumulate over the years into a real database of interesting tidbits.

In one sense I’m using the Notes application more on the Touch than on the Palm, largely because the Touch doesn’t have a To-Do application.  I wish it did, but a list in the Notes application works reasonably well in its stead.

Unfortunately the Notes application is about as bare-bones as it gets.  Its list mode shows the first line of each note and the date it was written. Touch a line and you see the whole note.  You can scroll around within the note, and type text into the touchscreen QWERTY interface.

No fonts, no colors, no frills.  The Palm didn’t have those things either, but the Palm was a much more primitive device.  I’d like to see Apple make better use of the capabilities of the Touch hardware and the MacOS software in the future.

Another annoying limitation is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to edit notes on the PC or Mac, which really limits how much data I’m willing to put into the thing.  Transcribing a decade of notes from the Palm just isn’t going to happen until I discover a way to do this.

Beyond that, the Notes application is seriously limited in usefulness by the lack of any reasonable way to find entries by full-text search, a topic I’ll cover later because it’s endemic to the whole application suite.

The Calendar

The application I use most on the PDA has to be the Calendar.  I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do more than a day or so ahead of time, and I have a knack of getting involved in an activity and forgetting even the things I need to do a few hours hence.  I live and die by my PDA’s calendar, and the Touch’s Calendar application is in some cases excellent and in others so limited as to defy belief.

The Calendar application has three different modes, “List,” “Day,” and “Month.” I was surprised it doesn’t have a “Week” mode, especially since doing this in landscape orientation would seem to be a natural.  Coming from the Palm I miss that less than I thought I would, but I’d be happy to get it back.

In List mode it shows all of the upcoming appointments with date separators.  It’s a pretty good way of getting an idea of what’s coming up during the day or for the next couple of days, depending on how active your schedule is.  You can easily zing forward and backward with the “flip” motion used to scroll in Apple’s multitouch interface.  Nice.  The interface is much less confusing than the Palm’s version of the same thing; the Palm version highlights the current day’s items but then presents everything following as a kind of cramped mush.  The Palm integrates this list with dated To-Do items, which is quite useful; hopefully Apple will follow suit if they ever get around to making a To-Do application.

In Day mode Calendar shows blocked-out areas on a timeline.  About 8 hours at a time will show, very much like the Palm’s calendar.  Oddly it does not allow you to use a multitouch gesture to flip to the next or previous day; you must touch the arrows at the top of the page.  This seems like such an obvious omission that it is difficult to see how they could miss it, and given its support in other places in the interface (such as the photo viewer) it really shouldn’t have been that much effort to add.  Touching the little tiny arrows really annoys me when I know they could have done better.  Aside from that the most irritating part of this mode is that it does not very clearly indicate overlapping items; they’re slightly offset and form sort of a Venn diagram.  This is the same way iCal does it on the Mac, but I prefer Palm’s much clearer parallel-boxes approach.

In Month mode a monthly calendar displays.  Each day with one or more appointments has a dot.  This is vastly less informative than the Palm approach with four dots—one for “no time” appointments, and three in a stack showing morning, afternoon, and evening appointments.  I miss the greater resolution of Palm’s interface a lot.  One place where Apple improves on the Palm is that it shows the first several appointments for the day selected in the calendar at the bottom, and you can scroll through any that don’t fit.

The Palm gives you the option of color coding categories of events.  So does Apple’s iCal application on MacOS X, but not the Touch’s Calendar application.  This further reduces the ability to see what’s coming up at-a-glance.

Adding entries to Calendar is considerably more annoying than it is on the Palm.  You can’t touch a time in the “Day” mode and have it come up with the appointment’s start time set for that value.  Instead, pushing “+” brings up the Add Event screen.  You can set the event name (oddly called the “Title"), its location, the start and end times, whether or not it repeats, and an alert or two.

Unfortunately it takes a lot of clicking (touching?) to get an event in there and, if you are using a PC rather than a Mac, you can’t use the PC to add or edit entries.  If Apple wants these devices to impact the PDA market, and it seems pretty clear that they do, then they really need to provide PC desktop applications too.  Let’s walk through the steps necessary to fill in a calendar entry so you can see what I’m talking about.

Touch on “Title/Location” and it brings up its QWERTY touch keyboard. Peck around a bit and you’ll get it in there, but it’s not fast and Apple’s “guess which word I mean” interface often guesses its way to incorrect entries.  (Perhaps I’ll learn to use it more effectively over time, but so far I don’t like it.)

Touch “Start/End” and it brings up a really unusual entry system, one that is akin to the rollers in a slot machine.  You roll to the date, hour, minute (in five-minute intervals), and AM/PM for start, and repeat for end.  It’s cute but it’s slow, much slower and less accurate than the simple menu interface that Palm uses.  Ick.

The “Repeat” feature works the same way as it does on the Palm, but has an “Every 2 weeks” feature that the Palm lacks.

As on the Palm there is the opportunity to set an alert as the appointment approaches, but you must choose from a predetermined set of times to sound the alert.  The Palm allows you to type a number of minutes or hours, much more useful, especially since Apple didn’t deign to allow you to schedule the alarm 10 minutes beforehand, or 20, or 45, or 90—all times I used with some frequency on the Palm.  I would really like more flexibility here—perhaps a few of the common entries, then “custom”.  In addition, Apple lists so many different fixed times that the selector for “At the time of the event” (which Apple confusingly calls “On date of event") is only half-visible.  It should really be first in the list.

Unlike the Palm there is no way to change the tone of the alert, nor its volume.  Apple’s choice of tone is one of the two softest available and is almost impossible to hear if the device is in your pocket.  It sounds only once, for a period of about two seconds.  I missed a number of appointments before I realized that if I didn’t put the Touch on my desk I would never hear it, and even there I miss it about as often as not.

The alert feature should, at a minimum, allow you to pick from the same set of tones as the Clock application uses.  It should sound the alert more than once (perhaps every 5 minutes, as the Palm does) if you don’t inform it that you heard it.  As it is the alert feature is almost useless, to the point that if I have an important appointment I set an alarm in the Clock application in the morning—the Clock application gives me a number of tones to choose from, and sounds them continuously until I tell it to stop.  I wish I could tell it to stop after, say, 15 seconds—but at least I don’t miss its alarms!

As a whole the Calendar application is fully functional but is balky to use, with a nearly useless alert feature, and a quirky interface that utilizes the multitouch interface in places where it needn’t and fails to use it in places where it would work really well.  Apple needs to continue developing the Calendar application to make it truly competitive with others’ offerings.

That’s it for today.  Tomorrow I’ll talk about the Contacts, Music, and Video applications and a few of the things that surprised me about the Touch.  See you then!

inspector gadget said on 04/01/08 09:40PM

H0Ney said on 04/02/08 04:48PM

khmeresmily said on 04/02/08 06:44PM

Aaron said on 04/02/08 09:10PM