Flaw 1: Search Button Too Small

Let me state beforehand that I’m going to completely ignore features that the iPhone should or should not have. Features like resolution of the display, number of megapixels in the camera, the amount of ram, processor speed, gps sensitivity, blah blah blah etc. I’m also going to totally avoid talking about poorly integrated or implemented features such as the maps that should do this and that, or that is should be possible to send more than 5 images in an email, etc. I’m sure that there are thousands of articles written about iPhone features – by far more experienced mobile phone users and reviewers than I am. What I do want to write about, though, is a set of ten poor user interface implementation details and the crippled user experience they cause.

The annoying things I’m going to describe here stayed exactly the same for the whole time I’ve had an iphone since the fall 2008 and they were never improved. It means that even the ever-so-great Apple is perfectly capable making mistakes in their design and not fixing them for a very long time. There’s no particular order in this list.

Flaw 1: The Tiny Search Button in Contacts

(see the image above) The magnifier search button in contacts is simply too small. The search function is the single most important functionality in contacts and yet it has so little button. If you are like me, you’ve mistakenly clicked the larger plus button instead when trying to search for somebody. So annoying. The workaround is to click on the letter F (for example) and drag your finger up until the search field appears. The proper way to implement this would be to add the search button instead the “+” add button and move the add functionality somewhere else (I admit I don’t know where) or to make the search button more prominent.

Flaw 2: Passcode “7″ next to the emergency button

There is so much space on the screen and yet the iPhone has to have the number “7″ in the passcode unlock screen right next to the emergency call button. Not that the buttons are small but mistakes do happen and opening the emergency call screen when you want to unlock the phone can be annoying. Seriously, how many people out there have set their passcode to contain number 7? Unless you are really paranoid and you really want to check the emergency call screen time to time to make sure it still works you probably want to avoid having number 7 in your passcode. This is a screen that you see a many times a day and you probably don’t pay so much attention to it as to other normal screens, that’s why these buttons shouldn’t be so close together. Look at the keypad screen in the phone menu for example. The buttons are much bigger there, using much more of the screen.

Flaw 3: Why Do I Have To Click on Edit to Delete a Message?

In text message list, why does Edit only allow you to delete a message thread? Shouldn’t the button be called Delete instead?

Flaw 4: Missing Cancel in Delete Messages Screen

OK, I’m in the message deleting mode now after clicking on “Edit” – see previous flaw. What if I don’t want to delete anything? What if I’m too scared that I clicked on something wrong? I mean, these do not enter signs next to all my messages don’t look any good. Will all my messages be lost now? I want to click on a cancel button to get away from this scary screen! Instead, my iPhone is giving my only a Done button, which could easily mean “ok, delete all messages marked with the do not enter sign”. I’m an experienced user of course and I know that I would have to click on the do not enter sign to actually enable the delete button. An iphone newbie, however, who gets to this screen for the first time, will be very worried. This aspect of the user interface is not very intuitive and therefore is very wrong. The Done button should be called Cancel or Back initially and should change to Done only after you delete a message.

Flaw 5: Another Missing Cancel Button and a Forward Hack

This again has something to do with a wrongly named “Edit” button in a text message conversation view. When you click on the Edit button, which in fact should be called Delete button, you get to this screen. Now you can mark your messages to be deleted or – surprise surprise – forward them to somebody. The forward functionality is clearly an add-on hack that shouldn’t be in this screen. It seems to me that the iphone user interface designers didn’t know where to add the forward button so they decided to add it to the delete screen, which is kind of dangerous. Additionally, this screen once again misses the cancel (or Back) button that would clearly indicate that you haven’t deleted anything. The Clear All button at the place of the usual place for a back button is also not very nice to the user.

Flaw 6: The One Click Voicemail

Voicemail is not very popular here in Europe and having a voicemail button that dials my non-existing voicemail account and costing me money for doing nothing is simply annoying. Please allow me to disable the button in settings!

Flaw 7: Ability to Write a Text Message in Bed

This is what I see when I try to send a message when I laying in bed. Seriously. Not that I don’t appreciate iphone’s ability to react to it’s orientation and switch between normal and landscape keyboard. It surely is useful for commercials. However, as you can see it’s very hard to write a text message when you see this! There’s obviously not an easy solution for this. May be a rotate screen button? I don’t know. What I know is that I have to hold my phone above my head to be able to write messages in bed which makes my hand hurt after a while. It would be much more comfortable if I could rest my hand on the pillow. Don’t Apple iphone designers use beds?

Flaw 8: Weekly View In Calendar

This is not an unser interface flaw really but a missing feature maybe. To be honest I don’t use the Day view much either because it’s pretty much useless on the iphone. Therefore instead of adding the week view the day view could be improved somehow. The issue is that you can’t really see the whole day in the day view which makes the day view unreliable. It’s even missing markers to show there is something above or below the current view in the day you are viewing. Therefore I use the List view instead which gives me the comfort of making sure I’m not missing an event.

Flaw 9: Which Number Did Just Call Me?

If you have two or more numbers stored for a contact and they call you from one of them, there’s no way of knowing from which of the two numbers they just called you from. This is very unfortunate if you need to call them back and you don’t know which of the two numbers to use, isn’t it? What if you need to know if they called from the office or from their cell phone? It rarely happens but when it does, there’s no way of knowing.

Flaw 10: Silent + Vibrate + Ring

This is the only user interface flaw in this article that cannot be fixed using a software update. Or can it? I’m talking about the 3rd missing sound mode for the iphone that would allow me something between total silence and a normal mode. Sure, I can go to settings and turn the vibration on or off for the silent mode but that’s not something I want to do when I want to switch to the mode. What I would really want is three modes: Total silence (cinema, really important meetings, at night, etc.), Vibrations (meetings, office, quiet places, etc.), Sound on (all other cases). May be the iphone could ask me if I want to switch to total silence or vibrations when activating the silent mode? Or may be this option could be turned on in settings?

What are your iphone annoyances?

Here’s what I did:
- Take the pictures, there are two things that needs to be considered when taking pictures for automatic panos
- 1. Leveling: The horizon needs to be leveled as precise as possible because the automatic software cannot determine the correct leveling for you
- 2. Precission: The pano head parallax point needs to be precisely calibrated, any misaligned is more visible in auto mode
- Load the pictures into a computer
- Adjust chromatic aberation and via a predefined filter plus apply any other filter you wish
- Export them as tiffs
- Load them in PtGui and let them auto-stitch, there is one important point:
- 1. Lens settings in PtGui: I don’t have the numbers, I’m running completely on auto stitch, that’s why I need even better precision when taking panos
- Save the result as jpeg

That’s it. 30 seconds of manual input plus 2 minutes of my quad-core gaming machine time.

And here’s the result:

Tram 7 in Prague

What do you think? I know the quality could be better, I saved it in a very low resolution to improve load time and like I mentioned above, it would help to have a lens profile set correctly in PtGui and/or calibrate the pano head more precisely.

Hint hint: Hey Google Maps Team! Why don’t you guys use this for implemnting Google Street View in the iPhone Safari browser?

I had one of those weekends when you need to try and do something new. So I finally went ahead and created what I wanted for a long time. Virtual Tour Viewer for iPhone. Version 0.1

Index page of the Virtual Tour

Spherical panorama view on iPhone

You can see it live by pointing your iPhone to this url:

Virtual Tour Viewer for iPhone:
http://bit.ly/6HEqD

Update Feb 1, 2010: Since I no longer update and improve the code I modified the application that now it uses a newer iphone panorama viewer from the 360cities.net website.

Please let me know what you think of it using comments below this article or by emailing me at jan dot vrsinsky at gmail d o t c om.

The app probably works only on iPhone and it has been tested only with my iPhone 3G. Any feedback and bug reports are appreciated.

I also want to thank waine a. lee and to Ryan Scherf, the author of jSwipe, for being an inspiration for me to write this (although they didn’t know ).

Read on: Goals, Roadmap, Technologies are below.

Goals:

I created this project just for fun, however the real-world use cases are being able to present a virtual tour of a restaurant, hotel or any other kind of real estate using iPhone. Virtual Tour Viewer for iPhone can work as a standalone application (the tour is only on iPhone) or as a counterpart of it’s destop rich-media variant to target iPhone audience when they are travelling for example.

Roadmap:

I’d like to create a jQuery plugin from this so others can use it easily. Then add a lot of features needed for in a mature virtual tour product. Such as loading the tour data from a web service, adding hotspots for moving from one panorama to another, external links, image pop-ups, etc. We’ll see.

Technologies used:

jQuery, webkit 3d css transformations, PtGui, Google Maps Static API, iPhone

Panoramic images used in the example:

All images are © Copyright 2009 Jan Vrsinsky. Please let me know if you want to use them – jan dot vrsinsky at gmail d o t c om.

* I think it’s the most interesting way to represent a spherical panorama (much less boring than the usual equirect I used in this blog post)

* It’s also more practical because the image’s width to height ratio is usualy 1:1 so it displays nicely almost everywhere

* It’s definitely more creative because you can tweak each image quite a lot (you can rotate the “viewpoint”, alter horizontal compression, move the center, etc.)

Take a look at some examples:

Tram Public Transport in Prague, Czech Republic

Wind Harvester Farm

Mexico City

Click on the images to view interactive versions.

Please send me links to little-planet images you find or your own.

This is a 270×270 degree stereographic, or ‘little planet’ projection.

The video was created by Jeffrey Martin (email him at 360 c i t i e s at g mail)

Note: The scope of this article is the virtual panoramic photography (and audio/video) part of the Google Street View. I’m not going to tell Google how to do the search thing now.

First of all, let me explain what I mean by virtual panoramic photography. There are many names, some people call it spherical panoramas, VR photography, virtual views, immersive panorama, 360 pano, virtual panoramas, etc. Whatever the name is, the key indicator is that it is interactive, immersive and fully spherical. You can look around as if you were there at the very place.

Hyde Street in San Francisco, Click on the image to open interactive version. Note the difference in quality compared to the Street View image from the same location.

I think of Google Street View (and other companies doing the same thing) as a part of virtual panoramic photography, not it’s competitor. Google Street View has just been one of the key elements that helped pushing panoramic photography to the mainstream during recent years. Handcrafted VR panoramas are usually taken by real people who spend their time shooting the panos and then carefully put them together on their computers. Google has just taken a different approach by streamlining the whole process of taking, processing, storing and putting the images online.

The future

Google Street View car as seen in La Mesa (photo credit goes to kylemurley)

#1 The basics will stay the same

VR panoramic image will probably be created the same way (by Google or by anyone else). In short, you need to take pictures in all directions from your chosen virtual point of view and then put them together by using a special software. That is really all it takes. The number of images you need to take depends on the field of view (or the focal length) of the lens you use. The process of putting the images together is called “stitching”. There’s really nothing more to it. All you need is ANY camera. Yes indeed, there’s a huge difference between just creating a panorama and creating a GREAT panorama. More on this is out of scope of this article so I’ll be posting a complete guide soon on this blog. Make sure you bookmark this article or follow the RSS.

#2 The overall quality will improve

If I could name the most significant difference between a handcrafted virtual panorama and Google Street View, the quality vs. quantity ratio would be it. The very fact that Google Street View imagery is taken from a moving car influences the quality by many ways, some of them are not so obvious. On the other hand, Google can put huge amount of data online this way, far more than could ever be imagined by manual work. I believe that the overall quality will improve in 5 years from now.

#3 Resolution will get higher

Google probably creates higher resolution imagery than it puts online today. And if they are not, they will be in 5 years. The current reasons for leaving the resolution low will slowly dissolve. The time required to process the images will be less of an issue, storage space will no longer be so limiting, end-user computing power for displaying the panoramas will increase. We should be expecting far better zoomability and overall picture quality in 5 years.

#4 Gaps will get smaller

Currently there is a gap between images in Street View. You need to click an arrow to get from one image to another. This gap will get much smaller or it will possibly disappear completely as the image stream will be a continuous flow of images along the street. This will allow video-like driving through cities and looking at objects from any angle.

#5 The car will get more invisible

Many errors and glitches in Street View images today are caused by incorrectly stitched images due to the fact that nobody has invented an invisible car yet. As you can see (or in fact, cannot ), the car cannot be seen in Street View images. Google replaces the image of the car at the nadir (bottom) of each panorama with the data taken from surrounding images. In the previous point I said the gaps will get smaller so it will be much easier to do replace the nadir. Or they could just use another sets of cameras and put one in front of the vehicle and another one floating behind.

View Larger Map

#6 Transitions will get smoother

It will be possible to seamlessly go from one picture to another using a technology similar to Adobe’s Infinite Images. Watch the middle third of this video for a short demonstration.

A demonstration of Adobe’s Infinite Images

#7 Glitches will be less visible

The key to understanding quality of Google Street View images is the understanding that you need to take all the images that create the final panorama at the same time and from the same place. This doesn’t sound like a big deal but really the “from the same place” could be a problem. Assuming the cameras aren’t infinitely small they, in fact, cannot be at the same place at the same time. The misplacement of the focal points of the cameras causes a degradation of quality called “parallax error” and it’s usually more visible if there is a contract of distances in objects in the panorama. I believe that parallax errors create a lot of blurry areas on Google Street View images, apart of purposely blurred people faces and car licence plates of course. The only way to minimize it is really is to make the cameras as small as possible. And of course, there is a trade-off between quality and the size of the cameras.

#8 Buildings will get the 3rd dimension

The recent change in Google Street View added a sense of depth. If we take the feature a step further, we can easily end up with 3D buildings and objects. Take these two videos as an example of what is possible today. In five years the 3D buildings are going to be a piece of cake

C3 Maps

Microsoft Photosynth

#9 It will no longer be street-only

The suitable mass-production pano cameras will get smaller and they will be detached from the cars carried by people. Once again, this is already possible today but the quality is not so great. The new technology will allow to include locations never imagined before in Street View, like towers, cars, boats and even airplanes. Check out my article on 4 Unusual Locations For 360 Panos and 3 Astonishing Aerial Spherical Panoramic Photos to look at some examples of where today’s handcrafted virtual panoramas can be taken. I guess the Street View will have to come up with another name then

Top of Torre Latinoamericana, Mexico City
(click on the image to videw the interactive version)

#10 Sound will be added

Sound is the “extra added value” some virtual panorama photographers are putting to their pictures today to make the panos more attracting. It allows you to not only see the location you are visiting but also to hear it. Check out this amazing panorama by Jean-Pierre Lavoie for example:

Click on the image to view the interactive version, this panorama has been linked from Jean-Pierre’s site PhotoJPL where he has a great collection of panoramas with sound.

#11 Video will be added

The technology for virtual panoramic video is ready today today however the price/quality ratio hasn’t allowed it to thrive yet.

Pano video example

#12 Live streaming will be added

There will be panoramic video cameras placed at various locations and they will feed live data to the system. We’ll no longer be constrained to seeing only outdated images of the places we visit. The real-word usages are endless, from security and traffic cameras to cameras attached to racing cars, for example.

#13 All people will contribute

The technology will advance so much that the handcrafted virtual panoramic photography will finally merge together with what Google Street View is doing. Don’t get me wrong here. I think there will always be special use cases for pro-level photography. There will always be reasons for doing something with extra precision, differently or in an exceptional quality. However the pano photography will hit the mainstream. There will be point-and-shoot VR photography cameras at a cost of today’s cheapest cameras and the software needed to create panoramas will be widely available, most probably online. People will be able to post their pano pictures and videos, share them easily and they’ll be encouraged merge them with existing images to fill in missing pieces.

#14 A virtual copy of the planet Earth will be created

We will no longer be constrained to view only satellite or aerial photography data and a limited set of panoramas along the streets as today.  The contributions of all people on this planet will create a virtual copy of Earth. You will be able to visit any place and look at it from many different angles. Eventually, when enough data is gathered, it will be possible to choose a month in the year, an hour in the day and apply current or chosen weather to any place on earth you decide to visit. There will be computer games based in this new environment and a lot of businesses will use this data to generate revenue.

How do you see the future of Google Street View and virtual panoramic photography?

If you liked this article please subscribe to RSS. I’ll be posting more articles about virtual panoramic photography soon. Please share this article with your friends, thank you.

1. The Secret to You

This is a video promoting the movie “Secret”, which is mainly about the law of attraction. It’s perfectly OK if you don’t know the movie. Just click on play and watch it and I guarantee you’ll feel more energized soon

2. Enterpreneurs can change the world

If you have forgotten the times you were a child and everything seemed so easy and that you had fun in everything you did you definitelly need to watch this video.

3. Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight

This one is longer but still worth of your time. Jill Bolte Taylor talks at TED in 2008 about an extraordinary situation that happened to her. She studied her own stroke as it happened and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. She fully recovered and now she shares the story with the world.

(go to Mexpedition Diaries)

We started in Mexico City and headed north, then through Palenque to Yucatan, then to Belize, Guatemala and back to Mexico City. Here’s the map of the whole Mexpedition Diaries trip.

View Mexpedition Diaries in a larger map

tip: hold the mouse button in the image and drag your mouse to look around

France

Vannes in France

Israel

Jaffa in Israel

Prague

Prague from a Balloon in Praha

Org version needs to be downloaded and hosted on your server, you can upload new plugins, themes and customize everything. The cons are that you need to have your own web host, handle backups and maintain the server yourself (some technical knowledge is needed). For more information, check out the Wordpress “com vs org” support article.

The com version I’m going to use from now on allows me to:

1. Use Google Analytics and itsert its tracking code into pages

2. Embed flash files like youtube vieo, pano viewers, etc.

3. Insert any javascript code into pages, e.g. Twitter updates

4. Switch to any theme I want

5. Use any plugin I want (check out the Top 18 most downloaded WordPress plugins ever)

Which version do YOU use and why?