February 23rd, 2009
Concept: App management in iTunes
One of my biggest pet peeves with the iPhone these days is application management. There’s no easy way to do it. When apps get stale or after restoring an iPhone users are forced to spend a lot of time moving apps to and fro via Apple’s rudimentary click hold and drag operation. While it’s tolerable for a few apps, moving a page or two, it quickly becomes excruciating when you have a lot of apps to move a lot of pages.
The problem is that the iPhone (and the iTunes interface itself) was designed to accommodate a single screen of applications. Apple didn’t design an easy way to organize more that 16 apps, because that’s all the iPhone was orginally intended to hold. In today’s world of 20,000 apps in the App store and 148 possibilities (another seemingly random limitation) Apple needs an interface to manage iPhone apps from the comforts of a desktop computer with a keyboard and a mouse.
This video featured on Gizmodo provides what appears to be a simple solution to the problem.
I hope that someone at Apple is paying attention and that something like this arrives in the 3.0 firmware this summer. Apple should be working on features like this instead of wasting precious development resources playing cat and mouse with the jailbreakers.
Jason D. O'Grady is the editor of PowerPage.org, which has been publishing daily mobile technology news since December 1995. For disclosures on Jason's industry affiliations, click here or to view Jason's full profile click here.
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