Hi Apple,

I love my iPhone. It took a while to ween me away from wanting to actually be able to store and organise my files, control directories, copy files on and off my 16GB £400 memory card, install applications that haven’t been through your ridiculous process, copy and paste (until very recently) data etc.. etc…

None of that really matters though, because the processes that you have put in place to achieve the functionality (for the most part – still annoyed I can’t put files on my 16GB £400 memory card) is sufficiently slick that I forget that I ever had a pictures directory where I could organise my images, or a documents file where I may store items that I consider to be ‘documents’. As did I forget that I liked to be able to copy and paste data because whenever a piece of data was somewhere, and you wanted it to be somewhere else, there was a nice little button that said ‘move this data in some useful way to this other application’. Great.

The problem with this system, is that when you don’t get it right, it’s annoying. It’s very annoying. I was stuck for a year with 16GB £400 memory card / phone that I couldn’t use to ever share contact details with anyone else by any means other than email. ‘I’ll just text you their num….’, oh wait… there is absolutely no way to achieve this without a pen and paper. Really!?

The latest – navigating to an event with the location stored in the extensively marked-up ‘Location’ field in the event. There is no way to request that the iPhone show you how to get there from your current position (which it also knows). So.. in order to get to the ‘Location’ of an event, you have to edit the event, copy and paste the location. Close the event. Open Google Maps. Paste the location. Request that it kindly show you how to get there. This seems like a perfect place for another one of those context-driven buttons. ‘Directions to Event from here’. Yay!

Somebody replied to my tweet on this subject by saying ‘Location!=Address’ – and yes, congratulations, semantics have not defeated you on this occasion. I remember however, when I purchased Office 2000 (9 years ago!) and it began to underline text in emails that represent addresses. Moving closer to home, Mail in OS X does this very thing – they have the code!

Apple, I love my iPhone, but just because we have Copy and Paste now (finally) doesn’t mean that I want to start feeling like I’m using a WinMo device; I still want an intuitive experience, an Apple experience.

Can we please have directions to an event location?

Thanks,

Chris