Apple, please don’t forget that before the iPhone, you were a music player company!
One of my biggest disappointments with iPhone 2.0 was to see that the iPod application was essentially unchanged from the 1.0.x firmware. Apple has done all of the hard work to connect music on the computer into a great cell phone interface. These minor enhancements could make it SO much better.
Further frustrating: Apple DID add a bunch of great features to the outstanding “Remote” application.
Here are some ideas, please provide your feedback:
- Provide more metadata during track, artist and album browsing. When looking at artists, it would be helpful to see the names of available albums next to the name in smaller print. This way, a user can decide how many tracks are available in the album, potentially skipping those “onesy-twosy” track artists/albums. Sometimes I am in the mood to hear complete albums, other times, just certain tracks.
- Make playlist browsing more intelligent. When I’m looking at the content of a playlist, all I see is the track name. It would be much more useful to also show the artist and album that the track belongs to. This will help better remind me what the playlist is about (have I grouped classic rock together? Is this playlist my recent favorites? etc.) My own personal habit is to revise my playlists relatively infrequently. Apple’s “remote” application does this now (see below). Could it be hard to move it to the iPhone proper?
- Provide keyboard-entered search. Again, easy to do, and also something available in the Remote app
- Keep improving coverflow. If I’m browsing a playlist, and I rotate to enter coverflow, why can’t I see just the contents of the playlist? Instead, right now, I see everything on the iPhone. It would be nice if there was a way to filter down coverflow to just what is covered by a playlist.
- Allow hierarchal exploration of playlists. Call me crazy, but I organize my playlists in folders. Apple remote lets me see these folders.. Why can’t I do this on the iPhone?