My rant from a few months ago about the inefficiency of the iPhone calendar application continues to strike a chord.
One of the things I criticized was how many steps it takes just to navigate to the calendar in order to check, tweak, or add an appointment. On the iPhone it ranges from 3 to 7 steps, with some of those being heavyweight steps that pull eyes and your attention of other things. On the ancient PalmPilot and its newer descendants, it is one button press. Extremely frequent task was rightfully given top-tier treatment, with a physical button on the device.
But Apple isn’t really into buttons. (Nor are they into acknowledging that the iPhone is really more of a PDA than it is a phone.)
Can we have our cake and eat it too? Can we have direct access to key tasks while also accommodating Apple’s pathological aversion to real buttons? Buttons that you can actually find without looking at the device, which are always available, regardless of the mode you are in, and which have the gratifying haptic feedback of… clicking?
Here’s one way: from the iPhone’s “slide to unlock” screen (or even from standby mode) let the user jump directly to an app by drawing a gesture. C for calendar, M for mail, F for facebook. It would be configurable.
Gestures could go deeper than just launching apps and get you to most used tasks. Draw an A to create a new appointment. Draw a T to go to today. Each apps could publish its candidates for direct-access tasks, and the user could assign them to gestures.
Here’s an even better way to give immediate access to key tasks without buttons: make voice recognition the main way to get to most frequent tasks. Press a physical “listen to me” button and say, “Go to today” or “new appointment for next Thursday at 5:30 pm” or “Call Leslie” or “new contact” or “Address book find Edwin” or “Facebook” or “Yelp nearby sushi” or “Montreal weather” or “Apple stock price”. These were scenarios I painted several years ago. Now they are starting to take shape at Google and with iPhone add-ons like Say Who (which actually works well) and Say Where (which doesn’t work as well yet).
A good implementation of voice command would suddenly make all that iPhone goodness a heck of a lot more efficient. It could be a key part of an iPhone-neutralizing device.
[...] Steal This Idea » Using gestures and voice for access to key tasks … [...]
the iPhone has Voice Control now in version 3. It’s not 100% accurate, but it does OK.