Thursday, June 5, 2014

Apple : Please Let Me Dock My iPhone On My Mac !



OS X 10.10 & iOS 8 will greatly enhance the user experience. The Continuity concept is exciting but should go beyond what was presented during the 2014 WWDC keynote.

I love the idea of receiving my phone calls and text messages on my Mac as I won't have to juggle between my mac and iPhone as often as I do it now when I'm at work.

My last post was about a dumb iPad and I do think that Apple should implement new functionalities to let their devices interact more between one another.

One great feature would be to let users virtually "dock" their iPhone on their Mac. I would love to be able to "bump" my iPhone against my Mac and then, magically, see the content of my iPhone appear in a desktop window. Wouldn't it be great to access all iPhone features through the Mac without having to deal with two devices (mac, iPhone) at the same time ?

I can't wait for OS X 10.11 & iOS 9 to implement such features !

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Why A Dumb iPad Would Be A Great Device



As smartphones are ubiquitous and tablets are becoming more and more common, we frequently find ourselves configuring two different devices with nearly identical settings. It just seems to me as an awful waste of time and CPU.

I love my iPhone and my iPad but I hate to configure them and keep them up to date. I don't need an iPad with a slightly faster CPU than my iPhone and most importantly I don't notice the difference. What I want and has yet to be released is a totally dumb iPad which only purpose would be to mirror à la Airplay the content of my iPhone on a bigger and more comfortable screen.

As many apps are universal (i.e. contain the code for both the iPhone and iPad version), it wouldn't be complicated to scale them to take advantage of the iPad display.

What I want is simple :
- An easy way to pair my iPhone with my dumb iPad using either bluetooth or Wi-Fi (iBeacon ?).
- Once they are paired, I want the iPad to automatically mirror the content of my iPhone on its bigger screen scaling apps to take advantage of the iPad screen estate.
- An Easy way to unpair them (time-out after 5 minutes and/or a gesture).

This would be awesome and allow for sharing the same tablet amongst a household. It just doesn't make any sense to me to have a full-blown ultimate specs iPad with the same apps than on my iPhone. I don't want to download, install everything twice and I don't need twice the memory storage. I just need a device that has enough horsepower to mirror my iPhone content.

Please Apple, make a Dumb iPad!