The night before WWDC
A hidden gem of a feature in the new iPhone OS 3.0 may be the least talked about… but for those of you who actually still love the “iPod” app the most, it is a welcome little egg. When you want to scrub a song (or jump to a specific point in a song), the granularity of the track-time slider made it an imprecise and clumsy affair. In the latest revision, once you grab the slider you will notice that depending on where your finger is on the Y-axis of the screen, the slider gets decelerated/accelerated as you move down/up the y-axis. Allows you to basically scan the track and release at a more intended upon time marker.
Simple, elegant, brilliant, needed.
A second little bit is more aesthetic, but also eliminates a nagging UI discrepency that’s existed for audio dock users. For accessory devices that use external volume control, the volume slider on the screen will no longer show a meaninglyless volume level. The volume slider on the now playing screen disappears when docked, and immediately reappears when undocked. What I haven’t verified yet is whether if you have a speakerdock that does synchronize GUI volume level with external amp gain, the volume slider remains. Need to check that out with a higher end speakerdock like the iHome iP1 when I get my hands on the two in one room.
Apple’s WWDC is taking place tomorrow.
I hope we will see Steve Jobs on stage.
I’ve been using iPhone 3.0 OS beta for a few months now. It’s fantastic. The big new features are:
1. copy & paste
2. search
3. keyboard in landscape mode inside email
John Gruber has a bunch predictions about a new iPhone. I will get one even if processor/RAM is the only meaningful update.
That will be a big improvement alone.
