Thursday, February 3, 2011

Does anyone know how to point out an obvious iPhone feature to Apple?


As I've said before, I am not a fan of Apple, but I still think they make the best smartphone out there. However, the phone has a problem that drives me and any other audiobook listener who's thought about it nuts. The iPhone has an iPod menu that comes up when you double-click the home button from the lock screen. This way, you don't need to unlock the phone and go to iTunes. This works great for music, but apparently no one told the designers of this lock screen menu that audiobooks have a different interface. When the iPod app is playing an audiobook, there is a "go back 30 seconds button" that is not there for music. This is the most useful button other than pause/play for audiobooks. However, the lock screen menu doesn't care that you are listening to an audiobook and only lets you play/pause and skip chapters. Wait, what? Skip chapters? Is that something anyone listening to an audiobook ever actually does on a regular basis? (That was a rhetorical question; the answer is of course not). Yet instead of giving the extremely useful go back 30 seconds button for when someone comes up and starts talking and you miss some of your book while pausing it, they put chapter skip buttons. This is worse than useless; it's a hazard. The buttons are, for some baffling reason, placed precariously close together so the slightest imprecision when pressing pause will skip a chapter, losing your place in the current one and playing spoilers from the next chapter. Someone needs to point this oversight out to Apple so they can fix it.

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