I bought a new iPhone 3G yesterday with my good friend, and major Mac enthusiast, Justin Youens.  You may remember him from such things as getting me to buy a MacBook Pro in May. That turned out to be a good switch.  (Although I do still miss Outlook on Windows. Oh well, I just do less email now.)

After 24 hours with the iPhone, I’ve decided that the iPhone chose form over function in too many areas for my *particular* (anal) self.

Two Examples of Choosing Form over Function

1) Lack of Copy & Paste. If a friend texts you to say, "Hey what Rich’s number?", how can you do this easily without copy and paste?

Or how about when you need to check-in online for your Southwest flight?  Who can remember 6 random alpha-numeric characters after 4 beers?

I had to perform both tasks this evening. Neither are uncommon, at all.

Better sharpen those memorization skills friends.

Btw, here’s a hilarious spoof / "proof of concept" for adding Copy and Paste.

iPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich on Vimeo .

2) Lack of App switching , or what I call "Alt + Tab" from my Windows days.  If you’re composing a tweet using the Twitterific app on iPhone and someone calls you, Twitterific closes and you lose what you were typing.  How do I know? It just happened.

A Freak about Frequency

These two complaints may seem mundane, but I’m an freak about frequency — the more often something is used, the easier it should be to access, use, and put away. When re-designing information architecture on a website or software application, I rely on this principle just as often, if not more, than any other usability principle.

To make anything easier to use, you must organize based upon frequency of use.

(HINT: It’s not the fancy-smancy stuff, it’s the meat and potatoes of any app or site.)

Three Other Complaints

1) Battery life sucks. How many times should one expect to see this screen on one’s iPhone each day?  I’ve seen it twice in 24 hours, and I’ve used the phone no more than 2 hours, almost none of it talking or GPS, both of which are rumored to be expensive on the battery.

2) Down is Up. While on MacBook, I move two fingers DOWN the touchpad to scroll DOWN the page.  That’s logical. But when I’m on the iPhone, it’s the opposite — moving my finger DOWN makes the page go UP. So far trying to get my mind switch between modes on is tougher than chicken breast on the grill after 45 minutes.

Side note: Sliding two fingers down the touchpad of the MacBook Pro to scroll down a page is probably my favorite part of using this machine.  Why?  Frequency of use!  Since my fingers are always only centimeters away from the touchpad, I can move there QUICKLY, and then back to the keyboard.  I don’t have to ever reach over for the mouse wheel or worse, move the cursor to the skinny vertical scroll bar.

3) Phantom Deletes. Anyone else having the delete key phantom backspace a whole bunch of characters? I’ve had it happen about 5 times now.

Most Surprisingly: Typing

The thing I was worried about the most — typing without tactile feedback — is actually not that bad. In just 24 hours, I’ve gotten pretty fast, mostly in part to Apple’s AWESOME word correction. I can type "ronirrow" and have it fix that to "tomorrow"…impressive guys! Much better in fact that Blackberry’s built-in corrector which I still fight 5 or 6 times per day.

The (Ironchef) Verdict

On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best…

• Form: iPhone = 5, Blackberry Pearl = 4
• Function: iPhone = 2, Blackberry Pearl = 5
• Total: iPhone = 7, Blackberry Pearl = 9

Blackberry Pearl, you are the winner!

My Video Rants that Started this Post

Like I tweeted to Justin, sorry for being such an iPhone hater tonight. But I’m wired the way I’m wired. Function matters to me a shitload more than form.

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UPDATE: Two more complaints.

1) Voice quality.  iPhone through headphones is only about 60% the crispness of BB on Tmobile.  iPhone is better on speakerphone than my BB, but that seems odd.

2) AT&T Customer Service.  Closed on Sunday.  All day.  (What, are they Chick-filet?)  However when I called T-Mobile this morning — and talked to a human — Melinda was so happy to hear from me and was ready that moment to reclaim me as a customer.

From 11,000 feet in the air…

• Siren Mary’s blog
• Siren Mary’s GPS
• Siren Custom Bikes
• Tour Divide Race Leaderboard

PS - I’m tweeting every once in awhile.

Speaking of "Out Of Office", this is the dialog I received while closing down Entourage for Mac:

Are you as confused as me?

Based on the question, OK = "Turn it Off", Cancel = "Leave it On".  Right?

BUT…Cancel is what you click when you don’t want to confirm something (ie. "Are you sure you want to delete this?"  OK = Yes,  Cancel = No)

Dear Redmond, might I suggest a simple "Yes", "No" choice?

I read GUI Bloopers by Jeff Johnson in 2001. Best design book I ever read. Learning by mistakes is like reading Proverbs. They stick. That’s good.

Bonus: This reminds me of great article by Jakob Neilson called OK-Cancel or Cancel-OK? (Short answer: Quit spending hours debating this menial question, follow the standard of the platform the majority of your users use, and focus your time on more important problems.)

If you email me, you’ll get this message:

I will be out of the office and *totally* disconnected (even from my crackberry) from June 25th until July 14th-ish.

I’m helping some friends shoot a documentary film about a mountain bike race that runs from Canada to Mexico across the Great Divide (http://www.tourdivide.org ). I’ve never been on a film crew, but this seemed like a great reason to unplug for a few weeks. Jealous, aren’t you?

Thx,
Patrick Sullivan Jr.

Follow me on Twitter . I’ll keep you updated with pics and interesting statistics.

Watch the video and I’ll show you:

“Patrick, what’s the deal with Hypnosis?”

Good question. I’m not really into the stuff myself. Instead I like to focus on reverse psychology, as explained by my friend, Michael Scott:

“No Patrick, seriously, why review HypnosisNetwork.com?”

Ok, so the owner of HypnosisNetwork.com contacted me in February about some biz dev opportunities for Jigsaw Health, the other company I run besides Obedient Software. I was pretty skeptical about the hypnosis stuff, but Michael seemed like a decent dude. Ironically enough, skepticism is what got Michael into hypnosis in the first place.

He was really cynical about audio hypnosis for becoming a better person, being more confident, losing weight, quitting smoking, and all that bullsh!t. But he ended up diving headlong into it to figure out what stuff was any good.

I hooked up with him (yes, that kind of “hook up”, retard!) at a conference in March of this year, and then hooked up again for lunch when I was in Ft. Worth in May.

At lunch, he told me he really wanted my help to redesign his website. I told him I’d take a look and give him my first impression. Here’s the email I sent him:

> Redesign…
Candidly, I don’t think you need it. You might just be suffering from symptoms of “I’m sick of my own website-itis.” Very common.

But you’re doing everything right.
1. Headline in question format that doesn’t make sense, but it fits.
2. Sub-head answers the question, makes you want to read more.
3. Eye jumps to hyper links next and sees benefits.
4. Conversion point above the fold (free trial, cool!)
5. Eye jumps to right nav, sees “National Institute of Whole Health”…cool, this has been approved by important people.
6. Hero shot of the product most likely to appeal, Enjoying Weight Loss.
7. Main/Top Nav is “hiding” in grey above the logo.

It’s no wonder you’re doing $XMM. You’re getting good JV traffic — AND YOU’VE GOT YOUR CONVERSION FUNNEL BUILT AND WELL-TUNED.

For full-blown persuasion architecture redesign, I would do better handing you over to the FutureNow boys, which I’d be happy to do. But I wouldn’t re-architect the “information architecture” or “workflow interaction” of your site if I were you.

So just get over your “itis” dude!

Patrick

PS - I did a review like this on mint.com, mind if I do one for your site? http://editweapon.com/30-seconds-mint/

So check out HypnosisNetwork.com for yourself and let me know what you think.