Where am I?

AlbumMixer 1.0 is now available, bringing album shuffle to the iPhone. This was my favorite feature from the iPod classic, and I signed up for the iPhone developer program specifically so I could re-implement it (Album Shuffle is interesting, but despite the name it doesn’t really shuffle the albums in my music library). I hope it’s useful to other iPhone owners: let me know if you run into problems or have ideas for improvements. The application page is here (for now, please report any problems or make suggestions by commenting on this post).

It took Apple almost exactly 14 days to approve the application, just as they predicted, and it was approved on a Saturday. I’m impressed that they’re working so hard to keep up with the massive influx of new iPhone apps.

I’m less impressed that searching for “album shuffle” in the iTunes App Store doesn’t match AlbumMixer, even though searching for “album mixer” does match. After some digging, I found a FAQ in which Apple states that it can take up to 24 hours for the app store to index new keywords. That’s too bad: I could sell them a better solution.

[Follow-up: 6 days later, keyword search still isn't working. I've attempted to contact Apple via iTunes Connect, but so far I haven't even seen an acknowledgment.]

The 3GS with iPhone OS 3.0.1 is good, but there are a few paper-cuts that I can’t ignore. Naturally I’ve told Apple about these.

• Calendar and conference calls: The iPhone doesn’t recognize phone numbers in the Location field of calendar events at all. It sort of recognizes numbers in the body of a calendar event, and it does even better if they’re formatted like this: tel://800-555-1212p9876 (NB – that looks sort of like RFC-2806 format, but it isn’t; the RFC doesn’t allow ‘//’ after the scheme). For pauses you can write a comma (’,') instead of ‘p’: that isn’t RFC-compliant either, but the iPhone dialer appears to translate ‘p’ to ‘,’ anyway (look at the call log to see). It seems to be impossible to add ‘#’ at the end: the dialer won’t accept the number. Apple’s docs are here, but seem to be wrong on most of these points (it doesn’t mention the extra ‘//’ after the scheme).
• Album shuffle: What happened to the album shuffle feature? This was my favorite iPod feature, and for me the iPhone is largely about replacing two devices with one. Apparently the iPhone has always been missing this feature, so I don’t think Apple will add it any time soon. Update: I’ve dealt with this by releasing AlbumMixer – I hope you like it.
• To-do list: iCal has to-do lists, and they used to sync with my W810i. They don’t sync with the iPhone, because… it doesn’t have to-do lists built in. You can download a third-party app, but that seems silly and it’s not clear that iCal sync would work. For the moment I’m using Notes instead: create a new note in Mail.app, and it syncs to the iPhone’s Notes application. That works reasonably well, but hopefully OS X 10.6 and the next rev of iPhone OS will improve this situation.

I’m sure I’ll discover more as I work with the device, and maybe I’ll find some solutions too. Watch this space.