Speeds and Feeds

As I continue to wind down Speeds and Feeds, I picked ruggedness as the topic for part 3.

In part 2 of this wrap-up series, I on Tuesday discussed reliability, suggesting that an increasing portion of the transistor budget in personal computers should be used to avoid, detect, and recover from hardware, software, and data errors.

Ruggedness, the ability of a PC to survive adverse physical conditions, complements reliability by further increasing the practical availability of a PC to do useful work.

As with efficiency in power management (part 1's topic), this is an area where PCs can learn a lot from cell phones. I expect my cell phone to continue operating normally unless it's physically damaged--and I expect that it will not be damaged even by fairly rough handling.

PCs, by comparison, are pretty fragile. I know that if I drop my laptop, even if it falls only a few feet to a carpeted floor, there's a good chance it will be damaged. The LCD could crack, the case could bend, the hard disk could crash, the battery latch could break. In fact, I've managed to do all of these things to one or more of the 15-plus laptops I've owned and used since 1984.

Not all laptops need to be rugged; for example, some laptops are used as small-footprint desktop computers and rarely moved at all, so ruggedness would be an unnecessary expense.

There are many situations, however, where greater ruggedness is obviously valuable: laptops for students (even in a classroom), field photographers, mechanics, factory workers, the military, and so on.

Some companies already make rugged systems for these applications, but demand for such systems is low, and they require a lot of additional engineering. The combination of small quantities and extra design work leads to very high prices; it isn't unusual to see rugged laptops with the features of a typical low-cost notebook selling for $4,000 or more.

There have been very few standard mass-market personal computers with any real degree of ruggedization. In the old days of 8-bit microcomputers, some consumer-oriented systems such as the popular Atari 400 and Commodore 64 were fairly robust due to heavy plastic cases designed to survive casual home use, but these weren't portable machines.

In the mid-1990s, Dell's Latitude line earned the favor of serious road warriors in part due to a high degree of ruggedness, if only in comparison with other mainstream laptops. Sometimes these Latitude models were the only survivors of annual notebook torture tests run by PC Computing magazine.

Panasonic's Toughbook line took over later in that decade as the first truly rugged notebooks. (I have a Toughbook 25 myself; alas, it's dead.) It's easy to see how these machines differ from ordinary notebooks: heavy magnesium casings with stiffening ribs to resist twisting, shock-mounted hard disks, water- and dust-resistant connectors, and so on. They aren't suitable for most people, though.

Three trends are bringing rugged systems closer to the mainstream today.

First, portable PCs are becoming increasingly more integrated into our daily lives. As power efficiency improves to the point that we can run them all day, portable machines will be even more important to us. But if these devices aren't rugged, we won't really be able take them with us as often as we'd like.

Second, the components themselves are getting smaller, lighter, and in some cases more rugged. It's possible to buy a decent dual-core CPU that doesn't need a huge heat sink. Solid-state disk drives are a huge step forward; and with 128GB of capacity requiring only 32 flash chips, they can be much smaller than traditional hard disks. Smaller, lighter components are easier to support and protect.

Third, materials science is making a lot of progress. The glass used in LCDs is much better today than it was a decade ago--better able to absorb shock and flex a little when needed. (It's actually a little scary just how flexible the displays of some super-thin notebooks are.) New chassis materials such as milled aluminum and CFRP (carbon-fiber reinforced plastic) can produce very strong machines, though in most consumer systems they're used to reduce weight instead. In the near future, carbon nanotube-reinforced materials will become available in commercial quantities; while expensive, they will be very strong.

These new materials can be used in new ways to make very rugged machines that don't have to cost dramatically more than existing systems.

In 2005, as a practical exercise, I designed a small notebook with a milled titanium case and a novel mechanical design that provided exceptional stiffness. With a fixed battery and few external connectors (another improvement enabled by new technology), it would have provided Toughbook-like ruggedness in a very small and convenient package.

That design didn't go anywhere, but there are plenty of designers out there. I expect that someone will develop something similar before too long.

The current Netbook craze is directing a lot of attention to ruggedness as a design goal. These machines are small, light, and obviously portable, but they tend to be cheaply made and more fragile than many consumers would like. Adapting these designs to more rugged enclosures would add significant cost, but I think there's a good market for such machines.

Personal computers have become much more reliable over the last 10 years or so, mostly due to the introduction of advanced operating systems with memory protection and hardware abstraction. The hardware itself has gotten better too; uncorrectable random errors are rare in PCs and extraordinarily rare in server-class systems.

These and other improvements have largely eliminated machine crashes. Blue-screen errors on Windows and kernel panics in Linux and Mac OS X still occur, but much more rarely.

Error-reporting services have become common, helping software developers figure out what went wrong. Most large developers now issue regular patches to fix newly discovered bugs, making systems more reliable between major releases.

All this progress is wonderful, of course, but our PCs still aren't reliable in the way that other consumer products are reliable. Machine crashes are still possible, and any bug can bring down an individual application.

Automobiles, for example, can fail in many ways, but they are still much more reliable than PCs. The risks associated with vehicle failures have been greatly reduced by decades of design refinements. Would you feel safe if PC technology controlled the steering and brakes in your car? Conversely, wouldn't you be more confident in your PC if you knew it was as reliable as your vehicle?

PCs are also fragile in response to change. I know I'm always a little nervous the first time I install a new device driver or run a new application. Even without software changes, opening an unusually large image can induce some trepidation. Consider this 370-megapixel image of the Lagoon Nebula available from the European Southern Observatory Web site; how confident are you that all of your image-viewing programs would survive the attempt to open it?

And worst of all, PCs are fragile in response to attack. The kinds of problems that are sometimes created accidentally by software bugs are relatively easy to create on purpose.

Minimizing the frequency and consequences of these problems would require tremendous effort from everyone in the industry. Almost every bit of PC hardware and software would have to change. One part of the solution is an extension of the same techniques that make today's PCs more reliable than older models: more hardware-based isolation of one function from another.

The minimal isolation of today's systems is very convenient for software developers, making it easier to write code and achieve high levels of performance. More isolation means more complexity and more overhead, but it improves reliability.

Developers are taking the first steps in this direction already, for example, with the process isolation features of the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and Google Chrome browsers. But there's much more that can be done.

Another way to improve reliability is to verify that data and addresses are consistent in range and format with the original intent of the software developer before they are used by the program. Making these checks in software can help; the incidence of failures related to accidental and deliberate buffer-overflow conditions has been dramatically reduced in this way. There's plenty of room for new hardware to help in this process too.

There's also work to be done in making it easier to recover from failures, since true hardware failures are inevitable. This is another area where some high-end systems are way ahead of the PC. Fault-tolerant machine architectures have been around for a long time in the aerospace industry, for example.

Historically, fault tolerance has never been practical on the PC because PCs always had only one of each critical subsystem: one processor, one bank of memory, one display channel. Today, PC processors and graphics chips have multiple cores and multiple memory interfaces, creating the potential for redundant operation where it's most needed.

Recoverability also implies backups--not just of the contents of disk drives, but even of the live data in memory through checkpointing. And disk backups can be improved too, by making the backup process an integral part of all disk I/O. Modern file systems use journaling to increase reliability; this technique can be extended to allow recovering from errors long after they occur.

There will be a heavy price to be paid in complexity and performance for all of these techniques, but the currency for this payment is transistors, and Moore's Law gives us more of those in every new process generation. We need to consider how we want to allocate these transistors. Over time, I believe reliability should account for an increasing portion of them.

After 19 months of consulting--in Silicon Valley, we prefer that term to "unemployment"--I've accepted a job.

Once I start, I'll have to stop blogging. But while I'm still independent, I'd like to wrap up here by offering a short series of articles addressing several key topics in the area of personal computing.

Today, the topic is energy efficiency.

Energy efficiency has become a major selling point of today's personal computers, especially laptops, because power consumption determines battery life.

Unfortunately, laptops are being optimized for energy efficiency in a way that isn't fully consistent with the needs of laptop users.

Advances in process technology and CPU design have greatly improved the power efficiency of modern microprocessors when they're running. This improvement is most visible at the highest performance levels.

Over the last few years, dual-core laptop processors have gone from maximum speeds of roughly 2.4GHz to 3.0GHz without consuming any more power. The newest quad-core chips provide much more aggregate performance in a similar power envelope.

This improvement in operating efficiency is great for gaming, mobile video editing, and a few other applications. But it's not very meaningful for most consumers.

What the rest of us need is non-operating efficiency, the ability of the laptop to consume very little power when it isn't doing much because that's what our laptops are usually doing.

We need laptops that can do nothing--more efficiently.

I've been looking at the newest crop of ultra low-power laptops. Based on published benchmark data, they consume an average of 8W to 10W of power when doing essentially nothing (what we call "idle power"). Even the best of them consumes about 6W of power at all times, getting 10 hours of battery life from a 60WH battery. Maybe 2W of that is spent keeping the display on. The other 4W to 8W is just wasted by the CPU and other motherboard circuitry.

When your laptop isn't doing much--for example, when you're typing in your word processor--it's using only slightly more CPU performance than your cell phone is when you're texting. Your cell phone consumes very little power to do this meager amount of work, usually no more than 0.25W or so for the CPU and its support chips. The corresponding elements of your laptop, however, may consume 50 times as much power under similar conditions.

Some of this difference is inevitable; your laptop has wider data buses, more and faster RAM, and so on. Nevertheless, your laptop motherboard could be designed to idle along on 1W or so.

That would give you a total system-level power consumption of around 3W--half the power of today's most energy-efficient laptops and about one-quarter the power of an average machine. Because there's a relationship between peak CPU speed and idle power, today's fastest laptops consume 20W or more at idle. With more energy-aware designs, these systems could see even greater proportional reductions.

In other words, adopting more aggressive methods for reducing idle power could easily double battery life across the board, and some systems would see much bigger improvements.

This is not merely a quantitative improvement. Consider what happens when your laptop can comfortably operate for 20 hours with the display on, or 60 hours with the display off.

For one thing, it never has to go to sleep. Your cell phone never really goes to sleep, and that's a great part of its value. Your laptop can have this same cell phone operating model.

Closing the lid should turn off the display, but the machine should keep running. It can stay connected to the Internet over Wi-Fi or 3G, periodically download your new e-mail messages, watch that eBay auction, and do whatever else you need it to do...all the time. Just plug it in to recharge while you're asleep. (If the laptop is in your briefcase, it'll have to slow down a lot to keep from consuming too much power, but that's easily managed.)

When you're ready to start using the machine actively again, it shouldn't take any longer to turn the display on again than it does to physically open the lid. Think "always on," not "instant on."

All of this is possible with today's technology, but nobody's doing it. I think one of the reasons we don't see this usage model is that laptop buyers don't know to ask for it. Incremental improvements produce adequate sales figures with each new laptop generation, and everyone figures that's good enough.

But mark my words: the first full-function laptop that works like a cell phone--always running, always connected, always ready--is going to hit the market like a sledgehammer. Everything else is going to seem obsolete overnight.

We all understand that government could do more to benefit from computer technology, but Carl Malamud can say exactly what it ought to do differently.

In a speech at the Government 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., last week, the online activist laid out a strong argument for how government should be using technology to make the legislative process and other government operations more accessible by the public.

Malamud fit his recommendations into an explanation of how the U.S. government has evolved over the last 250 years. He discussed how the nation's founders "established the principle that government must communicate with the people," and how the Lincoln administration "established the principles of documentation and consultation." Malamud summarizes what he sees as a third wave of information technology in government:

We are now witnessing a third wave of change--an Internet wave--where the underpinnings and machinery of government are used not only by bureaucrats and civil servants, but by the people. This change has the potential to be equally fundamental.

Malamud has been working toward better government for a long time. A 2008 article by CNET's Declan McCullagh ("Tech activist takes on governments over 'copyrighted' laws") gives a good overview of his work.

Malamud's speech, "By the People..." is available at his Web site, Public.resource.org. I think it should be required reading for anyone involved in government information technology, whether as a supplier or consumer. Don't miss the accompanying pamphlet of the same title; it has extensive footnotes for the speech as well as an appendix listing "29 things government could do today."

The list is very specific, very actionable, and very sensible.

Malamud's speech also presented a model for thinking about government: the notion of government as the country's operating system. In effect, he wants to open-source government.

Google tells me the concept of government-as-operating-system goes back at least to 1980 when Andrew Klossner wrote "A parallel between operating system and human government" for the ACM's SIGOPS Operating Systems Review. Ironically, that article lives behind a pay wall, so I haven't read it.

In any event, it's a powerful concept, and worth thinking about.

In a corporate blog post this week, Microsoft Vice President Horacio Gutierrez promoted the idea of a "harmonized, global patent system," in which all the nations adopt common standards for processing and approving patent applications.

Properly done, patents approved in one country could become enforceable in other countries, as is the case with copyrights under the terms of the Berne Convention.

I really have no problem with harmonization if it is properly done, but I think it would be tremendously difficult to achieve good results. The reality of patent protection is radically different from that of copyrights because patents are allowed based on the merits of the application; someone has to make a judgment call.

Would nations be able to compete for patenting fees on the basis of their approval rate? After all, who could say whether I invented a new audio calibration standard here in Cupertino--or Costa Rica, if I just happened to visit a patent agent while on holiday there? Even if this wasn't allowed, I expect all nations would begin to relax their standards in order to give their local inventors an edge in the global marketplace--a classic "race to the bottom."

Or would there be just one international patent bureau, perhaps run as an agency of the United Nations? I shudder to think how that would turn out, with the General Assembly dominated by smaller nations with little vested interest in patent protection.

Unfortunately, Gutierrez takes the latter position:

In today's world of universal connectivity, global business and collaborative innovation, it is time for a world patent that is derived from a single patent application, examined and prosecuted by a single examining authority and litigated before a single judicial body.

Not only does he want an international patent bureau, he wants to create a new international court system with global enforcement powers. The potential for abuse here is truly staggering.

But as objectionable as I find that proposal, my real issue with Gutierrez's post is that it's completely irrelevant to the real problems with the worldwide patent system.

Gutierrez summarizes:

Big challenges certainly confront the global patent system: Escalating patent application backlogs; lengthening pendency periods; increasing costs of patent prosecution; dubious patent quality due to the global explosion of prior art and the time allowed to examine applications; and examination inefficiency due to duplication of work by multiple offices.

Removing the duplication would help a little. About half of U.S. patents go to non-resident inventors. That fraction is increasing, and it's already larger in most other countries because of the stronger emphasis on innovation in U.S. companies. Letting inventors go through the process just once, in their own countries, would eliminate the duplication. But again, I think this approach would create more problems than it solves.

In any event, a factor of two here or there is not going to solve the fundamental problem of patent quality. The high percentage of bad patents in the system--and believe me, I can personally testify to how many bad patents are out there--undermines the whole system.

I've been thinking about this problem for over 20 years now, and I have some suggestions:

Problem statements. All patent applications should include a statement of the specific problem(s) the claimed invention is intended to solve. These problem statements should be published immediately and anonymously, along with whatever prior-art references have been disclosed--but no details of the invention itself. The problem statements and prior-art references would be taken as narrowing the scope of the invention. The public would then be free to point to known solutions, or even submit new ones, which would create a presumption of obviousness if they happen to coincide with the filed claims.

Claim standardization. One social benefit of the patent system is to publish inventions so that others may use them, either immediately if a license is made available, or after the patent expires. A published patent may also serve as the foundation of further inventive work. But patents are difficult for humans to understand and are practically immune to reliable machine analysis and searching. I think patent claims should use a standardized grammar and vocabulary that eliminates ambiguity and precisely identifies the scope of the invention. Although defining these new standards would be a difficult and lengthy process, the rewards would be tremendous.

Examination fees. As an inventor myself it pains me to say this, but examination fees must cover the actual costs of examination. That means charging enough to let the patent office hire enough qualified examiners to handle applications as quickly as they come in, rather than letting a backlog develop. Published problem statements and standardized claims will help a lot, higher fees may cut down on bogus patent filings, and we'd all like to see the patent office managed better. But ultimately, the system has to support itself.

No triple damages. U.S. law provides for triple damages when someone "knowingly, deliberately, intentionally, willfully, or wantonly" infringes a patent. But these damages are routinely awarded whenever there is evidence that an infringer was aware of a patent, even if the knowledge played no role in product development or there was truly some reasonable disagreement as to whether the patent was relevant. As a result, this law discourages study of existing patents, which is directly contrary to the constitutional purpose of the patent system. Knowledge alone is not a bad thing; we shouldn't penalize it.

I'm sure there are many other good ideas out there for improving the U.S. patent system. We need to talk about them, and we need to find solutions to our own problems before we even start thinking about globalization.

The annual Maker Faire, which lies somewhere between San Francisco's counterculture tradition and Silicon Valley's materialism, is set for this weekend in San Mateo, Calif.

Now in its fourth year, the event is organized by Make magazine and showcases the work of people who build everything from wooden bicycles to life-size robotic critters.

I've been making some fun things myself since I bought a small milling machine awhile back. Here's a titanium adapter I made to attach a small commercial USB flash drive to my keychain:

Not long ago I found some blocks of aluminum bar stock at HSC Electronics in Santa Clara and had the idea to turn one into a stand for my iPhone. I had the standard iPhone dock, but it's not very stable, and I wanted something better. I realized I could mill a pocket into the aluminum block for the dock, plus create a face for the iPhone to lean against. The result was nice, stable stand.

I decided to preserve the original finish on the block for an industrial look:

After making that first one, I thought of some other ways to apply the same idea:

This one's my favorite so far:

There's always something at the Maker Faire to inspire more projects. Come back to Speeds & Feeds next week for a review of the event.

The "Singularity" is that postulated point in time when technological progress, led by machine intelligences designing their own replacements at an ever-increasing rate, becomes so rapid that we mere humans can no longer comprehend or control it.

It's a popular concept in science fiction. Some people believe that this point will eventually be reached in the real world. I think that those people are drastically underestimating the other limits to progress, such as bandwidth limits for data gathering, the difficulty of comprehension, and the inverse relationship of speed to reliability in data analysis.

They're also confusing exponential growth curves (which lead to arbitrarily high growth rates) with S curves, which apply to real-world situations in which growth rates increase for a while as key limits are overcome, then slows again.

But while we're waiting for God to emerge from machines, some of the people promoting the concept of the Singularity are looking for practical ways to turn technological progress into social progress.

The latest such effort involves futurist Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation, and Google co-founder Larry Page. The new Singularity University is a school aimed at both students and executives in various technology disciplines.

From a Los Angeles Times blog post:

"Dubbed Singularity University, its founders hope it will help close the gap in understanding and applying fast-developing technologies to solve what they called humanity's grandest challenges...such as poverty, hunger, and pandemics."

The Singularity University Web site identifies these areas of technology for its curriculum:

• Future Studies & Forecasting
• Networks & Computing Systems
• Biotechnology & Bioinformatics
• Nanotechnology
• Medicine, Neuroscience & Human Enhancement
• AI, Robotics, & Cognitive Computing
• Energy & Ecological Systems
• Space & Physical Sciences
• Policy, Law & Ethics
• Finance & Entrepreneurship

This all sounds wonderful: that is, I wonder if Kurzweil, Diamandis, and Page actually believe that the solutions to poverty, hunger, and pandemics will be found in technology.

It seems to me that it would be more useful to take these students and executives through some classes on philosophy, theology, politics, sociology, and history--fields they're probably not sufficiently aware of and that are much more directly related to the causes of, and possible cures for, social problems.

I've been to two of Kurzweil's Singularity Summits, including the most recent, in October. I didn't write about it here because I simply didn't see anything worth writing about. Most of the conference wasn't even about the Singularity in any meaningful sense.

It will be nice if the Singularity University can achieve useful results for society, but I suspect that it will just be a longer, more labored version of the Summit, a painful muddle of science and science fiction identifying no clear path to a future we might not even want.

Just hours after I posted my WTF report (for "where's the feature," of course) on the iPhone 3G with version 2.1 software, Apple released the 2.2 update. I figured I ought to go through my post and see if any of the things I mentioned were addressed in the update.

But the short summary is: not much has changed. The new 2.2 software, as described on Apple's main page for iPhone updates, is mostly about internal quality.

Apple describes only four areas of new features for US users: an improved Google Maps application, direct downloading of podcasts from the iTunes Store, the ability to turn off auto-correction when typing, and using the Home button to return to the first Home screen from other Home screens.

Only that last change addresses one of my issues. It's a bolder change than what I suggested (allowing the screens to slide around from last to first in a circular fashion), and a bigger improvement, I think. It makes the first Home screen distinctly more convenient than the others, and I suspect this new feature will influence how I distribute applications across the available screens.

That said, it would still be useful to add the wraparound scrolling feature I described. It would save time-- and more importantly, reduce the chance of accidentally opening an unwanted application-- when accessing the later screens.

I tested the other issues I reported last week, and I didn't see any changes. I haven't had time to decide if the new software is more reliable, but I've had few problems with reliability anyway. I've seen my share of browser crashes, but Safari restarts more conveniently on the iPhone than it does on my Macs, so that hasn't been a big thing for me.

I'd like to thank CNET user IgnatiusTheKing for pointing out, in a comment to my previous post, that accented characters and some special symbols can be generated by holding down keys on the virtual keyboard. This works for accentable characters (such as "e" but not "x") and a few punctuation symbols (such as ! and ? to generate the inverted versions used in written Spanish, and $ to generate international currency symbols such as the pound, yen, and euro).

But as far as I can tell, there's still no way to get proper n-dashes and m-dashes, math symbols such as ×, ÷, and π, and other useful characters.

Also, I learned that Japanese iPhone users with the 2.2 software have access to a set of "emoji" symbols-- complex emoticons popular among Japanese users. (Back in October, MacRumors.com showed some of these symbols as found in the 2.2 beta, here.)

These emoji are also present in the US 2.2 update, but can't be generated from the US English keyboard, at least not without doing some hacking. One more reason for a little more typographical flexibility, I think.

So, anyway, I think there's still a lot of room for improvement in the iPhone software, good though it already is. I'll just keep hoping someone at Apple notices these posts and makes the changes I'd like to see.

Incidentally, before installing the 2.2 update, I checked around online to see if people were having any serious problems with it-- always a good idea, I think. I found scattered reports of various problems, but I went ahead with the update since it didn't look like there were any specific widespread issues.

After the update I tested for all of the reported problems, and was unable to replicate any of them on my iPhone. Everything seems to be fine. I can't promise it'll go as smoothly for everyone else, but this seems to be a pretty safe update.

(Sheesh, I've been busy lately. I had more spare time when I was employed!)

Ever since I got my iPhone 3G in late July, I've been keeping track of the things I like--and don't like--about it.

Since Apple is rumored to be releasing the next major iPhone firmware update today, I thought I'd run through the list now, and then see how the new firmware changes things. Many of these comments apply to the iPod touch as well.

The things I like are, generally, the same things everyone likes. The iPhone is feature-rich, well integrated, well supported by independent software developers, and fun to use.

The things I don't like are, generally, software features that ought to be present but just aren't.

Each time I discover another one of these missing features, I jot it down in my iPhone WTF list. WTF, of course, stands for "Where's the feature?"

Muting and sounds
For example: Where's the feature to mute the phone? You may point to the little toggle switch on the left side, but no, that just mutes the ringer and certain audio alerts, not the whole phone. On my old Palm Treo, the mute switch darn well muted everything, as if the switch disconnected the speaker wires themselves.

On the iPhone, there's no way to predict which sound sources will respect the mute switch. Calendar alerts do; alarms don't. These are good choices--I like knowing that the alarm function will still wake me up even if I mute the phone before going to sleep--but hardly intuitive.

Alarm volume is controlled by the ringer volume, but even the minimum ringer volume is still audible.

Application-generated sounds have a separate volume control. If you're not in the iPod application, which has a volume slider, I think the only way to adjust this control is to use the volume rocker switch while an application is making sounds. Sometimes, that's after the phone has already started to annoy the people around you.

Bottom line: I can't find a way to make the unit completely silent without going into multiple Settings panels and applications, and even that isn't completely effective because some applications (as exemplified by the otherwise valuable Phone Aid) will turn the volume back up when they run.

Alerts and Calendar app
While I'm on the subject of alerts: in the Calendar application, where's the function to set an alert for the exact time of an event? Sometimes I just want to beep myself at 10 a.m. to make a phone call, for example. I don't want to have to set the time for 10:05 a.m. and the alert for "5 minutes before." I love the fact that Calendar supports up to two alerts for the same event, but I wish I could set them to, say, 15 minutes and 0 minutes respectively. This problem could be solved by providing a "Custom" time choice for both of the alerts.

The Calendar app also has the worst user-interface design in the whole iPhone, I think. To select the date and time for an alarm, you spin three wheels apparently stolen from the game show The Price Is Right. The minutes wheel is so easy to spin that in going from :00 to :30, I commonly spin right past :30 and back to :00. Apple has developed many ways to select dates and times for other systems and applications; this is by far the worst.

The Calendar app does something else that's kind of silly. In the daily view, most events get two lines of text: the title and location. Displaying these two lines takes up about one hour of the day. For a shorter event--one scheduled for 30 minutes, say--the two lines get squeezed into one line in an attempt to maintain the orderly appearance of the schedule.

But come on, Apple! The lines on a sheet of paper are fixed. The lines on a computer display aren't. Stretch the lines apart so that every event gets the space it needs! Jeez, this isn't rocket science.

Similarly, a long event has plenty of room to display additional information, such as the notes associated with the event--but instead, the event ends up with two lines of text and a bunch of wasted blank space. Display the notes, and shrink the event if that helps to keep the whole day on the screen. I hate having to scroll the Day display just to show two events.

The Calendar app doesn't handle multiple-user event scheduling very well. Invitations received by the iPhone's Mail app aren't understood by the phone. I can go look at the message on my Mac and add the event to my calendar there, and eventually the event shows up on my iPhone, but that's not so good when I'm traveling. And even then, the event can't be edited on the iPhone--not at all, not even to change the times.

The Calendar app does something very nice: the icon on the iPhone's home screen shows the current day and date. So, where's the feature? Why don't all of Apple's apps do this sort of thing where appropriate? The Clock app icon always shows 10:15. The Weather app always shows sunny and 73 degrees. The Stocks app shows a random squiggle. Sure, updating all these icons would give the iPhone some extra work to do--so Apple should provide a "Live icon updates?" setting and have some rules about how often the updates should happen. I think the slight increase in overhead would usually be worth it.

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