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What The iPhone Needs: Part 1, Search

Posted August 26, 2008 4:33 AM by Hadley Stern
Categories: Applications 

All those Apple commercials highlighting Spotlight in OS X are awesome. Imagine, the ability to search anything on your Mac and find it so quickly. Imagine indeed! For us iPhone Mail power users search is a long-forgotten dream that has turned into a nightmare. For example, I wanted to phone my good friend Chris Seibold (author of an awesome Apple Hacks book you must buy!). Trouble was I hadn’t moved his phone number into a contact. It was deep within my email. On my Mac it is one click away. On my iPhone is is impossible to get to because I can’t sort by sender (or sort by anything) or search.

I can’t imagine search would be that difficult to add to Mail. After all, doesn’t the iPhone run OS X?! Isn’t that supposed to make developing this stuff super-easy?

In the meantime it seems the time is right for a competitor to come along and write a 3rd party email application for the iPhone (iEudora anyone?).

What about you, does Search matter, or are you happy to be pinned down to chronological order?

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Comments

  1. You mean “what the iPhone needs.” You have a little subject-verb agreement problem.

    Posted by Chris on August 26, 2008 6:44 PM

  2. Thanks Chris, headline fixed!

    Posted by Hadley Stern on August 27, 2008 5:51 AM

  3. True the mail app is rather lacking. My iPhone has quickly become my main email browser and I’d like to be able to sort and search and rename mailboxes and of course, copy/paste.

    Posted by hen on August 27, 2008 5:48 PM

  4. i agree with this first one--search would be brilliant.  they do it perfectly with spotlight, so why not a simplified version for the iphone?

    Posted by Rob Johnson on August 27, 2008 7:32 PM

  5. Cross-application search, like PalmOS has had for many, many years, would be great! Being able to just _search_ for something, without caring which application was holding the data, was unbelievably useful. I miss it on the iPhone. Not very often, to be fair, but when you need it there’s just no substitute.

    Posted by Steve on August 29, 2008 8:38 AM

  6. Steve, it makes me think, I wonder if a 3rd party could write a search application?

    Posted by Hadley Stern on August 29, 2008 8:42 AM

  7. I believe 3rd-party apps are not allowed to access each other’s data, so no. Apple would need to write this one.

    In the case of PalmOS, Palm provided the global find functionality, and each app had to provide a “search me” function that the global app called, if it wanted to be searchable. That architecture makes a lot of sense to me, and keeps applications from interfering with each other. I’ve no idea if this is in the iPhone API, though.

    Posted by Steve on August 29, 2008 8:47 AM

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