Six things the iPhone and iPad still can’t do

  1. Download an image from the internet, crop it, and upload it to a blog
  2. Post a video you find on Twitter to your Tumblr
  3. Download a song from a website and save it to your music app (or generally get music, or anything else, on or off the phone on anything but its “home” computer)
  4. Run Flash (and spare me, the $199 Kindle Fire does it)
  5. Check the weather from the home screen (or display any information other than the date: the calendar app customizes its icon with the current date, but no other app can do this)
  6. Adjust the size of text on a web page

5 thoughts on “Six things the iPhone and iPad still can’t do”

  1. I’m pretty sure you can do #1. You can definitely save an image from the internet to your camera roll. I assume there is a way to post from the camera roll to a blog (using a blog app?). Cropping can be done in Photoshop Mobile or the new version of iOS which is going to have some built in image editing.

    Also the next version is going to include weather and stock widgets on the home screen.

    But yea #3 irks me. #4, I’ve gotten over though.

  2. For 2 you can choose ‘open in safari’ with the link and get the URL to post on tumblr from there. I do wish the YouTube app had an option to get a URL.

  3. Yes, some of these are merely extremely difficult. 1 and 2 point to a whole category of things that may or may not be theoretically possible, but are painfully complicated — and difficult to figure out.

    Let’s talk about #1. (I’m writing this on an iPad, and “type” might well have been #7.) I’m on Textpattern, which has no compatible iOS app. So my only hope is Dropbox. The only browser that can both upload AND download files from the Internet is iCabMobile. But it does both to its own file bank. So the process is: download file, copy file to dropbox, edit, copy from dropbox to icab, and upload. This is ASSUMING an image editing app that’s dropbox-friendly AND can crop. In casual looking, I’ve not found one.

    But since you guys are smart about this stuff, please read the next post, where I ask how to do something I REALLY REALLY care about.

  5. Sure enough, Puffin promises to play Flash! Sounds aout as bad as Flash on Android devices, but for sure worth downloading just to play around with. CRAZY that I haven’t seen anything about this before?!

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