10 things that irritate me about apple's otherwise perfect products

I'm a huge apple fan(boy). I like most of their products because of their accessibility and ease of use Whenever I'm working on a windows machine or other OS, I miss the 2 finger scrolling, and the drag&drop anything anywhere mentality. However, there are a couple of things that annoy me about apple products. And as people are usually much better at pointing out what's bad than what's good, I'm going to take the easy route here, and go on a nitpicking journey through my experience with Apple products.

1. News stand can not easily be put into a folder.

I like having all my apps neatly organized into folders. This gives me a quick way to find anything, without having to type in the search box to search through all of my apps. There's only one problem. Newsstand won't go into a folder, or at least not in the way that we all got accustomed to for other apps. There is a way to do it, but you need to be very quick, newsstand doesn't work for as long as it is located in a folder, and the trick is impossible to do while using voiceOver :(.

2. the iPhone media player controls

A lot of apps on IOS devices use the standard media playing interface. The problem is that since the introduction of airplay, the buttons are closer together than they used to be. Especially in audiobooks and podcasts, where your current position in a track is saved, accidentally pressing the 'previous track' button is irritating, as it puts you back to the start of the track, making you loose your saved position. Marco Arment has an excellent suggestion on his blog on how this could be solved.

3. There's no setting for when to warn me about a low battery

Less is more, that has always been one of apple's design principles, and they also take this approach when it comes to the customizability of the system. A great deal of the ease of use of apple's products comes from the lack of things you can do wrong.

However, in this case, I believe an extra option would be nice, a way to set at what percentage of battery life, a low battery warning should be shown. By default, it shows the warning when there are 10 minutes of usage left. For me, that's way too long. I'm a huge procrastinator, if I don't need to do something now, I'll do it later. I want that message to be shown to me when there's only 1 minute left, so that I need to plug it in immediately.

It would be even better to have the option of setting multiple warnings, one 10 minutes in advance, and 1 one minute in advance would be perfect for me. This way, I wouldn't start a game of portal, forgetting about the dialog I've just seen, only to see the screen go black in the middle of a battle against GLaDOS.

4. Modal dialogs should darken the background

The battery warning problem brings me to the next problem. This may be too much nitpicking since it only applies to a small audience, but when you're using a mac when a modal dialog such as the low battery dialog pops up, while you're using the screen magnifier, you can't click on anything but the dialog. This can be confusing when the dialog is not in the part of the screen thats currently visible. I therefore think that the background behind modal dialogs should be darkened, to draw the eye towards the dialog, and to notify the user of such a dialog, when the part of the screen containing the dialog box is not currently visible.

5. Arrow key navigation within dialogs

currently within a dialog, you can use the tab key to switch the focus between options, but you can't navigate by simply using the arrow keys. I find using the arrow keys much more intuitive than repeatedly pressing tab to navigate around. I also believe that in order to be able to use the tab navigation in any dialog, you need to select this in the keyboard options section of your system preferences, otherwise, tab navigation is only available in dialogs containing a text input.

6. The edges on the macbook pro used to be way too sharp

I was 'unlucky' enough to buy my macbook pro in 2010, at least in so far you can be unlucky having bought a macbook pro, but mine has edges that are way too sharp, right where my wrist rests. In the winter, that's not a problem, as my sleeves protect me against them, but in the summer it's a pain in the ... umm, wrist. The 2011 model however, does have the edges rounded off. To see the change, and a video on how to fix this edgy problem, look here.

7. The icons in the finder sidebar should regain their color.

I don't fully understand what Apple is trying to do with the new lok in mac os;x lion. They took aay the candyland colored widgets, but put much more color into apps like iCal and Adress book. One of the places where I don't like the monochrome look, is in the finder sidebar. It takes longer now to find a specific icon, as the icons don't stand out as much as they used to. For those who agree with me on this issue, there is a solluiton, as given to me as an answer on the apple stackexchange site.

8. VoiceOver on IOS skips letters when the speech tempo is high.

As a visually impaired, I like using VoiceOver on my iPhone. I've tried using the magnifier, but on a screen that is already so small, seeing only a part of the interface really makes it hard to use. However, I don't want to loose too much speed in navigation. This can usually be solved by putting the sspeed of the speech near the maximum. However, on my iPhone, the speech just skips characters when I do this. It also has other quirks at normal speach, for example saying ww.w.domain.co, when the text actually is www.domain.com. I have no idea what's going on there, but it's very annoying.

9. Making custom ringtones is too hard

I know that apple wants to attract businesses, who can earn money using their platform, but certain things should just be left open for the user. Tethering is one of these (my carrier doesn't allow it), making ringtones is another. If you would like to make you're own ringtones, here's how.

10. Developers should be more encouraged to put VoiceOver hints on buttons

When using voiceover, you canput your finger on a button to hear the text on it. However, many developers use images as their buttons, and then give the image an undescriptive name. The name of the image (or the button element, not exactly sure) is spoken when there is no button text, but in such a case, what you hear just doesn't make sense. Sometimes, you even just hear 'button'. Nice to know that there's a button, but what will it do; blow up my phone? store my entire contact list in a company's database? I understand that for certain apps, especially games, normal vision is required, and therefore voiceover support is not very important. But for many other apps, the audience could be increased, if the developers would make sure that they could use the app with their eyes closed.

What grinnds your gears?

Is there anything apple related, or even just technology related that's really grinding your gears? Leave your frustrations as a comment below.