iPhone apps S/D

it automatically adds to old threads anyway dan

also, dan is wrong, you are a weirdo, i just want to point out, you are all weirdos, stop writing such long text messages, i guarantee you, the person who is receiving them, hates you

you guys are forgetting that i might have been interrupted by ANOTHER TEXT TO WHICH I NEED TO RESPOND.

and practically any time you are addressing a text to multiple recipients it counts as a "stranger" in that there is no particular "conversation" that contains that exact constellation of contacts so there is not even the option to scroll through your list first and find the conversation just so that, possibly, if something happens, you are hedged against having what you wrote simply ERASED because you weren't thinking ahead.

god damn.

So if you are in the middle of texting someone and you need to respond to someone else's text, you have to exit the application and re-enter it in order to keep from losing what you just wrote? Really? No one thinks that is counter-intuitive?

Also yeah, the failure to support texting multiple people is also stupid.

yes and my point is if you are writing texts of a proper length it will take you literally less than 20 seconds to finish the text you are working and then respond to the new text

it does support texting multiple people

max no one is writing "long" text messages except the elves which are turning the cranks in your brain

it's hardly "training yourself away" -- it's the difference between just hitting reply and hitting "new message" in email every time, even when you're replying. Why type the address again? xxp

and practically any time you are addressing a text to multiple recipients it counts as a "stranger"
oh come on this is totally just looking for the edge cases now. if you're doing this double-tap the text, hit "copy", do your other thing, come back, hit paste fuggedaboutit

So if you are in the middle of texting someone and you need to respond to someone else's text
If you're doing this is as a reply, just hit "back", go to the other text, reply, come back to your original thread and VOILA your draft has been saved

yes and my point is if you are writing texts of a proper length it will take you literally less than 20 seconds to finish the text you are working and then respond to the new text

― max, Friday, December 4, 2009 2:43 PM (41 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yes, but it would take apple less than 20 seconds to fix this (i checked), thus saving millions of man hours.

well as stet points out there isnt really anyhting to "fix"

You guys are amazing

I mean seriously <3 this conversation

there isn't anything to fix if your standards are really low, sure.

holy shit are we really arguing about this

it does support texting multiple people

And when one of them responds, it doesn't connect the message to the original thread and it doesn't show you if the person responding is also responding to everyone else on your original message; I have had multiple irritating text conversations amongst my family that turn into relaying messages back and forth because I'm the only one whose phone can't actually support a multi-participant text thread.

Again, the Treo does this.

you want to know what you sound like to me--this sounds like people complaining that you cant save drafts of your instant messages

there isn't anything to fix if your standards are really low, sure.
hit "cancel" ... it cancels. uh, fail?

Have you ever used another smartphone, max?

no? but? im not sure how thats relevant?

cos if you had you would try to use the iphone as if it was some other phone and then be mad that it wasn't the same

max, everyone else seems to agree that saving unsent texts is a useful thing, and is trying to figure out how best to do it.

not cutty

also--the iphone saves unsent texts, except in this one very specific situation that tracer is talking about

completely fine with iphone rethinking text messages like they're not emails, but if you can't start a text without a recipient and come back to it later then that is lame imo.

"one very specific situation" = any time i need to write another text before i have finished the one i'm writing.

it is interesting to see the vigor with which this STEP BACKWARD in SMS usability to like 1998 is being defended! sorry d00ds it simply SUX! every other phone does this!

^^^^^

Although it's funny watching fanboys cry when you tell them their baby isn't perfect.

"one very specific situation" = any time i need to write another text, to someone i have never written a text to before, before i have finished the one i'm writing

sigh

any time i need to write another text before i have finished the one i'm writing.
but this isn't true! It's not "any time"; it's "only when you've just started a blank text, which you do every time and make your life unnecessarily harder"

sure there's no reason they couldn't (or shouldn't) add a "back" button on the new text form and save its contents, but i think this is really a much more edge case than you guys are making out. 9 times out of 10 the app will try to save what you're doing. Just use it like it was designed and don't try to use like it was every other phone and a lot of the problems go away

fwiw, i don't care that every other phone does this. i care that it is useful and would not be hard to integrate into the UI without clutter. seems to me like that just haven't gotten round to it and it will happen eventually, rather than they've made a strategic decision about how people are texting wrong and it should suck for them until they learn to do it properly.

i suppose i will need to start getting into the habit of NOT using the "write a text" button with which i am presented on the main SMS screen. silly silly fucking me. and instead will start scrolling around to find the last text someone sent me BEFORE writing my text to them. handy! and then most of my problems will be taken care of. (though not the problem with sending texts to multiple recipients.) but frankly i think that is LAMENTABLE STUPIDNESS.

also I AM RIGHT.

I remember when the iPhone came out and they basically said "MMS is unimportant and will go away once people have a easier email integration on their phones" Guess what actually happened?

Not everything Apple does is actually right, guys.

to be fair, i think that was more a bullshit smokescreen for at&t's benefit rather than apple trying to reinvent portable telephones.

yeah at&t admitted later that lack of mms functionality was their fault

no one i know has a phone that uses mms anyway so

You never need to respond to a text.

i dont even know what tracer does but it sounds like a very high stress job

Text me and see if I respond. I dare you.

Oh seven ate seven too klondike for seven six.

I bet I wont respond to any.

no one i know has a phone that uses mms anyway so

― max, Friday, December 4, 2009 3:01 PM (29 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha

and instead will start scrolling around to find the last text someone sent me BEFORE writing my text to them
this makes perfect sense to me, cos on my old Nokias the shortest possible way to send a new text was to open address book, find their names, and hit "text". It makes sense on the iPhone too, because this way you don't have to type in their name/find it in the book, which is faster.

Not everything Apple does is actually right, guys.
No, tru, i guess this is like taking the arrow keys off the keyboard on the first Mac because they wanted to force people to use the damn mouse and not try to just treat it like "every other computer". This is the same: they want ppl to think about SMS as conversations instead of little discrete things that you start from scratch every time.

"klondike" isnt a number it is a kind of treat

Klondike 555 innit.

no, a treat

I picked the number just so I could say "klondike" when I tell people my number.

made of ice cream and chocolate

No one has texted me. That's how unimportant texts are.