nerdhook

While the buzz is starting to build around Macworld ’09, and the talk of potential new product introductions increases, I’m hoping for some expanded utility for the existing iPhone. I won’t bore you with talk of copy/paste, to-do lists, or note syncing; all those items have been talked about ad-nauseum and they all need to be addressed.

Here’s an issue with the calendar app which has been bugging me to no end of late. When creating a new event in the calendar, you can (of course!) select the calendar in which to add the new event. However, when editing an existing event, the option of changing calendars is simply not available.

Below are two screen shots, the first shows the Add Event screen where you can clearly see the Calendar as an option. The second image shows the Edit screen, and no way to change the calendar to which the event belongs:

So in order to change an event’s calendar, the user is left to delete the event, and re-add it as new to the alternate calendar (a process, by the way, which could be significantly easier if the user were able to copy and paste the event details).

From a technical standpoint, it seems this must be simply an oversight in the calendar application functionality. At the same time, it’s hard to believe something so basic could be overlooked. (Note: I am not positive if this has always been the way the iPhone calendar has functioned, or if this behavior was introduced along with MobileMe syncing and the 2.0 software). Perhaps it’s a well-known issue that simply has not garnered the significance to be moved up on the development to-do list.

In the spirt of Snow Leopard, here’s hoping Apple feels compelled to better the existing iPhone experience with some increased functionality across its core applications. This wouldn’t grab many news headlines, but would certainly be welcomed by a growing iPhone user base.