Musings from Left Field

Mr. Jobs,

I have been a Mac cus­tomer for over 8 years.  I made the switch after the ini­tial release of OSX and have not looked back since.

I am writ­ing today to pro­pose two mea­sures I think will keep Apple soft­ware up to par with its competition.

First, we both know that social media is here, and it is chang­ing the face of com­mu­ni­ca­tions in busi­ness, non-profits, and in the every­day lives of your con­sumers.   Your address book appli­ca­tion has caused me to hit a wall when try­ing to bring the rest of my com­mu­nity up to speed and into my social net­works.  Social net­works pro­vide a way to import con­tacts, typ­i­cally using a web app (for more pop­u­lar web based plat­forms) or import­ing a .csv file for gen­eral con­tact imports.

My sug­ges­tion is this:  Open your .Me/.Mac online address book appli­ca­tion as well as your OSX address book to BOTH.  Encour­age your devel­op­ers to make nice with social apps and get your mar­ket­ing dept to cam­paign for social media plat­forms to add .Me as a viable con­tact plat­form they will import from.  (See­ing it in the list next to gMail can’t hurt your mar­ket­ing either.)  Allow me to export my con­tacts to a .csv file with­out a mid­dle­man app.

Make the Address book the pow­er­ful, trans­par­ent, and respected app that it is by allow­ing it to play nice with oth­ers.  Just because I can take my con­tacts from the OS does not mean I’m going to stop using Apple Mail.  I’m a com­mu­nity Apple evan­ge­list.  Reli­gious lead­ers are held to a higher stan­dard!

A sec­ond sug­ges­tion is to make flags work for me in Mail.  I’ve been forced to used Out­look before, and the sin­gle fea­ture I used with fer­vor is Flags.  I could flag any piece of mail with a color coded flag to let me know that it needed to be taken care of, was a hot topic,  or was some­thing I needed to respond to next week.  I real­ize I can color code mes­sages with fil­ters in mail, but it doesn’t make sort­ing through mail a quick process.  Bring the func­tion­al­ity of flags to an APPLE level.  Let me develop new flags with dif­fer­ent col­ors.  Don’t stop at one color(orange).  Put flags on the tool­bar in Mail, or at least give me the option to add them when I cus­tomize the tool­bar.  Allow me to attach a check mark with its done, or a for­ward arrow when it is del­e­gated or is to be done in the future.  You added the to-do fea­ture to Mail, but doesn’t seem easy to tie together with sev­eral messages.

Thanks for tak­ing the time to lis­ten.  I will keep singing the praises of your company’s abil­ity to develop great soft­ware AND com­put­ing hard­ware.  Every­one needs a Mac at home to plug that iPhone into!

Sin­cerely,
Shel­ley Valen­tine Cook
San Anto­nio, TX