Here’s what I learned through trying to set the TimeCapsule up to act as drive space for music and video: The TimeCapsule works well as a wireless router, and works OK for backups, but it sucks to use as general storage.  This is a shame since it was introduced at the same time as the MacBook Air, a machine which is great as your main computer but for the fact that it doesn’t have enough hard drive to manage any but the smallest collection of photos, music and videos.

I’ve struggled with this issue since I first got my Air 18 months ago: where to put all the files that don’t fit on the tiny 80gb drive? It meant I’ve kept only a small music collection. Hell, some iPods come with larger drives, a few are even twice the size.

It seemed simple enough to fix. Apple’s TimeCapsule is a combined 802.11n wireless router and Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device. It is designed to give you a place to backup your computers via the OS X Time Machine software, but it also lets you mount a drive for any other purpose.  I’d bought one at the same time as my Air. But now I’d finally set it up as a shared drive, mounted it on both laptops, pointed iTunes to it (instead of the default local directory), copies all files there and started ripping CDs to it. This was going to rock.

Only it didn’t.

Now I’m walking around the house wearing nothing but a pair of red boxer-briefs, but not in the sexy way the hot blonde girlfriend prefers. See, I’m going back and forth between pieces of equipment, rewiring and reconfiguring. Actually, it’d be more accurate to say I’m not walking around in my underwear in THAT sexy way my girlfriend prefers — geek is also its own turn-on for her.

She asked me to move in with her recently. Thrilled that she likes me so much as to proposition me that way, I was still slow to accept. Aside from wanting to take such a step seriously, I knew what kinds of issues might come up. Issues that involved too many hours in red underwear.

Fixing the music problem was one of those kinds of issues.

Earlier this afternoon, her girlfriend Ann was over for Laura’s help to vacuum-seal a week’s food for Burning Man. While Ann was here, we listened for a while to a Pandora station on the living room stereo. Then we handed her the Sonos controller to pick music from our library. She quickly put together a playlist and started it, but a few songs in, the music stopped abruptly. After the first couple of times it restarted, but then it quit for good.

“What happened to the song?” the girls cried in unison.

“I think I know.” I replied. And it wasn’t pretty. “It’s going to be a while for me to fix it.”

I’d already done a lot of work on the system in the past week. Besides setting up the server and reconfiguring iTunes, we bought a Sonos from Best Buy and got it going (more on that later — it’s a fantastic piece of kit, but provided some of it’s own adventures). We’d also started ripping songs from CDs to the Time Capsule around the clock. Laura (the hot blonde) is a former rave DJ. Her CDs are organized alphabetically by artist. So far, we’re only up to Depeche Mode.

Besides dealing with the music, we’d also cancelled Comcast and upgraded DSL (also deserving of it’s own post). So we subscribed to Mad Men on iTunes and watched an episode over the network during the weekend. Had a few glitches there. Not a good sign.

Well, when the music froze up the most recent time, I noticed that my Macbook Air was in the middle of a Time Machine backup. To the same Time Capsule that was also our Media Server. That wasn’t what was happening earlier in the weekend (I’d disabled the backup feature), but this was the final straw.

My conclusion was that the Time Capsule was just underpowered to serve as a router and a backup device and to serve music and video files at the same time.  I was going to have to pick a machine to be up on the network all the time and put the files there.

Since we both have Macbook Airs, this meant buying a new machine. The Apple TV has too small a hard drive and too little flexibility to serve. So we ran to Best Buy and grabbed a Mac Mini to try out (the cheap model with 1GB RAM).

So far, it’s working like a champ at storing all the audio and video files, playing them on the TV, serving them up to the Sonos and the Airs (which also synchronize our iPhones). We’ve watched more TV episodes and run tests of doing several things simultaneously, never have had another glitch.

I wish Apple would sell a TimeCapsule sufficient to the task of serving all the media files it stores (or a beefier Apple TV). If I’m lucky, maybe they’ll even announce it today. I suppose it’s in their best interest to force us to purchase a third computer, one to hook up to the TV.

Hopefully Apple realizes the demand for a device that does more than backups — if they’re going to use iTunes to sell us media at the same time we switch from desktops to laptops, we need a place to store it.

I’d love to see an upgrade to the desktop iChat and add an iPhone version of iChat so that both handle SMS text messages as well as instant messages from AIM, Gtalk, Yahoo!, etc.

I want a record of all IM and text messages, so sync all IM and text messages in iChat like my photos sync with iPhoto. That way I have an archive on my computer. Make them all searchable.

Let me view text messages on my laptop screen if my phone is within Bluetooth range.

Let me video chat from my phone via 3g or WiFi.

UPDATE 9/16/08:
Steve still hasn’t given me any of these features, but last week at CTIA Yahoo! launched OneConnect which does let me see Email, SMS and IM for a given contact in a a unified view, and gives me a socially connected address book. Pretty cool!

Newly launched startup Xumii.com also looks promising as a way to do something similar through the mobile web rather than an iPhone app.

Fortunately, Apple design is typically more concerned with overall user experience than narrow focus on a feature list, but let that not stop us from enjoying our game.

Current set of tradeoffs in the iPhone contributed to its phenomenal success, and any new version should strike a similar balance. Development resources are limited. An extra chip adds to the price and decreases battery life. A software feature adds interface complexity or affects another desirable feature.

So it’s just not an option to make a list of “all the things missing” and add those to the product. Still, it’s nice to have a wishlist, and this is Monday Morning Quarterbacking, afterall. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things I’ve wanted over the last year of using an iPhone. What would you add?

• cut and paste
• search (the contents of my iPhone)
• SMS Forwarding
• instant messaging
• 3G
• GPS
• MMS
• video capture
• stereo Bluetooth
• bookmark something to browse on my desktop when I next sync (it’s flash or too long or otherwise desirable to have there)
• allow allocating more memory to store text messages or email
• make it easier to send things to my desktop via Bluetooth (like a URL or photo)
• wireless sync’ing

Some I just don’t get. I often want to forward an SMS, and it seems like that would be a fairly trivial feature to add, and something long available on other handsets.

Others, like cut and paste, solve many problems, but certainly present interesting interface challenges. It may have been a reasonable strategy to intentionally introduce the simplest iPhone first and then to introduce new gestures with future releases.

Many of them, while folks say they want them and the geeks clamor for them, I wonder if they’re really worth the costs. GPS, for example.

The location feature using triangulation with cell towers offers something that is good enough for many uses, but without the expense, size and battery issues GPS might add. If I had to choose between 3G support and GPS support, you can guess which one I’d take. Do you need to break out GPS into separate devices and pricepoints targetted to different markets? Or does it need to be available on all devices to grow the market for location-based applications?

Other features, you need one or the other, but can live without both. My biggest problem with no MMS support is when someone sends me a photo from their phone. I get a text message like this, created by AT&T but delivered from the sender:

I sent you a multimedia message. You can view my message w/in the next 7 days via the web at www.viewmymessage.com using MSG ID pn0otzx Password jans8move

If I had cut and paste, it wouldn’t be so painful, but as it is now, I have to write down the ID and password before browsing to the link, or try to remember to do it when I next sit down at my computer.

Or, how much do I really need to be able to search the contents of my email if I can only store 200 messages on my phone? Instead, I browse to Gmail online and search there. But I’d love to use the memory on my phone for messages rather than music, and if I could do that, search would become incredibly useful (it’d be nice if it searched my text and IMs as well).

Aside from design and engineering tradeoffs, how do you get the best information about the market in regards to features? How do you find out from users and potential customers about their wishlist items and what mix and what experience are going to sell the most upgrades and new phones?

If you go to existing iPhone users like me, you get a great list of new features that I think might make my life easier. The problem is, I already bought one of these. Are any of those new features ones that would have gotten someone new to buy one? For that matter, how much am I willing to pay to upgrade for my desired features?

After we’ve talked about the features in isolation, you may pick the mixes that you’ll have me try out in mockups and prototypes to get a better sense for how they all work together. Each combination requires so much investment in design work that you can’t try them all.

I’d love to know how Apple has worked over the last year to solve these problems, or even to hear more about the research and design that went into the original release.

I think one of the reasons that so few companies do a good job of designing an overall user experience is that it is so much more difficult than the business task of picking features. Apple keeps showing the business win for going to that extra effort, and I look forward to seeing their latest effort on Monday.