Feature Request

One of the things I love about the Apple ecosystem is the device independence. I can receive alerts, text messages, and even phone calls on whichever device happens to be in front of me at the time, whether it’s Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

And for most things, that works well…

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I can’t believe I actually have to ask Apple to add stereo-paired HomePods as a Mac sound output device! It’s the most ridiculous Feature Request yet, because it’s absolutely nuts that this isn’t already built into macOS — especially that it isn’t baked into Catalina.

Apple’s own audio apps will happily allow you to select stereo-paired HomePods as a single output device. You can see in the photo above that the Music app sees both my Office and Winter Garden HomePods as a single device.

Not so the Mac itself, however…

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Temporarily working on a second Mac has identified a small but annoying gap in the Apple ecosystem: There’s no way to synchronize learned spellings across Apple devices.

If you create Text Replacements, these behave the way you’d expect: Create them on any Apple device, and they sync via iCloud. For example…

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This is a small feature request: to have the same Auto-Shazam feature in the Apple Watch app that we get in the iPhone one.

This may be a bit niche. Certainly my own reason for wanting it is, but let’s see…

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All Macs have a clear and unmistakable ‘camera in use’ indicator in the form of a green LED next to the camera. Indeed, on Macs released from 2008 onward, there is a hardware interlock between the camera and LED which makes it physically impossible for an app to switch on the camera without the light also coming on to alert you.

Yet there is no equivalent on iPhones or iPads – which, as we have seen only today, can be problematic…

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Face Unlock on Google’s Pixel 4 is less secure than the iPhone’s Face ID, but it does have one feature I’d like to see Apple copy: Skip Lock Screen.

Copying that would be perfectly fair, as Google has recently confirmed that it will be copying at least part of Face ID’s Require Attention feature…

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Telegram this weekend added a ‘silent message’ option to the latest version of its app. I thought this was a really handy feature and is something I’d like to see Apple add to Messages.

There are three main scenarios where the audible alert you get with incoming Messages may be unwelcome, and the iPhone currently offers solutions for only two of them…

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I’ve said on many occasions that the ecosystem is one of Apple’s greatest strengths. Being able to start writing something in my office on my Mac and then continue it in a coffee shop on my iPad, for example. That should Just Work. We shouldn’t need to actively force an iCloud sync.

But, as I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, that isn’t always the case …

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Apple Maps offers directions by car, public transit, ride-sharing services, and walking – but there’s one notable omission: there are no cycling routes in Apple Maps.

Cycling routes in Google Maps have existed since 2010 – and it had been a top-requested feature for a couple of years before that. Why has Apple not managed this almost a decade later?

There are three reasons this needs to be a priority for Apple …

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We’ve today been able to confirm that Apple is bringing new standalone media apps to macOS, including a Music app on the Mac.

That’s something I’ve been calling for since 2015.

Let’s have a new OS X Music app just like we got a new iOS one. Have it be a music player, and a means of transferring music to iOS devices, and nothing else. Strip away absolutely everything that isn’t about music.

I gave an exec summary of what I wanted from it back then, but now we know it’s finally happening, I thought I’d put together a more detailed wish-list for the upcoming app …

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iOS is generally a very slick operating system, but every now and then I come across a UI decision that makes me wonder what on earth Apple was thinking, and app settings are a prime example.

You never know whether an app setting is configured in the app, or in the separate Settings app …

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I wrote back in 2015 on the bloated mess that was iTunes, and suggested that Apple needed to take the same approach on Mac as it has on iOS: separate apps for each content category.

The company took a big step in this direction with the release of iTunes 12.7 in 2017, removing apps and ringtones from iTunes, turning iTunes U into a subsection of podcasts, and tidying up Internet Radio …

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A WhatsApp update yesterday added the option of using Face ID to protect your chats, and that’s an option I think could be usefully added to other apps – including some of Apple’s own.

One could question the value. After all, locking your phone protects all your apps, so why bother offering app-by-app protection too … ?

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As a paperless kind of guy, I’m a huge fan of the Wallet app. I especially like the way it integrates all my cards, etickets and boarding passes into one place, rather than having to go hunting for them in a dozen different apps.

But there’s one small detail Apple appears to have forgotten which means there is still some hunting involved …

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I’ve never quite understood the concept of a to-do list. It’s never made sense to me to have a standalone list of things to do at some unspecified time, even if they can have pretty color coding and labels like Urgent, Priority and Today. I rely instead on calendar reminders.

I do make very limited use of Apple’s Reminders app, but only for location-triggered ones. It’s really useful to get reminded of something when I’m in the right place to action it – at home, at a shop and so on.

But for everything else, my calendar is my to-do list, for one simple reason …

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Apple already offers fairly tight control of location data privacy. We can choose whether or not to share it at all. We can choose to share it or not with specific apps. We can specify whether an app is allowed to access location data in the background, or only while we are actively using it. And we can see which apps are accessing the data at any given time.

But as we’ve been reminded this morning, that doesn’t entirely solve the problem …

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Earlier this year, I wrote a feature request that proved popular: a gesture to undo tapping the top of the screen to return to the top of the page.

The problem is that it’s all too easy to do this accidentally. Just changing your grip when holding an iPad, for example, or putting down an iPhone and picking it back up […]

That’s annoying in any app – losing your place and having to scroll back down to find it. But it’s even more annoying in apps where tapping the top also triggers a refresh of the content.

But with this year’s iPads now confirmed to have slimmer bezels, I’d actually like to go further …

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I can’t claim any credit for coming up with the idea for this feature request – it just seemed such a no-brainer to me that I’m endorsing John Gruber’s suggestion.

Shake to Undo is problematic enough that I think Apple should have figured out something better for the iPhone by now. (For accessibility reasons, you can turn Shake to Undo off, but if you do, you don’t have any Undo at all.) My best suggestion would be to take away some space from the auto-suggestion row above the keyboard and put in an Undo button on the left, just like the iPad …

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Apple Music uses a number of signals to learn your musical tastes. The most obvious one is that you can explicitly Love or dislike a particular track by flagging it in iTunes or the Music app. You can also do this on HomePod, by saying ‘Hey Siri, like this track’ or ‘Hey Siri, dislike this track’ while it is playing.

But it also uses a number of algorithms to automate its learning. For example, if you play a particular track often, it will assume you like it. And simply playing a track and listening to it all the way through (as opposed to skipping it) has some degree of influence.

All of which gets problematic when more than one person controls it …

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I’m a big fan of Apple Store workshops. A couple of Final Cut Pro X workshops were really helpful, one of them so much so I did it twice.

But reserving a space on one isn’t always easy …

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