Feature Request

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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I’ve written many times that the integrated ecosystem offered by Apple is one of the company’s greatest strengths. The Handoff feature is a great example of that integration. It’s really handy to be able to do start reading something in Safari on my Mac, and then continue reading it on my iPhone, for example.

Handoff works with most Apple apps: Mail, Maps, Safari, Reminders, Calendar, Contacts, Pages, Numbers and Keynote – but not Music. That’s what I’d like to fix …

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It wouldn’t take much for me to be okay with Twitter’s official app — the place where it clearly wants users. I don’t mind seeing ads, especially if they help the service keep running, and the iOS app has modern features like 3D Touch, Split View, and even dark mode.

Timeline streaming is what keeps me in third-party apps like Tweetbot though. It’s a feature I consider crucial to how the service works…

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Ahead of WWDC, this is my top software wish-list, addressing the number one feature addition I’d like to see for each of Apple’s platforms; iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS.

These are just my personal picks, choosing just one thing per OS that I think I would appreciate the most for the iOS 12, macOS 10.14, watchOS 5 and tvOS 12 cycles.

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Apple knows more about my music tastes than anyone else in the world. Thanks to iTunes Match, it knows every artist, album and track I own. And through my use of Apple Music, it knows exactly who and what I listen to on a daily basis.

It’s great at using this data to create personalized playlists for me. ‘For You’ is fantastic, in my experience. My Favourites Mix is an incredibly reliable – if somewhat repetitive – way to play music I love. My Chill Mix is another great way to know I’m going to like almost everything it plays …

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One major opportunity for Apple Music is the ability to see previously recommended playlists. The feature is so obvious that you would actually think it already exists, only to go reference an Apple Music playlist that has been updated and overwritten.

That’s what happened to me today. My New Music Mix last week was so good that I played it on repeat for days from my Apple Watch at the gym and my HomePod around the house, but I never got around to saving any of the songs to my library. Today my New Music Mix updated and there’s no historical reference to the songs recommended last week.

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Some of our Feature Requests require more argument and explanation than others. We might have ideas on an ideal approach, and alternative approaches that could be taken. We might describe our core ask, then add some nice-to-have options.

But this Feature Request couldn’t be simpler …

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Since HomePod was released last month, a spotlight of sorts has been put on Siri – more specifically, Siri’s weaknesses. HomePod has stiff competition in the smart speaker space, with companies like Google and Amazon having their own, more advanced, voice assistants.

There are several ways in which the Google Assistant and Google Home outshine Siri, but one that has stood out to me since HomePod’s release is Google Home’s integration with Chromecast…

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As Apple seeks to boost its recurring income from services, it recently purchased Texture – one of a number of services described as ‘Netflix for magazines.’ Ten dollars a month gives subscribers access to more than 200 different magazines.

That’s nice, but what I really like to see from Apple is ‘Netflix for books’ – perhaps more accurately described as ‘Kindle Unlimited for iBooks.’

If Apple were able to bring to that the kind of discovery smarts it has achieved with Apple Music, it would be a killer product …

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In general, technology gets smarter over time. New features are added that improve the functionality, or changes are made that allow a device or app to do the same thing in smarter ways.

But every now and then, a new feature can effectively end up making an app dumber – and Apple’s Calendar app is guilty of this …

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My experience with HomePod has so far been a very positive one, with its responsiveness to Siri requests something that’s really impressed me.

A key HomePod feature is its use of noise-cancelling microphones so that it can hear Hey Siri requests no matter how loudly the music is playing, but I’ve also been really amazed by the sheer distance at which Siri can hear me – often from one end of our apartment to the other.

But there is a downside to this …

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