Feature Request

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 Today my New Music Mix updated and there’s no historical reference to the songs recommended last week.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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CarPlay isn’t expected to gain any major features this year according to recent reporting, but that doesn’t mean we can’t dream. One simple change I would love to see in some future update is support for HomeKit alerts through CarPlay. Going a step further, a dedicated Home app for CarPlay with a few key features could be very beneficial.

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Apple Watch Activity Sharing is a great way to share your fitness progress with friends and stay motivated. The feature lets you easily share completed workouts, achievements, and more with your Apple Watch friends.

Activity Sharing has its limitations, however, and I’m hoping watchOS 5 and iOS 12 can address them with a few changes.

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A number of hotel chains have been using smart home technology in their rooms for some time now, with Hilton yesterday announcing its own plans to take the idea one step further, with the ability to remember your connected room preferences and automatically apply them when you check into a new hotel.

Hilton says the Hilton Honors app will allow guests to control the temperature in their room, adjust lighting, stream content to their TV, and control Internet-connected picture frames by displaying their own personal images.

There’s also support for scenes, so every time you stay at a Hilton with Connected Room, you can tap a single button to set your room up just as you like it.

I love this idea, and I’d like to see Apple work with hotel chains to take the logical next step …

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watchOS 4.1 brought iCloud Music Library and Apple Music streaming to Apple Watch, but the redesigned Music app on watchOS 4 killed a feature that it offered since launch. watchOS removed the ability to remotely control music playing on your iPhone from your Apple Watch in favor of focusing solely on music playable from the watch.

While this change makes the Music app much easier to use and understand for most users, removing a useful function from the Apple Watch isn’t progress for everyone. Fortunately, I think the answer to this problem is right in front of us.

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Siri is steadily getting better with new features and improvements, but one place where the voice assistant could still learn a thing or two is how it pronounces city names. Siri tries its best to pronounce the names of cities based on their spelling, but this often leads to a comically bad mispronunciation that makes Siri sound like a complete out-of-towner.

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Apple has made white accessories a signature design since the white earbuds dangled from the white iPod in 2001. The company even made a whole ad campaign out of the instantly recognizable white cord.

Since then, its cables, adapters, and other accessories have generally followed that trend. With the darker space gray color available as a default on iPhones, iPads, and even MacBooks nowadays, the standard white accessories have started to look cheap and tacky and not iconic for many customers.

Apple currently offers very few accessories in black, leaving that to third-party vendors (or as premium exclusives with the upcoming iMac Pro). I believe black should be standard.

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We’ve made quite a few feature requests, some of them for important things – like an option to automatically reply to text messages while driving, which Apple granted in iOS 11. Or for broader themes, like helping us with our personal goals.

Other times, we’ve asked for very small things, but ones we think would contribute to a better all-round experience when using our Apple products. Whether it’s multiple timers, identifying where Mac audio alerts are coming from or a way to transfer FaceTime calls between devices.

This request is so small it might seem too trivial to bother with, but it is an issue that annoys me on a regular basis …

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Quite a lot of tech features are designed to protect us from ourselves, and most of the time I’m fully in favor of this. I like it, for example, that my iOS devices ask me if I’m sure I want to delete a photo. I like it that my Macs ask me if I really want to empty the wastebasket. I love that Time Machine performs hourly backups and offers me an easy way to recover an earlier version of documents – and so on.

But there’s one aspect of iOS designed to protect me from myself that I find irritating, and I’d love a way to switch it off. My iOS devices don’t trust me to ensure there’s no-one watching when I type in passwords …

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macOS is very flexible when it comes to alerts. System Preferences allows us to choose on an app-by-app basis whether we want alerts that stay on the screen until dismissed, banners that display for a few seconds and then auto-dismiss, or no alerts at all.

We can choose whether or not apps play sounds. We can decide whether or not we want their alerts to show up in the Notification Center. And we can tell the Mac whether or not to add a badge to the app icon, for example to show how many unread emails we have.

So you might think that with all these different options at our disposal, there isn’t anything more that we could want. But there is just one more thing I want – and I want it rather a lot …

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A great collection of third-party apps is one of the stickiest parts of using the iPhone for me. Even apps that have versions for both iOS and Android are generally better on the iPhone to me. There’s still an opportunity for Apple to let you do more with those great third-party apps, however, like replacing stock apps and making them easier to launch…

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Apple’s timer feature on iOS and watchOS is convenient for single uses especially when set using Siri. There are a few basic limitations, however, that could be addressed to make timers much more useful. Support for setting multiple timers, adding labels to identify timers, Continuity between devices, and support for the Mac are all low hanging fruit for timers.

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I sometimes use my iPad at the gym to watch videos or read iBooks to pass time while exercising with the elliptical or treadmill. The tablet form factor is sleek and doesn’t draw attention to itself, and the iPad usually lays over whatever screen the gym equipment offers.

This works well because I usually ignore the heart rate trackers and progress indicators on exercise equipment and just rely on my Apple Watch for workout data. I glance at my wrist to check my progress and view metrics while using the iPad for entertainment.

Over the weekend I used a hotel gym that offered exercise machines with large screens and an easy-to-use interface, however, that made me think of how the iPad could be used for more…

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Apple’s Health app in iOS 10 prominently displays Nutrition as one of the four main categories on the Health Data dashboard, but adding detailed information currently requires a third-party meal logging app with HealthKit support. Apple recommends a variety of solutions that work well including Lifesum and MyFitnessPal, but ultimately a native meal logging feature and first party food database would make the Health app much more useful.

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Some sources suggest that distracted driving is as dangerous as drunk driving. The National Highway & Transportation Administration (NHTSA) reported that in 2015, the most recent year for which full data is available, distracted driving killed 3,477 people and injured 391,000.

Using smartphones while driving is the most obvious example of distracted driving, and the NHTSA says that reading or sending a text is the most dangerous form. That’s partly because of the length of time a driver’s eyes are off the road, but also partly because many people find a text hard to ignore.

Hard-hitting videos, like the examples below, definitely help – if you can get people to watch them. But I believe one simple addition to iOS could also play a part …

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