Feature Request

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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 …

Expand
Expanding
Close

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 …

Expand
Expanding
Close

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 …

Expand
Expanding
Close

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…

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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…

Expand
Expanding
Close

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.

Expand
Expanding
Close

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 …

Expand
Expanding
Close

I’m a huge fan of Apple’s Continuity features. Being able to start writing something on one device and continue it on another is fantastic. Pasting between devices is really handy. Being able to answer a phone call on my Mac is often more convenient than doing so on my phone when I’m working. And so on.

The ability to focus on the task I want to achieve, rather than the device I want to use, is a very nice illustration of the benefit of working within a single ecosystem.

But there’s one thing Apple appears to have forgotten, and that’s a quick, easy and reliable method to switch FaceTime calls between devices …

Expand
Expanding
Close

This week I bought and played through my first audiobook in iBooks (Shoe Dog) after realizing I have a habit of buying a lot of books then rarely making time to actually read them. I finished the 13 hour 22 minute book over the weekend and really enjoyed the experience (and the book). I listen to a lot of podcasts, so playing audio in the background while running errands is something I know I enjoy.

iBooks on the iPhone is a solid audiobook player. It works with Apple CarPlay, 3D Touch from the Home screen, and to my surprise has arguably the best Now Playing screen of any Apple app. Apple currently has three different versions of its audio Now Playing screen between its Music, Podcasts, and iBooks apps, the audiobooks version has features that every Now Playing screen should adopt.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple’s iCloud Drive feature has matured to the point that several months ago I stopped using Dropbox on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad without having to dramatically change any workflows. I still interact with Dropbox on the web once a week to produce the 9to5Mac Happy Hour podcast, but iCloud Drive could totally replace Dropbox for me with a few additional features…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Bar tabs are one of those conveniences that can sometimes feel like they’re more trouble than they’re worth. In theory, it’s super convenient to hand over your card at the beginning of the evening, allow anyone in a group to order by quoting a tab number or waving a bar card, then settle up at the end of the night.

In practice, though, there are drawbacks – not least, security. You are leaving your card unattended and out of sight for what may be hours. It would take just seconds for any of the bar staff to slip it out of its slot, photograph both sides and then have all your card details, including the three-digit security number.

There’s also the hassle factor of paying at the end of the evening – usually at the same time everyone else is trying to do the same thing. Mastercard has come up with an interesting solution to both problems through an app, and it’s an approach I’d love to see offered in Apple Pay …

Expand
Expanding
Close

For last week’s installment of our Logic Pros series, I wrote about the new Touch Bar support in the recently released latest version of Logic Pro X. It turns out Final Cut Pro users have good reason to be jealous; and other apps could benefit a lot from implementing what Logic has done. It’s some of the best support yet, and one feature specifically, fully customizable banks of buttons for keyboard shortcuts, is something I’d love to see other apps adopt.

Final Cut Pro, GarageBand and other Apple apps got Touch Bar support at launch, but what Logic Pro X ended up getting beats them all.

Expand
Expanding
Close

For an operating system as simple as iOS, it’s surprising how much stuff can appear in the 20px status bar almost always visible when using an iPhone or iPad. Ever since the Apple Watch came out, I’ve had a bit of a pet peeve that the Bluetooth symbol is always visible there as I’m always paired to the watch.

Is it really necessary to show me something that is always there? This leads me into a feature request that isn’t a critical new addition to the system by any means, but a small refinement to polish the iOS experience. I believe the status bar is too cluttered with redundant information and would like to see Apple make it tidier and less busy …

Expand
Expanding
Close

When Apple released iOS 10 last September, they pushed in a small change when connecting to wireless networks. Tucked away under the Wi-Fi settings, iOS now warns users when connecting to insecure networks that it exposes a user’s network traffic. The easy answer to this is to simply not connect to public wireless networks, but that’s something that most people will just ignore. If users won’t stop connecting to insecure public networks, they could at least start using VPNs and Apple could make it easy to do that.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Over the years Apple has made steady improvements to how our devices sync content. On the whole, it’s becoming more seamless to keep photos, videos and other content synced and organized across multiple iOS devices and Macs with software like iCloud Photo Library and iCloud Music Library.

However, one area I believe Apple could really improve the user experience is with photo and video management for multiple users. While iCloud Photo Sharing is a nice social way to share and organize photos with others, it’s not a great option to mange your photo and video collection. A feature I’d really like to see is iCloud Photo Library support for multiple Apple IDs.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Apple Watch is gaining a helpful new feature called Theater Mode with watchOS 3.2. You could already mute alerts easily, and now Theater Mode lets you both mute alerts and disable raise-to-wake which easily activates the screen.

Theater Mode is intended to be used at the movie theater where lighting up a small screen accidentally when you raise your wrist can be distracting. Theater Mode may be useful in other situations despite its name. With a few tweaks, Theater Mode could be especially ideal for drivers.

Expand
Expanding
Close

With many of us having new Macs here or on the way, it’s a good time to do some housekeeping: tidying up your existing Mac ready for a restore from Time Machine, or to think about how you want to organize your new machine if setting it up from scratch. (Cue comments war on which is the better approach …)

One thing I do is a periodic rejig of my dock, to ensure it contains the apps I use most frequently, and to keep them in some kind of logical order.

Adding spacers to the dock helps a lot when it keeps to keeping things organized. This isn’t a standard macOS feature, but I think it should be …

Expand
Expanding
Close