Feature Request

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 …

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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.

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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 …

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 …

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Earlier this month I wrote about a sour experience I had with my Apple Watch and activity tracking. Apple’s Activity app on the iPhone recorded 499 active calories burned, just one active calorie shy of my daily goal, even though the Activity app on my Apple Watch showed my progress at just over 100%.

It was an odd (and annoying) discrepancy that prompted me to think about how Apple’s Activity app could better handle different situations like sick days and harder to track activities. I proposed a new concept of rest days, tolerance levels, and an honor system that could help avoid losing achievement streaks and motivation.

A lot of readers wrote in with similar stories and advice for correcting the data sync bug that I experienced. Now that we’re on the last day of the month (happy Halloween!), I can report that the recommendation I received from 9to5Mac readers was successful and worth passing along.

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Being woken in the early hours by your iPhone bleeping for some trivial reason is one of life’s more irritating experiences, so I’m a great fan of the Do Not Disturb feature. Set the hours you usually sleep, turn off the phone and you can relax in the knowledge that you won’t be woken by any calls, messages or other assorted audio alerts until a civilised hour.

But the scheduling of the Do Not Disturb hours isn’t exactly sophisticated: you simply get to specify the start and end times, and those same times apply 365 days a year unless you change them manually.

There’s one improvement I suspect we’d all like to see, with more sophisticated options likely to also appeal to many …

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Really good fitness and health tracking is easily my number one reason for wearing my Apple Watch everyday (and upgrading to Series 2), and I really appreciate the new Activity Sharing features in watchOS 3 and iOS 10. Filling Activity rings and keeping a streak going is really effective motivation for me.

But breaking a streak or not quite filling an Activity ring can be equally uninspiring. It’s tempting to want to give up or take it less seriously, especially if you almost had it or the stream was broken by error. That happened to me this week, which prompted me to think about three things I’d love to see Apple’s Activity app gain: rest days, tolerance levels, and an honor system.

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Now that Siri has finally arrived on the Mac, Apple’s intelligent assistant just got a whole lot more useful. But some users are finding that this has only increased their frustration – because the service is unable to cope with more than one language.

Making Siri bilingual might, at first glance, seem an unreasonable request. After all, it’s taken speech recognition a very long time indeed to reliably understand one language at a time. I first tried a prototype system way back in the 1980s, when it was utterly hopeless. I’d try another one every few years, but it’s only in the past seven or eight years that it’s been any good.

But there are many places in the world where it’s extremely common to speak more than one language. In particular, speaking English and a local language is the norm in many countries. Which means that you may well be speaking to Siri in English but asking it to find, for example, a German place. Or speaking to Siri in Dutch but asking it to call someone with an English name …

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Not only is the iPhone 7 capable of outputting louder sound, but it also features two speakers that are capable of producing true stereo output.

The two speakers — one in the bottom of the iPhone, and one in the earpiece — are a first for an iPhone. Although the iPhone 7 doesn’t feature the four-speaker ensemble found on the iPad Pro, it is capable of producing true stereo-separated sound that your ears can perceive while the phone is oriented in landscape mode.

There’s just one problem. Unlike other apps, the iPhone Music app doesn’t yet support landscape mode…

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The above concept of how Apple could improve its current iTunes/App Store web view comes from STRV designer Ales Nesetril. It’s not the first time someone has suggested it, but it got me thinking once again about app installs via the web. What is Apple waiting for?

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Earlier this week during its WWDC keynote, Apple added highly-requested support for lyrics to the Music app in iOS 10. While lyrics support wasn’t immediately live when the first beta was released on Monday, it has gradually been rolling out since then to various songs and artists.

While I welcome lyrics support with open arms, Apple’s implementation of it is very basic. To access lyrics, you simply swipe from the bottom of the Now Playing screen. Lyrics are presented in plain text and there’s no option to annotate them or easily share them. Personally, I think there are a fews ways in which Apple could have done a lot more to improve the lyrics experience.

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We know a fair amount about what to expect from WWDC next week — software heavy with Siri as a star and light on hardware — yet there is still plenty of room for surprises like HomeKit and Apple News from previous years. Expectations are especially light on watchOS and tvOS, the software that runs on Apple Watch and Apple TV, and there are plenty of new features that could improve the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Here’s my Feature Request for each of Apple’s software platforms, WWDC 2016 edition.

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I once teased an American friend about the fact that only 36% of Americans hold a passport, compared to 83% of Brits. He quite rightly pointed out that in America you can fly for six hours and still be in the same country – Seattle to Miami, for example – while Brits can fly for an hour or so and be in any one of a dozen different countries. (I later did a bit of Googling and found he could even have said 11 hours: New York to Honolulu.)

For that reason, this feature request may be most relevant to Europeans and frequent business travellers, but I think it’s one that would at least fall into the nice-to-have category for anyone who travels.

The issue is mobile roaming charges. Use your iPhone in your own country and all-you-can-eat calls and texts are typically pretty affordable, with data being the main thing that determines how much you pay for your plan. But however much you pay for data at home, that’s nothing compared to roaming charges overseas …

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I addressed one big issue with Apple Music last week – and was very surprised to see from the poll results just how widespread the issue was. But while discussing that issue, we happened across a Reddit thread that I thought contained a really great idea: give the iOS app Smart Playlist functionality via Siri.

I may complain a lot about the bloated nature of iTunes, a single app that tries to do way too many different things, but I do really like it as a pure music player. One of the features I love is Smart Playlists, which you can use to do all kinds of funky things.

For example, maybe you have some music you really love but haven’t listened to for a while? Create a Smart Playlist where Rating is 5 and Last Played is not in the last year. Been listening to the same stuff too much lately? Create a playlist where Last Played is not in the past month. Feeling nostalgic? A playlist where Year is a particular year …

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I was expecting to jump ship from Spotify to Apple Music right from the start, and I did indeed do so. The longer I’ve used it, the more enthusiastic I’ve become about the service.

Before the launch of Apple Music, I mostly listened to my own music library, viewing Spotify very much as a supplementary music source. It wasn’t very good at introducing me to new music, so mostly I used it to try out artists recommended by friends.

Apple Music, however, has totally transformed the way I listen to music. Upwards of 80% of my listening is on the For You tab, listening to the recommended playlists and albums, and it’s introduced me to many new artists I now love. Listening to my own music library has become a secondary activity.

However, there are times when I definitely do want to listen to my own, locally-stored music, and this is where the iOS Apple Music app messes up badly – and iTunes too for some …

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Like a lot of new technologies from Apple these days, HomeKit isn’t perfect but the parts that work well are really useful. Apple’s home automation framework connects smart accessories from various companies all under the control of Siri and HomeKit apps like Home or Hesperus. But HomeKit is relatively young still and there’s plenty of low hanging fruit in terms of ways the framework could improve with iOS 10 and beyond. Here are a few ideas I hope we see with HomeKit this year:

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In our regular Feature Request series, 9to5Mac authors offer their opinion on how to improve popular hardware or software products. Since we started the feature back in November of last year, the majority of installments in the series have focused on Apple’s own software and hardware, including a number of ways the company can improve its current iOS and Mac OS X software as well as possibilities for upcoming iOS 10 and Mac OS X 10.12 releases.

And some of the other Feature Requests we’ve published included features for the new Apple TV, the upcoming next-generation Apple Watch 2, Apple Music, iCloud, and more. Below we’ve compiled a hub for the series giving you an easy way to stay up to date and hopefully some hints at what to expect at WWDC this year and other upcoming Apple product launches…

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I don’t classify myself as an Apple fanboy. I mostly prefer Apple products over competing ones, and I do find life is easier if I allow myself to be assimilated by a single ecosystem, but my opinion pieces are variously critical and supportive of Apple – and I’m certainly not blind to cool tech offered by Apple competitors.

I was particularly impressed by a feature Google released this morning: automatically and intelligently finding time in your calendar to work on your personal goals.

Most of us these days lead busy lives with packed schedules, and sometimes it can feel hard enough just keeping up with the essentials of work, family and those boring but essential chores – from clearing out the gutters to filing tax returns. When we do get some downtime, it’s all too easy to fill it with Facebook, Netflix and other time-snaffling activities.

This means those personal goals we optimistically come up with in the first enthusiastic days of welcoming in the new year – like writing a novel (gratuitous plug), learning a new language, running a marathon, or practicing a musical instrument – all too often get neglected …

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