My WWDC 2016 Wish List
Published in
3 min readJun 10, 2016
Apple WWDC 2016 is in a week and there have been a lot of good articles with predictions and things that they want to see. The most common things have been:
Predictions/Leaks:
- OS X gets renamed to macOS
- Siri APIs and Siri on the Mac.
- New MacBook Pros
Wishes:
- iTunes broken apart or bettered.
- Better watchOS and tvOS.
Here’s me adding to the pile. My wish list:
- Fix Wi-Fi issues on the Mac. For real. I know they got fixed for a lot of people when Apple went back to mDNSResponder, but not me. I’ve had the exact opposite experience. Bring back discoveryd!
- Fix Bluetooth audio issues on the Mac. Audio playback with my Sony Bluetooth Headphones is very choppy on the Mac and it gets worse when I’m using a Magic Keyboard and Mouse.
- Swipe/glide typing on the native iOS keyboard. Gboard is nice but it still crashes at times. The native keyboard “feels” better but desperately needs swipability.
- Better emoji picker. Just copy the one from the Slack desktop app. It’s near-perfect.
- System-wide support for the Telugu language on iOS. They support Hindi and Tamil already — what’s wrong with Telugu?
- Fast ‘Today’ widgets. They are too slow to be usable.
- 3D touch to bring up the app switcher on the iPhone should work with the home screen as well.
- Allow custom watchOS watchfaces. The current ones are ugly. Developers can do better.
- Faster (realtime) watchOS complications. No one uses apps and glances. Kill them if needed but make complications better.
- Context-aware watchface that learns and shows relevant complications to the user.
- Detect workouts automatically on the watch, rather than me having to start and stop them with the Activity app.
- Support for weight training on the watch. The watch has a myriad of sensors. Use them to learn and detect repetitive movements.
- Make iMessage more like Slack. Increase information density (bubbles are passé), add previews for hyperlinks, have “channels” or smart threads for topics and fix the identity issues (I have a phone number, a gmail ID, an iCloud ID, a me.com ID, so 4! ways this keeps going wrong).
- Fix the tvOS app switcher. Make it more like Mission Control on the Mac.
- Change the tvOS color scheme. A dark theme would be perfect.
- Fix AirPlay/networking issues on tvOS. a) Multiple Apple TVs show up in the network. b) Playing videos from my phone works only half of the time and they cut off abruptly.
- On the developers’ side, get rid of UIKit and just copy React. (React Native is great but it can’t do many native things)
- Provide a high-level machine learning framework for use in apps. The current industry are too dense and too “heavy” for the rest of us.
- Kill iTunes on the Mac. Have a Music app, a Videos app and a Podcasts app, each one with their store built in.
- Have a ‘Devices’ app to sync stuff with iOS devices. Make sync better. The current implementation is riddled with consistency bugs.
- Put Apple Music in the Music.app on if you must, but don’t mess up my local music. Applies to both Mac and iOS.
- Redo the UI of the iOS Music app. The current one is horrible — bad colors, bad layout and terrible contrast. Go back to the basics, please.
- Get rid of the ugly background texture in the Notes app. It’s the worst.
- Re-do the App Store apps on both the Mac and iOS. Get rid of the WebViews.
- Create an app for podcast production. No, GarageBand or Logic Pro don’t cut it. Something simple — with support for templates, ability to add intros and outros, insert ads, trim silences, level vocals, reduce noise. A subscription component to host files would be even better.
All of these will be good to have, but there’s one wish that’s non-negotiable, which is:
Blow our minds!