The most recent episode of Canvas — the podcast on iOS and “productivity” (a word I hate, but never mind that for now) hosted by Federico Viticci and Fraser Speirs — focused on hopes for the upcoming iOS 11. Merlin Mann joined the podcast as a guest, and the three of them went around and talked about features they’d like to see introduced to iOS.
Some examples: Viticci wants the ability to record, in video and sound, actions performed on the iPad; Speirs imagines having a digital equivalent of a transparent sheet to draw down over the iPad screen on which he could write with an Apple Pencil, thereby marking up, as it were, things that are happening in an app; and Merlin Mann, who has 450 apps on his iOS devices, wishes for the ability to batch-delete apps, for example, ones that he hasn’t used in two years or more.
Listening to the episode, I thought: These aren’t iOS users, not even power users, they’re meta-users. Viticci writes and talks about iOS for a living; Speirs teaches students how to use iPads; Mann makes his way in life talking about productivity, especially (though not only) on digital devices. Their iOS wish-lists make them the edgiest of edge-cases, because their uses are all about the uses of others.
As for me, a user neither power nor meta, many of my wishes for iOS involve things that Apple can’t do on its own. For instance:
- I wish Bluetooth worked better, but Bluetooth is a standard Apple doesn’t control. No matter how well Apple handles its implementation of the standard, they can’t control how well device manufacturers handle their implementations. But in any case, given how long Bluetooth has been around, it really, really ought to work better than it does.
- This site is on Blogger (sigh), and Google has withdrawn their iOS Blogger app and made sure that the Blogger UI doesn’t render properly on Safari for iOS — it seems that they’re trying to drive iOS users towards Chrome. (Also, there are no good blogging apps for iOS: some are abandonware, some have hideously ugly and non-intuitive UIs, and one, Blogo, demands that you sign up for an account and turn over your data to its owners.)
- Many, many websites just don’t render properly on an iPad, and I expect will never do so. Which makes me wonder what Apple can do on its end (besides enabling Reader View, which is great) to improve poor rendering. E.g.: One of the most lasting problems in iOS involves selecting text, which can be extremely unpredictable: sometimes when you touch the screen nothing selects, while at other times when you’re trying to select just one word the whole page gets selected instead. But these problems almost always happen on websites, and are a function, I think, of the poor rendering in Safari for iOS. Is there anything that Apple can do about this, I wonder?
Among the things that Apple can definitely do something about, here are a few wishes from me:
- When you’re connected to a wi-fi network and the signal gets weak or intermittent, and there’s another known network with a stronger signal available, your iOS device should switch to that better network automatically. Optimize for best connection.
- Apple should strongly push developers to implement Split View.
- Apple should strongly push developers of keyboard-friendly apps to implement keyboard shortcuts — and if they have Mac apps, the same shortcuts on both platforms (the people at Omni are great at this).
- This is perhaps pie-in-the-sky, but I crave extensive, reliable natural-language image searching in Photos. But I expect we’ll get this from Google before we get it from Apple.