WWDC Wishlist

Here is some stuff I would like to see Apple announce during WWDC in no particular order.

Just look at all those fancy watch bands!

Apple Watch

• Killing the grid of app circles would be nice and having a scrolling list of icons that you could rolling through with the Digital Crown would be nice. The galaxy of icons is hard to use, especially when you are moving. They look great on advertisements and posters in the Apple Store, but in the real world they aren’t the best experience.
• App Store on the Watch: This would be nice solely because it would allow for the Apple Watch to be more independent
• Faster Siri: Siri on the Apple Watch is almost the right-click of the Apple Watch in the sense that it has the potential to zip you along to watch functions that would be too time-consuming to cumbersome to perform. Having a faster Siri would make Siri a 1st class interaction method on the Apple Watch after touching the screen.
• Easier music controls: Multimedia controls were really easy to get to on Watch 1.0 with glances and being able to swipe up. Having the quick-controls are more useful than glances most of the time, but I would like another panel when you swipe up for multimedia controls. Its kind of obnoxious right now having the “Now Playing” widget be another app in your Apple Watch dock that requires a button press and normally a lot of scrolling to get over to.
• LTE: While I don’t know if I would personally use LTE, having the option would be nice, especially for exercising and maybe being able to leave my phone behind when I go to eat or to the store. Actually, it would be nice to leave my phone back in the office at lunch and just take my iPad with me and my Apple Watch. Having LTE on the Watch would also make it so the watch could be more independent from the iPhone to the point that Android users could use one.
• Android Support: Like putting iTunes on Windows, I think that this one will eventually happen if Apple want the Apple Watch to keep growing. This would be a great way to introduce Android users to the Apple ecosystem.
• Blood Glucose monitoring: I have several family and friends who are diabetic. This would be life-changing for a lot of them to not have to prick their fingers every day.
• iCloud Health Backup: I know this data is sensitive, but the process of backing up and restoring the Apple Watch is just horrible. It would be nice to just factory reset my Watch and have iCloud pull down the health data.

Siri Speaker

• Apple Music and Spotify integration would be great
• HomeKit support
• More Powerful Siri: Alexa and Siri have a skill store. Apple loves App Stores. This makes a lot of sense to have
• Multiple users is a must, especially with Google Home doing voice recognition. If this product is going to be one that you.
• Airplay target: Being an Airplay target is a must

Look at how impratically thin that laptop is! I envy people who can get away with a machine like that and have amazing battery life.

MacOS

• More powerful Siri: HomeKit Support would be nice and being able to use your Mac as a HomeKit support would be nice.
• Break apart iTunes: As an Apple Music user I would really appreciate a more streamlined and faster application for listening to Music. Opening up iTunes feels like navigating a battleship in a kiddie pool. I would love a separate Music, TV, and Podcasts app. They can throw the Store part of iTunes into the web or integration it into the App Store Application.
• Garage Band: Better editing tools and workflows for editing podcasts would be nice, especially an easy pipeline to the Apple Podcast store would be nice. Being able to easily redirect audio from other applications to Garage Band would be very useful for podcasting.
• Multi-person FaceTime calls: Being able to conference call multiple people would be very helpful on the Mac and iOS. I think they should also bring FaceTime to Android and Windows as well to encourage people to use it now that Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are all fighting for people’s calling time.
• Wallcat: Apple needs to buy Wallcat. Its an application I highly recommend that provides nice wallpapers every day. Google does this with Google Daydream backdrops on AndroidTV and Android. I think Apple needs to do something like this. Its silly, but I think it brings a nice fit and finish to the Mac that many people would appreciate. Especially Mac users.
• Calendar and Reminders: I think Calendar needs a menubar mode like Fantasical has and natural-language input like Todoist. It would be nice to type into Siri for Reminders and Calendar appointments.
• Apple Mail: Mail has come a long way in the last few years, but I would appreciate getting features like Outlook’s Focused Inbox or Smart Tagging would be nice. I like merging my work and personal email into one application. It would be nice if Apple Mail could use machine learning to automatically sort email by topic, priority, sender, etc as a special view if I wanted.
• My Day Application or Siri: Having a hub that I could glance at of important Calendar appointments, Reminders, weather, documents and email would be nice. Being able to ask Siri to read off “My Day” would be a nice touch when you walk into your office.
• Apple News: I enjoy using Apple News for reading news first thing in the morning, over lunch, and after work. I would like to be able to do this on my Mac. Also, being able to bring in your own sources over RSS would be nice. Finally, having Safari’s Reading List show up in an Apple News section would be really nice.
• Workflows: Being modern Automation to the Mac would be nice, especially one that is aware of modern web services. Automation is one of the most powerful things you can do on a computer and one of the core strengths of the Mac over iOS. Everybody from teachers to engineers can use Automation if they make it easy for people.
• Touchscreen Support: I have used touch on Windows 10 and Chromebooks to know that the feature would be nice. I think Apple should start bringing touch support to the Mac even if really basic like scrolling and pinch to zoom. Maybe a next-generation operating system that scales between the iPhone and Mac could address application support better, but part of me wants a Surfacebook running MacOS that swaps over to iOS when you undock it from the base with Apple Pencil support. That, or being able to sit my iPhone into a dock and have it power a display, mouse, and keyboard and run MacOS. I feel like Touch is the future and Apple could include touchscreen on the Mac and touch-gestures without destroying the platform.
• Aperture: Apple has been updating Final Cut and Logic Pro the last few years. Photos app is great for phone photography, but if you do anything with RAW photography it crashes and burns. RAW support is messy and confusing. I think its time for Apple to reintroduce Aperture for the Mac with the new Photos library system and iCloud photo library support. Yeah, I know Lightroom exists, but I already have a lot of my photos in iCloud photo library and I really don’t want to have to switch to a completely photo management system. This would be great bone to throw to professionals and show them that Apple is serious about their commitment to Pro’s that they professed at the Mac Pro press briefing earlier this year. An Aperture mobile would be really cool as well if they could build that for the iPad Pro so you could round-trip edits. I’d love to bring an iPad Pro with me to the field to review photos and then edit them seriously on an iMac or MacBook Pro

Please Apple….please……..I don’t want to switch to Lightroom

Yes….I totally spammed people with stickers this year

iOS 11

• Dark Mode: Being able to manually set this or have it automatically swap after nightfall would be nice.
• iPad multitasking options: Split view and 1/3 view is great, but I would like to be able to to put some apps on the left-hand side like I do on my Mac. Also, having maybe 3–4x on the bigger iPad Pro would be nice.
• Drag and Drop. If Apple wants to consider the iPad a computer replacement, being able to drag and drop data like text, links, photos, etc. from app to app would be a big deal.
• Finder for iOS: Apple already released a hidden, but extremely basic iCloud Drive application. I think having a Finder app to get to all document data would be much appreciated. Let 3rd parties plug into it as well like Dropbox, OneDrive, Windows Server, and Google Drive. Being able to manage application data is critical. They don’t need to include a full file system like a Mac, but being able to do basic options like attach removable storage such as an USB key or SD Card and easily manage it would be a God-Send.
• Simpler Camera app: The camera app as of iOS 10 has become bloated with feature-creep. I say remove the filters and give us a better way to switch between camera modes. Swiping between 2–3 modes in the camera often makes people lose the shot. I’d imagine that most people apply filters in whatever app they are posting from like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook.
• More Photo Storage: Google does this with their premium phone. Only giving users 5GB of iCloud storage is kind of a slap in a face for them buying such an expensive phone. They need to lower the prices of iCloud and maybe throw out a little more storage for $500–1000 smartphones.
  Podcast app: Please give me the ability to skip back and forth with my car and headphone buttons….please Apple…I beg you….for the love of God why would I want to skip to another different podcast with my car’s fast forward button?
• Fix Core Audio: Allow for the applications to hand off auto to other applications. Right now its really hard to any kind of podcasting on the iPad
• Health app for iPad: Being able to see my progress and get recommends on the iPad would be neat. I use the iPad at the beginning and end of the day to prepare and review. If I could do that on the iPad it would be nice. Also, it would be neat if you could set fitness goals like running multiple times a week or doing more mindful minutes. I don’t know if they could do this, but providing insight on Health data would be invaluable, but I imagine that would require FDA approval.

Dark mode on the AppleTV is the best mode

Apple TV Service

• I would love an Apple TV service that is like Apple Music. Apple Music has come a long way in two years and I prefer it to Spotify. Being able to actually use the TV app the way I imagined it was meant to be used would be nice. The way you have to have a 3rd party subscription service like Comcast and then sign into anywhere from 1–30 apps is obnoxious. They really need to offer this service to make the AppleTV really compelling. Right now its just a nicer FireTV built for the Apple ecosystem.

I have grown to really enjoy Apple Music. I don’t want to go back to buying songs individually

Apple Music

• Apple Music Connect: Spotify Connect is one of the best things about Spotify. It lets you hop devices with ease. Why I can’t pick up a playlist on my Mac or iPad after I have been listening to it on my iPhone is beyond me. Handoff has been a thing for three years now. This really needs to come to Apple Music.
• Location-based recommendations: Google Music uses machine learning to recommend playlists based off your location and activity. If I’m in the gym or my calendar says that I’m running Apple Music should recommend playlists for working out. Using the calendar, previous habits, and GPS this should be pretty trivial for them to do. I think its a brilliant feature.

Apple Photo’s cloud library has changed the way I manage, edit, and share my photos

Apple Photos

• Index sharing: It would be really nice if every one of my devices didn’t have to index my photo library separately. I’m already storing the photos on Apple’s servers. Its okay for them to share that data between devices.
  RAW Support: The RAW support on Apple Photos is truly awful with his hybrid JPG/RAW format.
• More powerful editing: This is always welcome. If they could do suggested edits like Google Photos that would be really useful.
• Album recommendations: This is one of the best features of Google Photos.
• Sharing Suggestions: Apple Photos already does face-tagging and it knows from my history who I share photos with most often. Having suggested photo sharing based off face detection and GPS location would be handy.
• Shared Family Libraries: This is a big pain point for a lot of people. Being able to have a shared library with automatic photo sharing options based off of face tagging would be useful to a lot of people.
• External Editor Support: Being able to round-trip a photo from Photos to Photoshop or Pixelmator would be a welcome addition. This is particularly painful on RAW where you have to explicitly expire the RAW format, import it into Photoshop, export it back to the desktop, and import it back into Photos.

32 GB of RAM would be wonderful….so would an Nvidia graphics card

Hardware

• MacBook Pro: I would like to see a more powerful option for the MacBook Pro featuring 32GB of RAM, Intel’s 7th generation processors, and Nvidia graphics. We already have a low-level MacBook “Pro” with the Touchbar-less MacBook Escape. Having a higher end model would be nice…especially if they were kind and threw in an SD Card slot again for photographers. Removing the SD card slot was just user-hostile without providing any better alternative.
• MacBook: Faster processors and the Touchbar would be nice to have on these laptops. Also, one more USB-C port would be nice. I could see them axing the headphone jack on the right and replacing it with another USB-C port.
• iMac Pro: I don’t see this machine coming out until later in the year, but I think WWDC would be a good time to show off the concept. Its not like Apple to tease hardware, but their Mac Pro meeting with the press was also extraordinary. Big flashy reveals are great for consumers, but they really need to give professionals a concession and show them what they are working on. I think a Space-Grey iMac would be pretty great with a powerful Nvidia GPU and upgrading RAM slots like they have right now and Thunderbolt ports. Its a professional machine so I can see them keeping the ethernet, SD Card slot, and headphone port on it.
• Mac Mini: I wish they would announce a smaller Mac mini around the size of an Intel NUC. Most of the time Mac Mini’s are used in classrooms or as utility Macs for businesses. Making them smaller and easier to mount in different places would be useful. I don’t see it as a mainstream product anymore, but I think its still a useful form factor to run MacOS on. I would like to see what Apple could do if they tried to make the smallest possible computer that runs MacOS, but is still useful. That would be an interesting device.
• AppleTV: 4K….make it happen Apple! Also, a better Siri remote where I can actually tell which side is face-up.
• AirPort: A next-generation of mesh Airport Extremes would be nice. Easy to use auto-VPNs would be a great selling point in today’s world as would being able to host your own iCloud storage for Music, Video, and Photos would be really nice. That would be a good way to sell some modern Time Capsules. They could sell it as your own, personal iCloud in a box.
• Apple Pencil 2: An eraser would be nice as would Mac support by drawing on the trackpad like a Wacom tablet. Its not as good as drawing directly on the screen, but its something they could probably do without having to design MacOS.

So, there you go. My wishlist for WWDC 2017. Its kind of crazy how many products, services, and accessories Apple has these days and I know I definitely did not mention some like Final Cut, Watch 3 hardware, and the Mac Pro. I’m looking forward to lots of little changes across the board and hoping we get a Siri Speaker. I recently got an Amazon Echo Dot and I really love it, but would love it more with HomeKit, Reminder.app, and Apple Music Support. Anything you disagree with? Want that I’ve forgotten? Feel free to reply! I’d love to hear your responses.