Wishes for iOS 6
Not been active as much as I wanted to, lately, due to a large and challenging project. More on that in a few days when I’m done with it!
Anyway, it’s that time of the year when everyone on the web goes with predictions, and I though I’d share some wishes on what I hope iOS6 will print to the table.
iCloud streaming
iCould has been on all the lips and in too few apps this past year. I think the success of Dropbox has a lot to do with it, and devs now have to deal with a well established service, which may not be that easy to demote. In particular, iCloud does not solve the problem of transferring data from/to your desktop to/from your iDevice.
The other thing, really, is that I wish iCloud was a full streaming service in some cases. I’m still wondering what would be the cost to make it less asynchronous. We’ll see. But picture this; I’m typing text on my iPhone, and my wife sees the same text being typed live, on her iPhone. That’s what I want. And third party sharing with it. I know that there are other solutions to do this, but since I’ve got iCloud available for free with little to none boiler plate code to write, I want more from it.
Fix Core Data
The Xcode generated accessors to core data remain broken, one year after their introduction. Come on!? We’ve all had to implement our own add/delete methods because of that stupid NSSet error… Please fix that.
Passports/Contracts between apps
That’s a biggie, and apparently it’s been on Windows Phone and Android for a long time. So, I wish to be able to share data or access to public methods between apps. That would go a long way for better system-wide integration of apps. And also, I foresee that we will see the beginning of a certain type of consolidation in the mobile space from that initiative.
A New Safari
It sucks now, and we cannot replace it by another browser (not that the competition is that good, anyway). What I’m looking for: a lateral bar where I can drag sites or rss feeds, into either an icon or a folder - dashboard like - and not worry about my bookmarks. I want to be able to access those said bookmarks from other apps. I want to be able to use another search engine than Google by default. And I want the address bar to disappear. The search textfield is good enough for 99% of anyone’s needs anyway.
System-wide Siri
Nothing much to say here, if it isn’t: “Siri, please add this link to my Instapaper queue”, or “Siri, make a note in X of Y and sync it to Dropbox”…
Active Dashboard
I’m hoping at some point we’ll get, not active widgets on the dashboard, but rather actions attached to our launch icons. In other words, we’d have the icon expand when long pressed that presents some actions immediately available without launching the app. Like for instance “add a note”. Don’t know if this makes sense, though it’s pretty clear in my mind.
And that’s all for now, I’m wishing all WWDC participants a pleasant and fruitful week. I won’t be there but will be following the keynote, of course, as well as the many developments during that week. And I will download the beta release of iOS6 when available, obviously.
