Thursday, May 14, 2020

WWDC 2020 Wish Lists

Becky Hansmeyer (tweet):

Most of my issues with SwiftUI boil down to 1) Missing UI elements and 2) Missing customizations.

[…]

I would really like to see an easier way to support the native Apple Pencil mark-up tools in PDFKit.

[…]

A system-wide color picker in iOS. It’s bananas that I can’t select some text in Apple Notes on my iPad and change its color.

[…]

De. Fault. Apps. Let me change them.

[…]

A revamped iPad multitasking system (yep, just do it again until it’s right) that isn’t big ol’ hot mess.

Jordan Merrick:

Shortcuts desperately needs a way to copy and paste actions across shortcuts—it’s almost criminal that it doesn’t have it already. There’s simply no way to reuse a set of actions from one shortcut in another or even just duplicate actions within the composer.

[…]

There’s no way to easily back up shortcuts, which feels like a regression and something that was possible with Workflow (i.e., saving workflows as files). iCloud syncing helps keep devices in sync but it’s not a backup tool.

[…]

Subroutines could be mini-shortcuts that don’t exist within the standard set of shortcuts, instead they could be accessed like actions. Sharing a shortcut should also include a full copy of the subroutine.

Previously:

Update (2020-05-18): David Smith:

So now I am turning my attention towards the future and what might be possible for the Apple Watch.

John Gruber:

Fiddling with the home screen on iOS is just awful. Whenever I sit down and try to clean it up — deleting apps I don’t use, moving apps into some semblance of order — it drives me insane. The 1984 Finder was awesome for rearranging icons, right on day one. Yet we’re 13 years into iOS and rearranging apps is still terrible, because the whole thing is based on a home screen design where there’s just one screen and no third-party apps. The concept worked fine when all you could do was rearrange 12 built-in apps on a single screen. It feels like a prank trying to use it today.

Update (2020-05-22): Becky Hansmeyer:

The first is by Steve O’Dell, who helps run a Girls Who Code after-school program at Bacon Elementary School in Colorado. His wishlist stems from a desire for Apple to once again become a major player in the education space.

[…]

The next wishlist I wanted to share comes from Daniel Andrews. It’s a great list; some of my favorite things are feature parity for Messages across platforms, the return of the magnification loupe, making better use of the iPad status bar, and improvements to search on iPad. He also mentions some specific improvements to Mail[…]

Stuart Breckenridge:

This WWDC wishlist is focused around the frameworks and functionality that I’ve been working with over the last year or so.

[…]

I’d like to see BGAppRefreshTask improved with some form of guaranteed refresh schedule, e.g. three times a day. I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to workaround the refresh schedules for NetNewsWire—including using Location Services—to no avail.

[…]

SwiftUI has rough edges and outright missing features.

[…]

Make SF Symbols available for Mac app development

[…]

Using CloudKit shouldn’t make it impossible to transfer an app

Previously:

Update (2020-06-22): Howard Oakley:

What I’d really like to see before anyone launches into Keynote addresses later this month is a review of all the fixes and improvements which are coming in 10.16 to address these shortcomings in tools and the fundamental maturity of the last three years of macOS. Without them, 10.16 has weak and flawed foundations, and the more it changes, the greater the risk it will fall flat.

Arek Holko:

My only wish for this year’s WWDC is for the App Store to stop being the only approved way of distributing apps on iOS. This is definitely more significant to the health of the ecosystem than some new features or bug fixes in frameworks.

See also:

8 Comments RSS · Twitter

I only have 4 wishes:

1. Fix bugs in developer tools and frameworks.
2. Write decent technical documentations.
3. Fix bugs in macOS and provide truly native system applications instead of Catalystish ones.
4. Stop transforming an already complex language into an overloaded Christmas Tree.

1. Please don't make things worse.

I'd be happy with
1. a Snow Leopoard style year (more clean up and modernisation of older APIs)
2. some kind of consolidation of Codable/NSCoding -> CoreData support for Swift Structs
3. any extra magic that Breeno and Troy bring to UITable/CollectionView

1. Documentation for everything Apple makes. Not just enough for experienced software and hardware developers to take part in Apple ecosystems. Enough so that those learning how to develop can learn how to achieve their goals.

2. For Apple applications to be treated like Apple OSes: update plans revealed 5 months before they are due via sessions at WWDC/WWEDC (Apple Worldwide Ecosystem Developer Conference) and Safari/OS-style public Beta programmes for Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Garageband, Logic and Final Cut Pro.

1. Put on the damn brakes. Stay on the same OS version for 2-3 years instead of one. Sure, do a marketing based annual release with new features, but let those be new or revised apps. Keep the underlying OS the same, with serious attention paid in years 2-3 to fixing the damn bugs.

2. Make Apple's developers use the same tools and procedures as everyone else has to use to create and publish their first party apps. Since that's probably the only thing that will ever cause code signing, the app store back end, etc, to stop being horrible.

3. Since they're going to be transitioning to ARM anyway, can we please have a first party emulation layer that allows 32 bit apps to run on the current 64 bit only OS?

Odds of any of this happening, 0.000001%

The fact that docs are a common Common thread, should be a major warning sign and something all developers start to push.

Also, most apps use the same JSON fetching code, JWTs and the rest of tons of boilerplate.

Please give us a JSONkit

[…] Stuart Breckenridge (via Michael Tsai): […]

Leave a Comment