My iOS 6 Wish List

Everyone seems to be hitting the blogsphere with their predictions and wish lists for the next big version of Apple’s iOS.

I’ve seen a new 3D map interface, multiple users, Siri everywhere and lots of other ideas. Great! I like a good bit of advanced technology so keep the ideas coming.

But as an early adopter of the iPad, I have a few things on my wish list too that are a lot less advanced and significantly less interesting to the fanboys.

GMail Integration That Works

Like millions of other people, I use both GMail and an iPad. The iPad like most other devices comes with a number of different connection mechanisms for email, contacts, calendar, and tasks. Even better than that… it comes with an Exchange connector that works with GMail and does it all in a single set-up. Way better than trying to configure all of them separately. And it works.

Well, it did…

Somewhere in the iOS 4.x era the whole thing just broke. Email would no longer sync, it would hang and crash back to the desktop. Then calendar started hanging and crashing. And then the reminder app. And then Safari started behaving badly. In fact, the whole iPad started behaving pretty badly.

Easy you say. Delete and recreate the email profile. But if I tried to go into the email settings, that would hang too. If I turned off wifi and waited, I could get into the settings and delete the profile fixing everything. But if I recreate the setup, it’s broken once more.

Wow, that’s some bad luck, right? Seems not. According to the Apple forums this is a pretty common problem. Only advice is to completely reset your iPad back to factory settings.

After the 5.0 upgrade (which didn’t fix it) I was desperate so actually did the complete reset. And amazingly it fixed it! Suddenly my iPad was back! I lost some files stored in different apps, all my home page links to web sites, and had to completely reconfigure absolutely every app, but that was OK because my email, calendar, contacts, and reminders worked, right?

3 months later…

Oh no. It’s happened again. My lovely iPad is largely a brick. Emails sent via a different connector just disappear. It hangs all the time. I’m in misery!

5.1.1 didn’t fix it, but I’m hoping that iOS 6.0 does!

Reminders App That Lets Me Manage Tasks

I was really surprised when the iPad came out that there was no way to manage tasks. It seemed to me and many others to be a really obvious omission. After all, anyone connecting to a calendar using CalDAV might well have tasks in there too, because it handles both.

While not everyone wants or needs task management, those who use it really use it. We use it a lot. We keep work and home life organised by dropping things instantly into our task list so we don’t have to keep it in our brain. We then categorise, sort, flag, prioritise, and constantly reset the due dates on our tasks to our overloaded schedules.

So there was rightly some excitement when the new Reminders app was announced at the WWDC as part of iOS 5.

But what a let down. While it looks good, it suffers from an inability to organise, filter, or sort on any useful fields. The UI is clunky, make it hard to update tasks in common ways (how many dials do I have to touch to move a task from January 31 to February 1?) and just doesn’t satisfy.

After a brief play, I stopped bothering. It’s much easier to edit reminders on my Blackberry. How embarrassing is that Apple?!?

Web Browser That Doesn’t Forget My Pages

I love tabbed browsing. I’ve been using Firefox for ages and just love the fact that I can load lots of different pages and then switch between them quickly. It’s so easy! So quick! So useful!

Of course Safari has that too. Great! I load one tab. Load a second. Go back to the first…

Hey! Why is my first window reloading? I just loaded it and I know it doesn’t have an autorefresh. How about my second tab? It’s reloading now as well!

This makes absolutely no sense to me. I know that the iPad has main memory and storage memory. But I also know that lots of my apps use heaps more memory than Safari and don’t do anything as mad as reloading the page each time I look at it. Surely it should be able to get the information from the cache quickly, right? But no, it downloads it all again?!? I like my web pages fresh, but that’s just excessive and annoying.

It’s only really a mild annoyance on wifi, but a complete nightmare on 3G or slower and more expensive connections.

 

So that’s my minor rant on the subject of my iOS 6 wish list.

Please Apple, keep on innovating and producing great, flashy, fun hardware and software. But also, please don’t just drop and run. Remember your customers, listen to them on the Apple forums, and fix the things that are broken.