iOS (formerly iPhone OS) has come a long way since its inception. What began as a simple system with only a few default apps and zero expansion opportunities is now a powerful application platform with desktop-like features such as copy and paste, global search and more.
Despite this notable progress, there’s always room for improvement. Today we’ll go over my personal wish list for the platform then ask for your input on features you’d like to see Apple implement in the future.
Home Screen: Jump to Specific Page
My first request is quite simple. We all have tons of apps filling our iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches and it can be time consuming to flip through each screen to get to the one you want.
To be fair, the global search feature has vastly improved app-finding for me and I use it on a regular basis. However, I’m quite familiar with how each of my pages is organized and frequently just want to shoot to the third or fourth page immediately.
The iPhone page indicator should be more functional
The dots at the bottom of the page seem like a natural place to implement this feature. Perhaps holding your finger on a dot should have an OS X-like dock zoom effect so you can easily select the page you want. Honestly, it doesn’t matter much how they implement it, I just want it to be there!
Alphabetical App Listing
When you navigate to the search screen, the list is blank until you start searching, which of course brings up the results matching your inquiry. I think this is a waste of space and could be made extremely useful if the default state of this screen were an alphabetical listing of all the apps on your device.
The iPhone search page could double as an app list
It might seem unnecessary with a search bar at the top but you don’t always know what app you’re looking for. Sometimes you forget the name but can recognize the icon, other times you merely want to quickly browse all of your apps to find one to kill some time with.
Zip Support In Mail
Zipped archives are an extremely common way to send files digitally and it’s beyond frustrating that iOS leaves you hanging on this aspect. If you receive a ZIP, tough, you’ll just have to wait until you get to a desktop to open it.
After all this time, still no ZIP support?
As I pointed out in an earlier article, Readdle’s excellent app PDF Expert actually solves this problem and brings excellent ZIP support to the native Mail app, but this feature should be built into the system and not something that you have to pay extra to receive.
A Central Notifications List
Notifications were an awesome addition to the iPhone. It’s great that apps can inform us of important events that we want to know about, but the system isn’t perfect.
As inspiration for how it should work, let’s look at another notification system we’re all familiar with: Facebook. Just as with the iPhone, Facebook has a system that tells me about anything that I’ll likely be interested in knowing. The great thing about the notification system in Facebook though is that they’re all organized into a nice list that I can go back and reference at any time. If I ignore a notification or was simply bombarded with ten of them at once, I can just cruise over to the list and browse through everything that happened.
The Facebook notification list
Where is this functionality on the iPhone? We get those little popups, but once they’re gone that’s all we get. I want a simple screen where I can browse through all my past notifications. This could easily be implemented in a new screen next to global search or even through the feature in the next wish.
A Better Lock Screen
The iPhone lock screen seemed neat when we all first saw it, but then Teehan and Lax created a mockup of a home screen (later hacked into a functioning lock screen) that blew away Apple’s silly little clock.
Teehan and Lax’s brilliant mockup
This just makes too much sense for Apple to ignore for much longer. It’s a beautiful implementation of a dead-practical idea that would save us all tons of time.
As a further look into what we could be enjoying if Apple would just get on board, check out the new Palm Pre 2′s dock screen apps. This brilliant idea, outlined in a recent article, allows developers to create apps specifically designed to run when the phone is docked. How cool is that?
Tell Us About Your iOS Wishlist!
I could keep going for days but these suggestions are definitely at the top of my iOS wishlist. We never know what Apple is cooking up in their next release but it’s good to get these discussions going so they know what we want to see!
Be sure to leave a comment below and tell us about your brilliant feature ideas to make the best mobile operating system on the planet even better.