Macworld Forums

There are several things that I don't like about iOS which have pretty much been there since day 1. If I had requests for iOS6 they would be:-

• Pictures, Voice memos, emails can all be sent via email. It would be good if there was a way to select these while composing an email instead of having to leave mail. Or if you do switch to another app and you ARE currently composing a new email, an option should appear in each app to "Add to current email".

• Calendar should have the ability to step through years as well as months.

• Calendar alerts should number as many as you want (not just 2) and they shouldn't be restricted to a maximum of 2 days notice. If you are reminding yourself of someone's birthday, you may have to post something overseas, 2 days is useless for something like that.

• Mail should be able to re-load an email that wasn't fully loaded. Quite often I open an email too quickly and it tells me it wasn't loaded from server and it's then impossible to retrieve it on the phone.

• Numbers that look like telephone numbers in notes (but aren't), shouldn't just dial if you accidentally touch them. Perhaps a warning should pop up before the phone dials.

• More than 8 active web pages would be nice.

• A means of sending and receiving photos to / from iPhone to A.N.Other phone, perhaps via bluetooth.

• Wrap text on all emails, some appear with 0.1 pt text, especially if theres an attachment.

• When updating Apps, don't automatically come out of App Store

• Store notification history somewhere. Currently once it's gone it's gone.

• Siri should be able to learn correct pronunciation on words. If it thinks Jean is John, or the Van Halen Album OU812 us OU eight hundred and twelve, it should be correctable.

• Siri on iPhone 4, and ability for Siri to read iBooks. I know voiceover attempts this, but has anyone tried using it.

• The brightness settings on the iPhone never seem right to me. At night, if it's dark, I can turn the brightness right down to save battery life, then when it's sunny I need to turn it back up. It is set to automatic but I'd like to see a way of setting my own brightness graph curve so I can set the brightness myself at different ambient lighting conditions and the iphone then remembers these settings. Perhaps touching screen and using volume controls to adjust brightness at any given lighting condition.

Any other suggestions anyone ?

Dragonfly,
I agree with every single one of those points and would add another.

Siri should be able to hook into the VoiceOver functionality to make it useable for blind and visually impaired users. My partner bought an iPhone 4S because Siri was billed as being able to do such things but it turns out to be pretty much useless for her. iOS already has the VoiceOver function to read what's on screen so it really shouldn't be too hard to ask Siri not just 'Did my mum send me an email..' but also for Siri to then ask you if you'd like the phone/iPad to read it for you? Likewise with SMS/iMessages, calendar events etc...

Siri would become infinitely more useful if it could do this although I think most people would probably just settle for Siri actually being able to do something - ANYTHING - outside of the US!

grumpygiraffe,

Siri is quite useful for setting reminders and sending messages that you dictate to it, but, as you say, its search capabilities are still pretty limited in the UK. I think Siri could definitely be a major product for blind / visually impaired users if integrated with VoiceOver.

Siri is a massive feature, not only does it need to understand what people say and be able to access an in-depth search engine to tell you where you can "buy a door handle in Birkenhead" or "the quickest route to Runcorn". but it needs to do the same in numerous different languages for numerous different products in numerous different countries around the world. Then keep that information up to date in the future.

Compared with adding a new camera or a digital compass Siri, if they plan to implement it properly, will cost Apple a small fortune.

It's basically google for the real world and not just websites. But if they get it right, it could be massive.

Dragonfly,

I'd like updates from different accounts to work without you having to sign out of each account, and back in (and swap between purchases made on US and UK stores).

I heard Apple were looking into it but it's hardly likely to be top of the list I suppose. Most users just use the UK.

Messages still seems clunky to me (and a few other people) and iTunes Match can be a pain. Some fixes there would be nice.

Mark Hattersley,
I guess there are people that regularly commute between 2 countries, and I'm guessing you mean there's some Apps in the US (Bus times for Iowa) that you can't get or use in the UK, so you need to switch between 2 different accounts to use them ? Seems to me the kind of people that do a lot of commuting from UK to US are the sort of people that would buy Apple phones, so probably something they should sort out.

Dragonfly,
I've always been puzzled about why there is no junk mail filtering in iOS.

The junk mail filtering in OS X Mail is excellent, but I still get to see all the junk mail that get's picked up on IMAP mail accounts when the iPhone gets to them before my Mac does.

It's particularly pertinent right now because in the last few days, I have been receiving a deluge of junk mail, all of which has been sent to an address that I supplied when enrolling for a Macworld Expo ( so that has to be many years ago ! ). I always provide unique e-mail prefixes to my domain names, so that I can trace the original leak of my e-mail address and selectively block it, but sadly only in OSX and not iOS.

AlanAudio,

I sympathise, I do a similar thing with my email, giving individuals different email addresses, spam is annoying. I'm surprised there isn't an official way of making email addresses more spam proof with some form of certification, i'm sure they'll come up with something one day, but the email system hasn't really changed since it was launched many years ago, despite junk and spam mail being recognised as a problem costing industry many millions of $$$.