WWDC is in a few days, as I write this. Joining in on Apple developer Internet tradition, I decided to chip in a very small and admittedly selfish wishlist.
- I’d love to see new 16” MacBooks Pro in color. Maybe the normal boring choices plus one nice color, like recent iPhones Pro, or maybe even a full palette like the new iMacs (although that seems highly unlikely).
- I’d love to see those new laptops announced during WWDC and available soon; my 2018 butterfly keyboard is, well, doing what those keyboardssss do.
- It’s time for iPadOS to diverge more from iOS and give productivity apps more of the kind of built-in features and well-marked paths that we take for granted on the Mac. (This is especially on my mind as I’m bringing a Mac productivity app over to iPad.) Like many, I think Vidit Bhargava’s mockup nailed it.
- It would be nice if SwiftUI acknowledged the existence of
NSAttributedString. (That’s all the SwiftUI I’ll throw in here for now.) - It would be fantastic if Apple jumped off the annual macOS release train and switched to a year-round incremental update approach. They’ve climbed some big hills in the last few years, with the release of Catalyst and SwiftUI, with a UI overhaul, with big changes to OS and app security, with a new processor architecture; maybe it’s a good moment to pause.
- Apple’s automation story is clearly centered on Shortcuts now, so I hope we finally get it on the Mac, but in a way which doesn’t ignore the fact that there are a lot of native Mac apps with existing scripting interfaces. I’ll leave the details vague, because I’m not sure how that looks!
- In true daydream territory: we really need an update to the HelpBook spec, making it clear how to author offline help with the same features as Apple’s own apps, and a new cross-platform Help Viewer so I can deliver help in an iPad app with the same tools.