Becky Hansmeyer’s WWDC 2020 Wishlist

Good list from Becky Hansmeyer. Two of her wishlist items:

A complete redesign of Mail. There is no perfect e-mail client, but like, maybe Apple could try or something?

That’s a huge bite to chew. I don’t think a wholesale redesign is what’s called for, personally, but Mail could certainly use a lot of attention. I mean, just look at Mail on iPad. There’s no way to create a smart mailbox. How are we supposed to take iPad seriously as a computer when its built-in email client doesn’t even support smart mailboxes? Compare and contrast with Safari, which I think does an absolutely brilliant job of balancing features across iOS and MacOS. (Web inspector for iPad would be cool though.)

More home screen customization. Let us have an empty row at the top if we want. Give us some widgets. Allow for some chaos. Set us freeeeee.

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: Gus Mueller has a single important addition.

★ Thursday, 14 May 2020