WWDC 2021 Discussion

Indeed they can. But I personally haven’t seen a better solution of quickly skipping through an alphabetical list.

I’d take that over Apple library.

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I think the issue is that even if the folders are well organised you still have to hunt for the folder and then the app within the folder. There’s no muscle memory in the process.

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There is no muscle memory initially, as the system creates the sorting, but after that there is. Unless you install or uninstall a lot of apps the library has fixed positions for all the apps in categories, except for the suggested category.

The suggested category tries to guess which apps you are likely to want, so it mainly changes based on time of day (and what you have used your phone for at this time in the past). So suggested is supposed to be automatically correct most of the time, and is at the top of the list so no scrolling.

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My categories keep shifting, I swear! I tried to open apps using muscle memory but then I find myself in the wrong folder

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That’s weird.

I am sure mine haven’t moved for ages! But maybe they have and I haven’t noticed?

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The categories actually do move! It uses the same logic as it does for choosing which 3 apps in a category to give prominence to on the main screen. The more you use an app category, the more it moves up towards the top of the list. Suggestions and recent are always at the very top though. This is the one aspect that does mess with my muscle memory.

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That’s probably why I haven’t noticed then!

On the rare occasion I do open App Library, it’s only really for suggestions or recent.

If I literally never use the other categories at all, then they probably all have the same bottom priority and don’t move as a result?

Anyway, scratch what I said earlier about the order being easy to remember.

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Mine do. On the fourth row down, the two categories keep swapping around.

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For me, there are 3 folders that like to move around and swap places with one another. In my use it seems to largely depend on which category of apps I’ve been opening more frequently. I suspect time of day influences it too but to a lesser extent.

Also starts occurring on the fourth row down for me, with Other, Information & Reading, and Entertainment occasionally swapping around with each other. Shopping & Food might have moved up actually too. I’m sure that used to be lower down. The rest of my folders are rather stationary.

It’s a weird one, because sometimes this messes with my muscle memory and I get confused and find myself questioning if that folder was always where it currently is. Just like I did with shopping just then. But it also doesn’t interfere with muscle memory too much, because I can’t say it has impeded my ability to locate the app I’m looking for at a glance. I still locate it very quickly. I suppose it’s because the folders don’t stray too far from where you expect them to be.

I hope it’s something they keep working on with future versions of iOS. It’s time iOS had a better way at managing all the hundreds of apps we have and I believe App Library is a good start towards an alternative to pages of home screens that we have to manage ourselves. I don’t think it should ever replace the Home Screen, rather just augment it in sorting and managing our app libraries so the app we want is easier and more efficient to find.

I think much of this comes down to how we individually process, store, and recall information. I better identify and recognise my apps by their icon than their name. Take that tree icon next my Reddit app and dark sky for instance. I recognise the app as my animal crossing companion app from the icon. But I don’t remember what the app is called, so I wouldn’t instantly know what to search for in Spotlight to find it. Yet in App Library I can glance and identify it almost instantly.

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I’m 100% with you on this, IMO the app library is completely crap, they should at least make it so you can choose the default view of the library, categories or list.

The list has allowed me to remove a lot apps from home screen but still scroll through and find them easily if i want to, I still have 3 screens of organised apps, but I occasionally use the list.

I’d also like them to add options to toggle the visibility of screens in the shortcuts app. You can toggle it in jiggle mode so why not with shortcuts. I have a screen of apps I use for work, I’d love to be able to automate it so they hide outside of office hours or something of that ilk

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This would be great.

There’s already the ability to switch watch faces in this way so would be consistent with that to some degree.

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I was about to start a thread for this as I completely forgot about this one but as WWDC is just round the corner, what’s everyone hoping for?

iOS
Ability to toggle visibility of Home Screens through Shortcuts
Updates to Widgets (Interactvity, ability to move pre iOS14 widgets onto your home screen)
Updates to Weather - Incorporate some of the Dark Sky goodness
Updates to Home App

iPadOS
Theres a lot here that I’d like, I’ve wanted to replace my Mac with an iPad Pro for a while, now they have M1’s in them we’re closer to that goal, however, iPadOS is still far too restrictive. The biggest thing for me is being able to run things in the command line, most of my work relies on running the following in Terminal pretty much all the time: Compiling, Linting, Git, SSH etc. Until I can do that I can’t even think about switching which means it’s pointless investing in an iPad Pro for me.

I’d also like to be able to move apps and widgets anywhere on the homescreen.

My absolute dream would be to just move the current MacOS to iPad, it’d be pretty touch friendlyas it is anyway with the new UI

Apple TV
I’d like to see a whole redesign here personally, My Apple TV has been in the cupboard for a long time now as it’s redundant, there’s so many other devices now that do what it does and in some cases do it a lot better. I’ll be digging it out of the cupboard at the weekend so we can watch the second season of Trying but that’s only because the Apple TV app isn’t on Sky Q yet. It annoys me that I don’t want to use my Apple TV because I have Apple everything and everything else I use all the time… Phone, iPad, Watch, Laptop, Computer & HomeKit Devices. Yet somehow the Apple TV is just pointless to me

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This would be nice as the UI is very unintuitive and hard to use. Also, I’d like some visual changes to iOS, maybe some of the sweet, macOS neuomorphism

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Actual multi-tasking support would be good. I can’t leave a task running in an app and switch to an other, because it may stop etc. :frowning:

Love all of this, although it will take a ton to bring me back to the stock weather app.

Long time dark sky user, but have moved to carrot recently in anticipation of its death, and really loving that.

Unsure what else I want on iOS tbh but hoping they can surprise me with something good :grimacing:

If I get this for iPadOS I’ll be happy lol.

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If you have loads of HomeKit devices, why aren’t you using your Apple TV as a HomeKit hub?

That is a major use for it.

I agree with this, these changes would make a lot of people happy!

This is interesting, HomeOS

Apple ‘homeOS’ Mentioned in Job Listing Ahead of WWDC - MacRumors

My guess would be it’s the OS that will run the rumoured HomePod with screen type product.

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I’d love to see Apple use App Store guidelines to enforce streaming service integration with the TV app on iOS & tvOS, mainly just so I don’t have to use Netflix’s POS app to find content anymore.

Sadly, won’t happen with all the anti-trust stuff flying around at the mo.

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I’d guess this will likely start out as a rebrand of tvOS & “HomePodOS”. IIRC, the HomePod OS codebase was rebased to tvOS and away from iOS around 18 months ago.

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Be interesting to find out how Google have managed to integrate Netflix into the new Google TV whilst Apple have had no luck at all.