iOS 6 Feature Requests

iOS 6.0 arrives later in the year, probably at the same time as the next iPhone (rumoured to be announced on September 12th, name unknown but unlikely to be called "iPhone 5"). I've written before about features I would like added to iOS and each year a few of my requests are delivered. Here is this year's list.

First up, I want left and right cursor keys on the standard keyboard. Some applications (Diet Coda, for example) have these buttons and they save a fantastic amount of frustration and effort when trying to place the cursor - their presence effectively ends the need for repeated cursor placement attempts, allowing you quickly to correct placement errors caused by last minute movement as you lift your finger.

Personal hotspot, the ability to use wifi to share a data connection with other devices, is a very useful feature and it does exactly what you'd expect. I'd like to know more about the devices connecting to my phone, including their names, the amount of data they've used this session, length of time connected and so on. In essence, I want to know which devices are connecting to my wifi and how they're using it.

It's not unusual for iOS to ask for your Apple or other password. Unfortunately, because the dialogues can pop up according to iOS's needs rather than in response to user actions, it isn't always possible to see why the password is needed. To fix this, login dialogue boxes should clearly show which services they work for, maybe by putting an icon in the window so that it is easy to tell that you logging in to FaceTime rather than iMessages.

A recurring favourite on these lists, widgets on the home or lock screen have long been a strong feature in Android and it would be nice to see something similar in iOS. The ability quickly to review upcoming appointments, reminders, weather forecasts and even share prices would be most welcome, even if it meant relegating the familiar icons and folders to a second screen.

The notification centre introduced in iOS 5 went a long way toward delivering a decent system for notifications and was clearly a huge improvement over the previous implementation. That said, there are further improvements to be made before this feature could be considered complete.

We already know that Facebook integration is coming in iOS 6 (and as an update to Mountain Lion at around the same time) and this is most welcome (although it's unclear that posting more stuff to Facebook will actually improve anyone's life). Hopefully these features will enable cross platform contact management and unification because contact duplication can make contact lists unnecessarily long and difficult to use. It would be nice to have improved contact de-duplication or merging features but I suspect these would sit better in a desktop app.

So that's my list for this year. My wish list of new hardware features will follow (probably next week). Thanks for reading.