So Steve Jobs will be making another bunch of announcements about iOS 5 and the revamped iCloud tomorrow (Monday, 6 June, 2011) at Apple’s WWDC (Worldwide Developers’ Conference). The buzz is they’ll re-announce a cloud-based iTunes service that will try to lock Apple-philes into the iOS platform even further by holding captive their personal content and app libraries. I’d rather Apple’s “stickiness” was a great user interface and brilliant functionality that continually improves faster than the competition. So they can achieve that, I’d first like to see Apple make some really basic fixes to iOS:

1. Non-modal notifications – let’s face it, the iPhone’s notifications suck!  They remind me of old-school modal dialog boxes in early versions of Windows … when someone sends you a text or FB status update it locks the screen with a useless blue box.  And if you have password protection turned on, it disappears when you unlock the screen so you can’t even click through to the underlying app.  Apple should take a leaf out of the later versions of Windows and have some kind of unobtrusive taskbar where notifications can appear, and/or slide in and out – and you get to choose how you’d like to be notified by app.

2. Active home screen – now that smartphones have more CPU and memory than the first generation iPhone, Apple should be able to create a more useful home screen (and lock screen/ saver) – they don’t have to copy the Tiles interface from Windows Phone 7, but they should explore cool ways for apps to present richer real-time information to you than just the no. of messages waiting to be read – e.g. first few lines of text of the messages, etc. (the Blackberry had that already some years ago!).  Of course, users who want the current home screen can always choose that 🙂

3. Easier password entry – in addition to a keyboard-like touchpad, allow password entry that could be done one-handed or even without looking at the screen – this was one of the great benefits of the Blackberry (as well as its much better keyboard input).  I doubt that the touchscreen is accurate or sensitive enough in this generation, but a fingerprint scan would be perfect.  Otherwise, iOS could recognize custom gestures.

4. Better CPU management – The battery capacity on iDevices is still not that great, so if you use a lot of apps, you must continually and manually optimize several things to stretch out each charge, e.g. close apps not in use, etc.  First and ideally, iOS should automatically manage apps to minimize battery usage (e.g. don’t let Google Maps and other GPS apps drain it all when in the background, etc.).  Second, there should be options you can set on how an app should behave, e.g. that it automatically closes when you switch away.  Third, a more intuitive way to manually close apps than double-clicking on the square button and holding down on the open app …

5. Easier Bluetooth (and other wireless antennae) management – Another drain on the battery (and potential security risk) is having Bluetooth turned on when it doesn’t need to be … there should be an easier way of turning them on and off than to go to Home, Settings, General, Bluetooth, On/Off, then double-click and go back to the app you were in (10 or so clicks – very unintuitive and non-user friendly).

6. Turn off App Store purchasing – you can’t accidentally buy something on the App Store as you need to enter your iTunes password.  However, if you have a toddler and you give them the iPhone/iPad, I guarantee they will find some way of getting to a purchase screen within 10 seconds, and then randomly enter passwords and lock you out of your iTunes account – plus they get frustrated because they’re no longer blowing up pigs in Angry Birds, or causing Talking Tom to fart.  Far better to have an easy way to lock out App Store purchasing altogether, and keep toddlers in the apps that hold their attention!

7. Multiple accounts – especially useful on an iPad, but even on an iPhone where I could pass the device to my toddler, I’d like to be able to ‘switch to’ another user account which could have personalized settings like #6 (App Store on/off), customized email accounts and family safety/ security features.

8. Untethered sync with PC – what’s with tethering your iPhone/iPad to a PC when you need to sync it with iTunes (e.g. when you want to sync music, or notes/journal items, or apps that aren’t downloading off the App Store?)  I’m assuming iCloud will help solve some of this, but really, there should be no reason for a USB tether at all.

9. Make Safari competitive – where can I begin?  How about tabbed browsing – we’re not in the 1990s any more!  And stop this religious war with Flash, if Flash really is that buggy then just put a subtle/ non-modal warning when users first use Flash, and let Adobe sort out of the bugs (it’s in their interest).  Users want Flash and HTML5 and iOS native apps – all getting on nicely together.  If you can’t make Safari a world-class browser, then just talk to Google or Mozilla about licensing Chrome or Firefox, I’m sure one of them will oblige, for a fee …

10. Allow apps to “take over” the in-built apps for common tasks – in that same vein, if I want to use Chrome or Firefox on my iDevice (assuming Google and Mozilla write iOS versions) I’d like it to completely replace Safari, just like their browsers can become the ‘default’ instead of IE on Windows.  And if I want to use Google Voice or Skype or other unified communications app, that should become a ‘default’ for Phone, Messaging, etc. rather than having to keep multiple apps running.

Discussion topic: I am fully aware some of these are business decisions for Apple which the are not likely to reverse any time soon unless forced to by the DoJ (e.g. #9 Flash, or #10 alternative default apps), but I’d love to hear how many of the above wishlist do you agree with?  Which other ideas would you add?  How many do you think Apple will implement, say, before 2011 is up?  (My guess is 3 or less, but let’s see …)

Jokersmiley’s iPhone App of the week: Onavo – it compresses all data on 3G/4G connections, which increases download speed and decreases bandwidth costs.  Who wouldn’t want this app?  AT&T and Verizon, for starters … But what a perfect feature for Apple/Google/Microsoft to add to iOS/Android/WP!