Newsletter Issue #653: Hopes Grow for Possible iOS 6 Changes
June 4th, 2012During that widely published interview this week at the D10 conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook was coy when asked about future products. He also promised that Apple is going to double down on secrecy, so you were left with a few bread crumbs, and vague hints at what’s coming.
This is part of the Apple playbook, so I didn’t expect to hear anything about, say, iOS 6, although you just know it will get heavy play at the Worldwide Developers Conference when it convenes later this month. The real question is what 100 or so new features will Apple introduce? Will they make major changes in the user interface? These are serious questions, and the possibilities are rich.
If you use previous OS introductions as a guide, Apple will concentrate on a handful of “tent pole” features that they regard as being the most significant. Or the ones that are designed to get the most play in the media.
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Sorry, Gene, but I think the wow factor of Notifications is pretty limited. It would be a lot more impressive if Growl didn’t already exist, but Growl does exist and works just fine, thank you. iOS features like Game Center and better Facebook integration? Feh. That’s definitely stuff for the under-thirty crowd. Apple doesn’t appear to have even dreamt of doing the one thing that would make me sit up and take notice, bringing SIRI to the Mac (and why exactly not?). What else would grab me? Things like taking greater advantage of the graphic processor, getting Grand Central to really do some heavy lifting, better support for multiple displays. Not a word about any such forward progress, and let’s not even dream about a Finder overhaul or a modernized formatting of storage devices.
As for virtual desktops, I’ve tried them all and none works the way I want: something that can be set up on a project-by-project way as well as an app-by-app way (i. e. that can gracefully handle the same app. displaying different windows in different desktops), something that is genuinely stable in that it will reliably keep apps and windows where you want them, and something that can remember these placements across reboots. That would be a useful tool. Anything less is just a toy, and Apple’s implementations have not been any better than third-party ones that have been available for years.
Bottom line: so far I haven’t been given a single valid reason for upgrading. The price of admission isn’t really the money, it’s the hassles and headaches of broken applications you get with every OS upgrade, and I don’t see any compelling reason to face these this time around.