Apple’s loose ends: How iOS 6 must make amends at WWDC
Next week is a huge week in the mobile space. Google will kick off its annual I/O developer conference, but not prior to Apple’s had its chance to wow the globe with a show of its personal: WWDC.
WWDC 2012 kicks off on Monday, with most believing that Apple will take the likelihood to show iOS 6 off to its developer collective. We’ve already been via what we want Apple to unveil, but there are a few additional loose ends, that have either been promised or hinted at, that Apple actually needs to address. These are as follows…
Siri SDK
Siri says some odd factors sometimes. Ask it to take down a note, for instance, and it will not tell you that it can’t it’ll tell you that it cannot “yet”. Same goes for creating contacts, taking images an downloading apps.
Without doubt, Apple’s going to expand on Siri - what’s left up in the air is when and to what extent Apple’s going to let Siri into the hands of developers. Having apps that can be controlled by voice will, in some circumstances, be a real revolution.
iOS widget SDK
Apple’s never laid out plans to contain widgets in the SDK, but hacks have proven that it is attainable to place non-Apple messages in the Notification Centre. In May final year, hackers managed to infiltrate the drop-down menu and replace a widget with the easy message “Hello World”.
It was a proof of possibility exercise, rather than an attempt to build anything valuable, but it says there’s a lot more possibility there than initially meets the eye – all Apple needs to do is consist of that extended functionality in the iOS SDK. That way, devs will be in a position to make suitable Notification Centre widgets, equivalent to those in Android.
Siri location services in the UK
We’ve been over this before, but Apple simply has to unleash Siri’s place-based services in the UK and elsewhere. At the moment it’s tied in with Yelp! in the US, but Tim Cook’s current musings that Apple is ‘doubling-down’ on Siri recommend that the company’s going to have something new to announce at WWDC.
It demands to: Apple’s Siri FAQ says that “Maps and neighborhood search support will be offered in additional nations in 2012.” Perhaps this’ll tie in with Apple’s new proprietary maps service?
Facebook integration
Twitter produced the cut in iOS 5, bringing the option to tweet images and messages from anywhere in the OS. This came as a result of a close relationship among the micro-blogging internet site and Apple during a time that the latter’s relationship with Facebook was very strained.
That is not the situation now. Tim Cook’s been full of praise for Facebook lately, and at the D10 conference last month he teased us with this:
“Anyone that has an iPhone or iPad, we want them to have the very best expertise with Facebook on these platforms. So remain tuned.”
Facebook not becoming involved although Twitter is smacks of half a job to us. iOS 6 has to get this fixed.
Do Not Disturb
Of all the new attributes that have filtered into the Developer Preview of Mac OS X Mountain Lion, the most intriguing is Do Not Disturb. Most of Mountain Lion’s tweaks are factors borrowed from iOS, but DND is an evolution that wants to make it is way back.
Head to the Notification Centre on a Mountain Lion-enabled Mac, and you will be in a position to turn on the Do Not Disturb mode, which halts all notifications and alerts, for if you’re watching a film or playing a game.
If iOS 6 does not have that function, we’ll eat our collective hats.
Offline Reading List
Similarly, the version of Safari in OS X now has a spot to retailer all the pages you’ve added to your Reading List. On iOS, you can transform the page you’re on into a Reader page, with the text and pictures stripped back to their most basic form, but there’s no way to save these anyplace to access later and offline.
It is not also much of a stretch to think that Apple will bring this across in iOS 6, but it’s an fascinating a single, because it would arguably suck a lot of company away from apps like Pocket.
More on iOS 6:
- iOS 6 and Siri: How Apple can fix the voice assistant
- Six issues we want to see in iOS 6
- The features iOS really should steal from Android
- Six approaches Mountain Lion puts an iPhone in your Mac
- Will you miss Google Maps?
Any much more loose ends that are crying out for a repair at WWDC subsequent week? Let us know your thoughts below…