1/21/21
9:00 am

New Features and Fixes Apple Needs To Bring To The Mac

Here's my list of simple software features that Apple needs to bring to macOS and apps. Many of these come from years of taking user questions and hearing the same requests over and over.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me talk about some things that Apple needs to fix and new features they need to add on the Mac.
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So today I've got a little something different for you. Instead of a tutorial on how to do something on your Mac I want to talk about some things that Apple needs to change in the software. A lot of these come from repeated requests I get from people over the last fourteen years for features they would like to see. After hearing them a hundred times I really think Apple needs to consider adding some of these features or making some of these fixes. 
Let's start with a new one. In macOS Big Sur when you get a notification, say a calendar event triggers an alert, you have the ability to Snooze it. But you don't really have any options. All you can do is click the Snooze button. When you do that it simply goes and adds another alert that's 9 minutes after the first one. I think there needs to be more options and more robust. In the past you got to choose from a few different times. I think you should be able to do that and customize those times. So one person may choose 5, 10, or 15 minutes. Another person may want to do a hour or five hours. As a matter of fact, I don't think it should just be a feature of Calendar events. I think it should be built into the Notifications system. So not only can you snooze an event like this but anything, a reminder or a notification coming from another app. Anything you get there will be a Snooze button and you can choose from a customizable list of times.
Now speaking of Snooze here's something I've long wanted to see in Mac Mail. That's the ability to snooze an email message. So, you get a message like this and it's something you want to deal with but you don't have time right now. So you want to push it back a hour. You should be able to choose a snooze option and then it's gone from your inbox, maybe it's in a special folder here called Snooze or Delay, and then it returns to your inbox at that time. I'd also like to see the ability to delay sending email messages. So if you have an email message that you know you need to respond to at the end of the day, instead of having to wait until the end of the day to respond to it or creating a draft and remembering to send it, you can respond to the email and then, maybe up here, set a time and at that time the email would be sent. One last feature for Mail. I would love to see the ability to bounce an email. Sometimes when you get a particularly nasty piece of spam, instead of just ignoring it it would be great to hit a button and then Mail sends a response back just like it was a server that couldn't find that email address. 
Next, the Reminders app. What I would love to see in Reminders is a way to Export From or Import Into Reminders. It seems ridiculous that you could have a list like this and say now I decide I want to make it a note or I just want to put it in a Text file. There's no way to select all these items and then drag and drop it somewhere else. It looks like you can but it doesn't work. You can't even drag it into TextEdit. It doesn't work there either. The only thing dragging works for is actually moving the reminders. Now in the past year we've seen a lot of people moving meetings, classes, even just get togethers to online platforms like Zoom. Sometimes FaceTime is used but FaceTime only has a tiny portion of the features that an app like Zoom does. It would be great if Apple could actually build some of those features into FaceTime so we could sometimes use it for group gatherings. For instance the person that started the FaceTime Chat should be able to make themselves, say, the leader of the meeting or the teacher for a class. So then a really big thing, that should be relatively simple, is the ability to Share your screen in FaceTime. Without that you really couldn't use FaceTime for much more than just a personal conversation. One other feature I would love to see is the ability to show a photograph. So many times when I'm talking to another family member or a friend I want to show them a photo. There's just no way to do that in FaceTime. I have to send them that in a message while we're chatting on FaceTime. I should be able to click a little photo button and then change my image to the image of the photo temporarily so they could see what I'm talking about. 
Now one of the things that always bugs me about Safari is when you try to view a RSS feed in Safari you get this. If the website developer is smart enough they'll actually include some special tags in here that will make this render correctly in Safari. But plain RSS feeds won't show. But here's what you see if you go to the exact same URL in Chrome. It recognizes that it just can't just display the information but it just puts the text of the feed up there. Which in a lot of cases is good enough. If I just want to see what's in a RSS feed or grab a link out of it this is all I need. It's frustrating that Safari won't even display this. But Apple could go just a little bit further and actually display RSS feeds in a kind of nice format. It wouldn't be really hard for them to do and it would actually make RSS feeds usable on the Mac again. 
Another thing I'd like to see is them to continue to build the Start Page functionality. Make it more useful. Notice how frequently Visited gives you these previews whereas Favorites just gives you the icons. But in Frequently Visited you can actually Control click on it and change the view as icons. You should be able to do the opposite with Favorites and change to View as Previews. You should be further able to customize what's in here. Maybe add in more custom section instead of just Favorites. You can add another Bookmarks folder for instance. 
Now the Preview app is a very powerful app that a lot of people don't use enough. You could do all sorts of cool things in it like adjusting images, adding shapes and text in Markup. The one thing you can't do in Preview is create a new document. You can Create New From Clipboard if you have a piece of a PDF or an image in the Clipboard. You can open an existing document. But you can't just start with a blank slate. So then a lot of tasks begin with copying a white box and using that with New From Clipboard to create a new Preview window which then you could paste things into and then up markup tools to build an image. It would be great if there was just a new item here just New. It just prompts you for an empty PDF or the size of the image and it would just create that. Then you could start from there. It would be a nice step for making Preview a more capable image editing tool. 
I love how the Maps app just keeps getting better and better with every version of macOS. But what is really needed to be added next is multi-point routes. Right now you can go from one point to another but you can't add a third point in-between. 
One of the most common complaints I hear about the books app is there is no way to store you books especially large audio book files on an external drive. You go to Books, Preferences there's no option here for saying where you want the files to be stored. The Music and TV apps, although very similar to the Books app, have in Preferences the ability, under Files, to say Copy Files to the Media Folder or Don't Copy Them. Having the same ability in Books would allow people to keep large audio book collections on an external drive, have this unchecked, and then have them all listed there in their Books Library. 
Now how about Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Well, I have one wish for all of them. That is the ability to add links to other documents. Right now you could add links to webpages. You can add links to other parts of that document. But you can't link to an external document. You should be able to do this. You should be able to link from one Pages document to another Pages document or from a Keynote presentation to a Numbers document. In fact you really should be able to actually just include a local file link to anything that you want. So if you wanted to have a link in a Numbers spreadsheet to a video file you could do it. 
Now specifically in Numbers one thing I hear about all the time that you just can't do but would be so cool if you could is to have Dynamic Pop-up Menus. So here I've got Cells that are set to be the Pop-up Menu format. You have to hard code in the options for the pop-up menu. So when you click here those are the options you get. But what you should be able to do is, in addition to this, you should be able to specify a range of cells somewhere, or perhaps an entire column, and that is what appears in the Pop-up Menu. So if this changes then the values here change as well. There's so much that could be done if this simple feature is added. 
Now in iMovie I think it's obvious what needs to be added next. That's the ability to have multiple layers. Right now you can add one video for a cutaway or picture-in-picture on top of the main timeline. But you can't add another one. To be able to add two, three, or four could be really important especially if you want to have graphics that appear over the video. In addition to that there should be a new title added that's as simple as can be. Just a plain piece of text that you can have anywhere that you want. Something kind of like this but the idea being that you can select it and move it anywhere. Then also add multiple ones at the same time. That will allow you to add captioning, pop-up text, and all sorts of things like that using special character symbols and emoji to get some interesting results in iMovie with just a little bit more than with what you can do right now.
My one wish for Photos is to be able to expand iCloud Library functionality to share an entire iCloud Library with somebody else. Perhaps just somebody in your Family Sharing Group. Right now, of course, you can create a Shared Album like this. Share a few photos to it with somebody else. But I think it's kind of weird when you return from say a family trip and you have your photos that you're the only one that can see all of those photos. Not your spouse, not the rest of your family. There should be a way to grant permission for another Apple ID to view your entire iCloud Photo Library. Even if it's just at iCloud.com but ideally it should appear here on the left of Photos and they should be able to browse through it. This is the one way where the Photos app falls short over just old fashion printed photo albums. You could have them sitting out there in your house and anybody in the family could look through them. You can't do that with the Photos App because nobody but you has permission to see your photos. 
Now let's look at some system things. One thing that never used to bother me but now kind of does is if you go to About This Mac and then you go to Storage you'll get a readout like this and it will show things like Documents and Other. Now it's important to understand that these are not locations. When it says Documents it doesn't mean your documents folder. It's easy for people to make that mistake. After all there's a folder called Documents and this says documents. So you think I have 129 gigs in my Documents folder. But that's not the case! This is a category. You can have documents in your Documents folder and any other place on your hard drive. Then people take that and when they see Other they think Other is also a location. Where is Other. Where is all this stuff that's in Other. These are Categories. Once you understand that and understand that this isn't really useful for deleting things off your drive, this is just giving you a big picture overview, then it makes sense. But I've seen too many people ask about this and too many people don't understand it, that it finally has convinced me that Apple should change how this works. Instead of showing what is on your hard drive they should focus on where. They should show locations. Documents should show what's on your Documents folder. Then there should be Desktop folder, Pictures, Movies. By default that list should show you locations on your drive and how much space they're taking up, not categories of files. I think that would be a lot easier for most people to understand and use.
Another thing I think needs improving is Spotlight in terms of the customization. So if you search for something with Spotlight in the Spotlight menu, like this, you're going to see a variety of different results. That can be controlled by going to System Preferences, Spotlight and you get to say what's in there and what isn't. But I think there needs to be more of these categories. Things like Siri Suggestions should be broken down into exactly what type of suggestions. There should be more file types and different things to choose from. In addition to that, and most importantly, you should be able to rearrange these and change the order so you can say what you want to see at the top and what goes further down the list. 
So that takes me to my last idea which goes full circle back to Notifications. In the Notification Center you've got these widgets. The widgets are great. I fully expect that Apple is going to be adding more widgets and improving the ones it has as macOS continues to mature. But what I would love to see there is something that used to be included in the old Dashboard widgets. Which is to take a section of a website and include that as a widget. So, for instance, you could grab this part or the MacMost site, which includes an image and a link to the current video, and then have that appear here as a widget in the Notification Center. Then also going back to RSS feeds again it would also be great to have a RSS widget. Perhaps it should just be a part of the News app. It would be great in the News app to be able to add a RSS feed and have that appear instead of just picking from the large selection of things that you could find when you search. Then whether it's from a RSS feed or from a news source that's in Apple News you can then create a widget, like what we've got now for a topic, but it's actually a particular news source or feed. Then have a large widget for that appear in the sidebar just like the current news widgets.
So now it's your turn. What fixes and new software features would you like to see added to a future version of macOS. Let me know in the Comments below.

Comments: 28 Responses to “New Features and Fixes Apple Needs To Bring To The Mac”

John

4 years ago

Hi Gary -- Junk control in Mail is frustrating. It would be greatly improved if I could click a confirming button while in the Junk folder that would forever banish the sender to the Trash. I use Rules now, but why not make the process faster and more satisfying? Thanks for trying to engage Apple to work on user complaints.

Howard Brazee

4 years ago

1. I so very much agree with you—I’d love to share my Photos App data completely between my iMac and my wife’s iMac. (We do have iCloud Family). I keep trying various synchronizing services.
2. Big Sur should make it easier to sort mail (the way earlier versions do)
3. I want to edit my health data on my Mac. It should be synchronized with all of my devices.
4. I want my Mac to shut down at its set time even if it’s waiting for me to respond that it’s waiting to synchronize my iPad. If it

James McCormick

4 years ago

In Excel and Word you can "Print Area" that has been highlighted. I have not found that capability with Numbers or Pages.

Mike

4 years ago

Users can't increase Reminders' font size on Macs & the current font size is extremely small.
On IOS, the font is much bigger & easy to read.

Will

4 years ago

I would like to see the ability to add words and names to the dictation feature (the mic beside the space bar). This is a feature that was in Dragon Dictate. You used to be able to 'train' the dictation software and, indeed, in Dragon Dictate you could enter or create specialist dictionaries to reflect your specialist concerns. And, if I was being really picky, I would like play back dictation to help with proof reading.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Will: You can do this. System Preferences, Accessibility, Voice Control, Vocabulary.

Tom Walker

4 years ago

Here is one I and many others have been wishing for some time, for the iMac -- a backlit keyboard like the ones on the MacBooks.

Erron

4 years ago

I'd like to see Voice Control upgraded to where it actually works. At the moment it's like Dragon Dictate in the early versions, i.e. faster and far more accurate to just type the damn thing! I can't upgrade to Big Sur because Dragon Dictate 6.0.8 - the last released, and only feasible version that works properly, is problematic after Catalina, where I've got it working just fine now.

Rasto

4 years ago

Would be nice if one could split a cell in Numbers.

P. Deal

4 years ago

Thanks, Gary, for all your knowledge and how clearly you share it. My absolute pet peeve with IOS is that you cannot make a shortcut on the Home Screen for a setting. I wear hearing aids which function as my Bluetooth heardphones. I often must resync with blue tooth so have to go into settings to do it. I would love an easier way to make a shortcut app which seems so complex to use. I would be a happy camper if it was just a simple button on my Home Screen of my iPhone or iPad.

rusty

4 years ago

Rasto: In Numbers you can merge and unmerge cells, and there is even a Text to Columns option (although it's actually called Import Settings). Import Setting can split a column into multiple columns but that option is poorly implemented and awkward at best. This is something that I really wish Apple would fix.

Carol Wardrop

4 years ago

I would like to name people in a photo. When I bought a new mac, the names appeared to be on another layer and moved from the original spot. I could not move the circles to their original spot to rename.

Steve

4 years ago

Dynamic pop ups is a must in Numbers.
I use Numbers all the time and coming from an advanced Excel background would love to see Smart Catagories enhanced.
At the moment it’s limited to rows. So for example you could ceate a category for Month and a category for Region within that. It would be so much more useful if one of those categories could be across the column heading. Creating a crosstab/pivot table look.

nick

4 years ago

Not sure if this is just happening in my computer. and it may be too specific an example, but the Contacts app in Big Sur seems to add names and emails without me realizing it. I never have Siri turned on so it's not based on suggestions from Siri. If it's a bug I hope it gets fixed.

Phil

4 years ago

one thing is certain for me:
I don't need a "new" version of the OS every year ...
I would prefer Apple to fix existing bugs faster.
By the way, IMHO, they can abandon FaceTime or else, it must be made cross-platform
but I think it's too late ...
Similarly for RSS feeds. There are other good applications.
Concerning other apps, personally, I would like to be able to add Notes or Tags in Mail.

Jean-Claude

4 years ago

No specific request, but a comment about software « evolution ».
Software get bloated by including every possible gimmick while useful features are taken out or dumbed down.
This has generated a huge tutorial industry (no offense Gary).
Precious time is lost to relearning everyday tools.
Apple started out simple and user friendly.
Big Sur is now harassing us with constant « allow access » popups.
Remember this: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cltj3zipx7w70kb/mac%20vs%20pc%20security.mp4?dl=0

Rick Grossman

4 years ago

I almost hesitate to say, but it is easier to make menu selections in Windoze:
Alt-1st letter of menu
letter highlighted
Continue with work

Mac:
Remove hand from keyboard. Grab Mouse. Move mouse to exact spot (may require two moves).
Click
Move mouse down to the exact two mm of space.
(If you have to go to a third level, carefully stay within the lines to move mouse over to the next level
Clilck
Move hand back to kayboard and place correctly

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Rick: You can do that on a Mac too. The trigger is Control+F2 (or what you choose in System Preferences, Keyboard, Shortcuts, Keyboard, "Move focus to the menu bar").

Gordon Stallings

4 years ago

The People feature of Photos has become buggy since Apple added the option to store photos into iCloud. Now I have two and sometimes three different sets of photos of the same person under identical names and also the names are no longer alphabetized. Facial recognition seems to have been turned off, but I still need to be able to tag persons to their names so that I can locate all photos of a person.

Barbara Hooper

4 years ago

In iPhoto I could caption photos and when I made a slideshow with those photos, the caption would stay with the photo. Now in Photos I have to use Markup to caption a photo in a slideshow, basically making me caption photos twice.

Craig Miller

4 years ago

My suggestions are 1. A column browser view in TV app, same as in the old iTunes app. 2. Ability to lock cells in Numbers to prevent accidental edits. 3. Restore the calendar in control centre

Alston Ray

4 years ago

1. Booting up an iMac — can Apple automatically direct the keyboard to the login window?
2. Pages — the search window seems to work differently from other apps, and only successfully completes the search if the whole word is correctly typed with caps etc.

Smith John

4 years ago

I would like to see smooth keyboard scrolling available in Safari.

Jean-Claude

4 years ago

I would like to see a "focus" or "writing" view in Pages. One click and all sources of distraction are gone (tool bars, menu bars, everything). All you have is text, like when writing on paper. Something like Nisus Writer Pro has. I'm not 100% sure, but I remember having that functionality in Pages 09 and it disappeared. It seems simple enough to bring it back. Do you remember if that feature was indeed included in Pages 09?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Jean-Claude: See my video https://macmost.com/creating-a-good-writing-environment-in-pages.html

Jean-Claude

4 years ago

Thanks for the link to the video. True, I can get to an uncluttered view in several clicks, but my feature request is to be able to get to it in one click.

Joe Pusai

4 years ago

I seem to have a tough time just doing a simple "move to" whenever I get a new file and want to put it into the appropriate file folder. I end up dragging it around over many folders and usually accidentally dropping it somewhere that I didn't mean to... and must then go searching for it. Am I missing something or is this another to be added to Apple fix list?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Joe: Try opening the destination in one Finder window and having that ready before you start dragging from another Finder window. If you having trouble with using the mouse or trackpad for such operations, you can always select the file, Command+C to copy it. Then go to the destination and Command+Option+V to move it there.

Comments Closed.

New Features and Fixes Apple Needs To Bring To The Mac

Comments: 28 Responses to “New Features and Fixes Apple Needs To Bring To The Mac”

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