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.



Check out New Features and Fixes Apple Needs To Bring To The Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.
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.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 800 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us to get exclusive content and course discounts.
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.Related Subjects: Mac Software (83 videos)
Related Video Tutorials:
Bring Out the Blue Sky In Your Pictures In Mac Photos ― 10 Useful Mac Features You May Not Know About ― 10 New iPhone Features In iOS 13 To Try Out Right Away ― 10 New macOS Catalina Features You May Not Know About