UPDATE: Head to the bottom of this article to check out the CEO of McGraw-Hill totally outing Apple on their Tablet! It’s confirmed, people!

As we all know, tomorrow Apple is having a keynote. They are, as usual, keeping totally tight lipped as to what will be announced, but we are all pretty damn sure that it will be tablet hardware. However, hopefully they will do some software refreshes as well, and the following is what I want to see.

iPhone

Let’s be honest, here, people. The iPhone home screen is pretty difficult to get around. If you have lots of pages of apps, chances are you have to go flipping and flipping and flipping to find the one that you want. For instance, if I want to find one of my most used apps, “iFartz 2010 Biggest Evar Farts Application”, I need to flick to page 5 of my apps. And this takes time, time which might make my classy little joke a little late. And NOBODY want’s to make a joke late, right? This is what I’m thinking. You know Exposé on your Mac? I want to be able to do that for iPhone pages. If you are on any home screen, I want to be able to use three fingers to flip up or down, and then a 3 x 3 grid of homescreens will be displayed. I tap which one I want to head into, and boom. Easy access to “iFartz 2010 Biggest Evar Farts Application” along with all my other apps. Of course, if you had any more then 6 home screens, you could scroll down to see them. But if you have more then 6 home screens, you might need to get checked out. That’s 54 apps you have there.

[EDIT: Holy Crap, somebody pointed out that Steven Troughton-Smith, mentioned further down in the article, has developed THIS EXACT THING for Jailbroken iPhones! Apple! HIRE THIS MAN!]

While I’m on the subject of apps, I want some sort of auto-sort for apps I download. I want to say that homescreen 5 is my games screen, and have any games I download sent there automatically. Of course, this may get difficult when I fill up that screen, but it could then give me the option to dedicate another screen to games, which would be inserted, pushing screen 6 to screen 7 and creating a new blank screen 6, ready and waiting to receive my new game.
I want multitasking. Or if I don’t get multitasking, I want some sort of inbuilt push system. I want my RSS feeds to automatically update in Newsie, dammit! (More coming on Newsie in a later blog post.) While I’m at it, I want the Notes application to be able to sync over the air, like all the other MobileMe Push apps on the iPhone.

How about stacks? You know, those things that nobody I know uses that Mac OS X people can use on the dock? Basically, you click on it and a big drawer opens up, allowing you to place any application or document in it for easy access. Let’s have that on the iPhone! I want to be able to put a stack on the bottom bar of my iPhone, (a “cool games” one, for instance) and then just tap it so it springs open, allowing me open any app with ease. That would be nice. In fact, an Irish developer called Steven Troughton-Smith has developed a Stacks application for Jailbroken iPhones which is pretty much perfect. Apple! Buy it off him!

You know what would be really cool? I have my iPhone sitting here, next to my Macbook Pro. It’s on the same Wi-fi network, and has bluetooth. It can connect wirelessly in these two manors. How about I can send a text message from my Macbook Pro and have it routed through the iPhone to be sent? Hell, how about the laptop doesn’t even need to be on the same wifi network, but sends it over the internet to be sent, Push style, to the iPhone, which will then send it on. That would be spiffy.

iWork

There is one thing that pisses me off about iWork.com, Apple’s cloud document service. You can’t edit from the cloud. Take a look at the likes of Google Docs, and I imagine that Apple could bite a fairly huge chunk of this market from Google if they were to give cloud editing a shot. In fact, how about when you buy iWork and own MobileMe, we get iWork webapps? Online versions of Pages, Keynote and Numbers that integrate into your offline version. Sure, they might not be able to pull all the fancy moves that the desktop applications can, but it would be pretty damn useful! Every time I save a document, I want iWork to, in the backround, update the cloud version of the file, and visa versa. You can even use my MobileMe space, if you want! There is a Documents folder in there for something, after all!

A big problem with iWork is that the documents are not easily viewable by people who are on Windows, or Mac users who haven’t bought iWork. Of course, you can always do a little jiggling about with the file and fish out a PDF (more on this rather cool process at TUAW.com) but I want something more. Apple, after all, like their stuff to “Just Work”. So how about, when the file is opened on a computer which doesn’t have iWork or is a Windows machine, a really barebones integrated PDF viewer is opened instead, and opens up this PDF file? Sure, there is no editing ability, but it allows me to send files to anybody, and have them viewed by anybody! Perfect cross-platform document sharing!

MobileMe

MobileMe doesn’t have a huge number of problems. As I mentioned before, I want to be able to sync Notes.app over the air.

HOWEVER, one huge problem that MobileMe has is iDisk. Let’s not mince our words. In comparison to services like Dropbox, it is utterly shite. It stalls all the time and it takes ages to update. It stops working for no given reason and, most suprisingly for a product that is supposed to be “embedded into the core of the operating system”, we can’t share files directly from the finder. Dropbox, on the other hand, is utter perfection. Seriously Apple. Buy Dropbox, or develop something that is even almost equal to it. If you do, iDisk will become perfect, and much more useful. Hell, what would also be nice is Apple giving us unlimited storage (with a MobileMe subscription, of course) and making some sort of cloud based Time Machine. The likes of Mozy would NOT be happy with that, but we are already paying more for MobileMe then for an unlimited Mozy account, so I suspect that Apple can afford it. Sure, limit the amount of non backups we can keep, but unlimited backups (for, say, a 30 day period) over iDisk would be lovely. And make it real easy to order a complete restore. Maybe send it out on a USB harddrive or something. In fact, just copy Backblaze for the restore process.

iLife

I have no idea what I would want in an iLife refresh. Much much faster iPhoto loading, maybe. Oh! Since I have already requested unlimited MobileMe space, how about all my iPhoto pictures automatically get sent to the MobileMe cloud? Build in some social network ability, and BOOM! Apple have just knocked Flickr out of the market, when it comes to Macs, anyway. The MobileMe iPhoto gallery is cute, but not really good for sharing with friends.

While I’m on a “Move Everything to the Cloud” rant, how about putting our iTunes libraries up there? You just bought Lala, a serious contender in music streaming, so you have the tools in front of you. Why not allow me listen to my iTunes Library wherever I am?

So, in general, I want Apple to cloudify everything. Of course, this would make most of the Mac population totally kill their bandwidth (I only get 100gb up/down each month) so that would have to be sorted out.

What do YOU want to see announced tomorrow?

UPDATE Some silly CEO has outed Apple on their tablet. Oh-Oh…

Tags: Apple, apps, dropbox, iLife, iPhone, iWork, MobileMe, mozy, Software, stacks

For the last four or so years, I have been doing all my school essay work on my Mac. For anything in English or French, I use the wonderfully capable Pages, but for Irish, I have to use OpenOffice, simply because Pages refuses to allow me add an Irish Spellcheck. Now, I know that there are people out there who swear by the piece of java abomination that is OpenOffice, and I will likely never be able to persuade them that the rest of the world really isn’t that impressed with it.  On a Mac it runs rather like a car might if it’s engine was replaced by a small boy who hasn’t been fed in days. It is just sluggish. It crashes. And worst of all, it seems to just fall asleep at random times which stop me from saving it.

But I had to use it, you see. I needed my Irish Spellcheck!

Well, yesterday, I got so annoyed at this that I spent another 20 minutes of my life trying to find a solution (bringing my time spent in this area up to a few days, I imagine). I failed. Not put off, I decided to make use of my AppleCare agreement, and rang up Apple. I got a wonderful man named Magnus on the other end, who was friendly, polite, but said that he personally couldn’t seem to find a way to add a language pack into Pages. It just didn’t seem to be a thing that could be done. He even went to find some of his Irish Associates who confirmed that they had never manage to get Irish Spellcheck up and running.

So, we spent a fair bit of time discussing all the different possibilities. Suddenly, he told me that he had found an application originally developed in 2001 that allows you add any language that you wish to Mac OS X. HURRAH! It was called CocoASpell and the developers claimed that it worked on Leopard. Of course, me being on Snow Leopard, I would be taking a bit of a risk. But he told me to give it a shot anyway, and then sent me an email with various links and things explaining how it could be done. Long story short, it worked. Magnus: You are my new IT hero. I want to buy you a drink. He left the phonecall by saying “Well, us here at AppleCare learnt something today! Thanks for calling!”. What a charming chap. Whoever trains the AppleCare employees needs to get working on the rest of the IT Support industry.

So, here is a step by step on how to get Irish spellcheck (or 73 other languages) working across your Mac, in any application. Exciting, eh?

1. Head to http://cocoaspell.leuski.net/ and download the version of CocoASpell that you need. This is broken into if you own an Intel Mac or a Power PC. If you have bought your Mac in the last 4 or so years, you are Intel. Once you have it downloaded, run the file to install the application. Nothing overly hard here.
2. Head on over too ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/aspell/dict/ where you will see the list of possible spellchecks. Irish is marked “ga”. If you want to get any other languages, work out their two letter code. Click.
3. The instruction sheet that comes with CocoASpell reads “I would suggest you choose the dictionary using the following rule: prefer files that start with “aspell6″ over files that start with “aspell5″ over files that start with simply “aspell”. If you are interested in more details about the differences, see the README file at the ftp site.” so following that logic, you will need to download aspell5-ga-4.3-0.tar.bz2.
4. Once the download is complete, unzip the file, and drag the resulting folder into /Library/Application Support/cocoAspell.
5. Head into System Preferences, and on the bottom row, click “Spelling.” Tick “Irish” in the box to the left of the pane, and off you go!

Now just head into your application of choice, and set the language settings to Irish! For instance, for Pages, open up the Inspector by clicking the blue circle with the I in it. Click the Text pane, then More, then look near the bottom to find the language selection.

Enjoy your new-found Irish Spellcheck! And throw out that copy of Open Office!

Update

And enterprising individual has released an Irish Spellcheck for the Mac, which looks like it will save you all the bother of ASpell. It is called MacLitriú and can be bought for a tenner (which is cheap, but not free) from http://www.snasta.com/maclitriu/ . I hope to be getting a review of this online in the near future!

Tags: Apple, dictionary, Gaeilge, Gaelspell, Irish, iWork, Keynote, Mac, Pages, Spellcheck