My wish list for a better iOS and a better MacOS X

24 May, 2026

Yesterday I experienced yet another of these ugly shortcomings in MacOS and that was the trigger I needed to air a few improvements I've in mind for a while with both iOS and MacOS.

1. I'll start with the trigger: I spent way too long to recover old data from OmniFocus.

Let's be clear: the only function of a backup is to be restored. Restoring data is all about availability¹ in terms of ACCESSIBILITY of the data to be restored and of the restore mechanism. With a personal computer, NOW is the unit of time to be aimed for.
In details, what went wrong in the whole process:

• Omnifocus' Show backups in Finder function didn't bring me to the place where my backups were saved... in 2022. Software upgrade shouldn't mean old backups amnesia. I found the location of the backups by looking in the Ominigroup website. Eventually I found a gruelling path².
• Incidentally, I haven't stumbled on any information that would tell me where this app stores my data. I didn't find it in the usual places: Documents, Application Support, the Application Package itself... Grrrr.
• The backup path contains multiple versions of the same file with a date in the file name. It's MS-DOS era backups. Omnigroup didn't care about leveraging TimeMachine or using in-file incremental changes like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. It would be passable if only the app had brought me to the right location for the backups.
• Once I found the files, I used the dates in order to narrow down the period of the project I was interested in – a few months –, and then I went through each of the files in this period in order to manually record the changes I made in the actions in this project.
• I came out of the rabbit hole successful, but at least two hours had passed by, and that is NOT acceptable to me when dealing with restoring something I typed and saved.
• Before these two hours, I had a rather good opinion of Omni's skills, but the experience highlighted some big holes.

2. That experience means that Apple's App Store doesn't do its job in terms of enforcing usability guidelines, or that Apple' software engineering is not producing strong usability and software architecture guidelines.

• Enforcing usability and software architecture guidelines were the main tasks of the iOS App Store when it started.
• Then it became a money machine, and lost its focus.

3. Please Apple, make personalities of MacOS and iOS without any AI, or give me ways to switch AI off completely.

• iOS used to be built on MacOS – and may still be – because MacOS is an operating system that can have several personalities: a personality for laptops, for desktop machines, for smartphones, for watches...
• Therefore it's not a big deal to ask for having the bloody AI agents outside of the operating system. Please put the eye candy with the eye candy, and let the operating system be.
• And speaking of operating system, I haven't seen any improvement since Snow Leopard in 2009 when your guys introduced kick-ass libdispatch. When is the next big thing?

4. I wish that the Xcode IDE, Instruments, or the analyzer would help out with memory management in a concurrent programming context.

• But nope: on that topic we're stuck in 2008, in pre-libdispatch era.
• The more cores are added to the processors, the more the feature is needed when programming in C.
• And for those of you who wonder, C is still the fondamental language on top of assembly. No Python or other toy-programming language will replace C anytime soon in that spot. Tell the people who dream seeing Python doing low-level stuff to go back in the 80s with BASIC's peek and poke.

5. Still on the development topic and the 80s vein, I wish that I didn't have to confirm that I agree to let that app access my files, especially when that app is the latest compilation of the software I work on.

• Apple! Stop trying to protect myself against myself like Windows CE used to do!
• This is not security: this is dumb hindrance.

6. Please bring back documentation to the Operating System.

• It has become opaque to an unprecedented point, as if your engineering had turned to security through obscurity.
• There are many tasks that I would have delegated to a MacMini back in the days, but today I delegate an awful amount of things to Orange PIs and hosted VPS. It's funny that the OS of a VPS is in fact more accessible and documented than the OS of the machine on which I work on. Pity.

7. Please open Siri as to allow programmers – then users – to insert new vocabulary in Siri's actionable dictionary and connect this vocabulary with apps around.

• Siri without this feature is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Today, Siri cracks nuts. And not that well.
• I believe the future of personal computing is to be able to add personal assistants in user land with full on capability to interact with the apps around.
• Yes there are security issues to deal with, but that's not because it's complicated that it shouldn't be done.
• Sandboxing every single app won't help with that concept. By the way... sandboxing was never the solution. It was an easy fix, but not a long term solution. If you can't get your head out of your *ss quickly enough, the NextStep story should happen again.
• It probably means that AppleScript needs to evolve, instead of slowly dying from inadequacy.

8. Please remove Apple Incompetent Assistive Interference from Notes:

• Get the automatic conversion stuff out of the App, or make it an on/off preference, or make it a note-specific on/off preference. It interferes with my recipes – I store my recipes in Notes for years and it works very well for me. By the way, who is the guy who decided to convert cups in recipes that use only volumes (where no conversion are useful nor helpful) and in any other recipes without asking which is my reference for cup amongst the 8 possible different measures for a cup?
• Why did you think that calculating the result to a plain text calculation I typed, should replace the developed calculation by the result? Why? If I typed it I want it! Otherwise I could have done that in the Calculator app myself!

9. Other wishes for Notes:

• Why isn't there the ability to make links between Notes? And a back button with it please. That would be useful.
• Note that I am not asking for Tabs. Your latest liquid eye candy makes the Mobile Safari experience quite awful (amongst others), and the inconsistencies between the PDF reader. Books, and Safari in the treatment of tabs makes me think there are too many artists in the software department. Make it useful, and make it helpful. If you can't improve usefulness and helpfulness, then don't change anything. Thank you.
• Why isn't there a function that offers the content of my cut clipboard when I type something similar in another place just after the cut? That would be assistance 101. Really.
• And my darling wish: please add a Paste as plain text function. I am tired of removing extra line breaks and tabs from the recipes I copy on the web, before being able to edit them to re-order the steps in a sensible way, and fix ingredients and quantities. I also need this function for when I start compiling knowledge about a certain topic: the formatting is in the way.

10. The latest liquid user interface is full of basic glitches never seen since the beta versions of MacOS on 68000, e.g. the mouse pointer not changing to show that the edge of the window can be grabbed and moved.

• I have a permanent feeling of not getting the appropriate feedback from the UI.

11. Weather App

• Two things about weather forecasts: they are more wrong every day that passes, and public forecast accuracy is better for densely populated areas (where food is consumed) than for country side (where food is produced).
• So, for me and for years now, the weather app's forecasts are always wrong for temperature by a few degrees and mostly wrong for precipitations.
• What is the purpose of offering me to report forecast errors when you guys don't provide feedback about how it benefits me?

12. Photos

• Would you please add controls to the photo browser as to cluster the pictures by location within the chronological view? That would save space and improve readability of the picture space.

13. There are more indeed

• It was just a quick dump from what I had encountered over the last few weeks may be.

Footnotes