Our 2025 macOS and visionOS WWDC Wishes
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Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. I'm John Voorhees back in North Carolina and I've got Federico with me. Hey Federico. Hello John, how are you?

I'm doing really well. I've recovered from my trip. It was a fun trip, but it's good to be home and kind of getting caught up and back in the usual routine. But we are getting back on track with our wishlist episodes. We took a little break for the Airbnb interview. That was a lot of fun. We learned a lot about design. And we also learned that Airbnb wants to hire Federico, but we're not going to let him go. We're going to make him stick with Mac stories and

And we're going to talk today about our Mac OS and Vision OS wishes, which, you know, I've got a bit of a list. I've got a bit of a list here. You obviously got a longer list. I've been back on Mac OS for way, way, way shorter time than you. So obviously you have a longer list. I have some items in my list. But yeah, we're also going to talk about Vision OS. And yeah, I think it should be a fun episode. Why don't we get right into Mac OS?

Yeah. Let's start with something that I see is on both of our lists, which are permissions prompts. Oh, yeah. And this is not a new problem. It's been a problem for a couple of years. It's gotten worse. And

And now, reportedly, there's a new API that's going to do a similar thing that they have on iOS and iPadOS where you get permission prompts for using the clipboard, which is going to make the situation even worse. Although, you know, there are some limits around it to make it not happen every single time you use the clipboard. However, one of the things that I've noticed, and you and I have talked about this a little bit, is that especially with AI apps...

you get a ton of permission requests because they're the kind of apps that want to look at your screen. They want to use your microphone. They want to, you know, I don't know, capture, you know, they wanted to work with the clipboard. They, they have all kinds of accessibility and other permissions that they ask for in order to be able to synthesize as much data as possible that you're, you've got on your Mac.

And that can mean four or five of these prompts pop up the minute you install a new app. And if you test a lot of apps like we do, it's a real problem. And I think it's something that Apple needs to fix. And I have an idea, but what are your thoughts on this as a newly arrived back to the Mac guy these days, Federico?

It's a lot of prompts. It's a lot of prompts and they're all kind of all over the place in system settings. And it's kind of strange that some of them require you to quit the app and then relaunch it. Some of them don't. Sometimes the same prompt comes up multiple times, like I just did the

the migration assistant, for example, moving from my MacBook Pro to the Mac Studio that I got as a review unit. And I had to go through those permission prompts again, even though I did a migration and like, like,

Look, the thing is, I understand that Apple wants to make sure that users are protected. I'm not arguing for the prompts to go away. I just feel like a better sort of unified design. Like the way they present these prompts could potentially be done a little bit better, a little more intuitive. It doesn't help, of course, that system settings is like the world's most unintuitive app to navigate.

And I feel like there should also be like a toggle for power users, like people who really know what they're doing and people who really know what they're, quote unquote, sacrificing in terms of privacy and access in exchange for the pro apps they want to use. I just wish there was a mode where, you know, I could go through some initial steps like

Touch ID and then putting your password and then click a bunch of things, you know, multiple times to say, yes, I know what I'm doing. Yes, I know what I'm doing to sort of act as a power user override so that in the future, whatever I try, you know, it doesn't require me to go through multiple steps, maybe just one step.

I'm not saying that Apple should get rid of the system prompts, especially because there are apps that, you know, maybe you download them and then later, you know, you realize, oh, this app was monitoring my entire screen the whole time and I didn't know. So obviously that's bad, but I just wish there was, you know, a little, a better design, a unified page in settings where all of the prompts were consistent and...

and a power user option for people who know what they're doing, people who know what they're trading off to say, let me just do this upfront one time and then forget about it.

Right, right. And I think too, I think that there should be a better convention for how these are presented by third party apps, because some developers do a very good job of opening up the system settings exactly to where you need to go. So you know exactly the toggle you have to flip. Others just kind of dump you into it generally. And if you have a lot of apps,

it can be very hard to find where in system settings, where in the privacy settings those things happen to be, whether they're in monitoring your screen or whether they're in the microphone or location settings or logins, whatever spot it is. And so that can make it hard. So I think kind of a...

a UI convention for dealing with these things would be helpful. Another thing I think I'd like to see is I would like them, all these permission prompts when you install a new app to be consolidated into a single UI, give me a sheet that pops up that says this app is asking for looking at your screen, saving to downloads, your location and your microphone, those four things. And then you can just tick off the boxes one by one in one place instead of like doing the first one. And then it comes in and pops up.

then another thing pops up and then another one. Oh, and now I have to restart the app. And then when I restart the app, a fourth one comes up, you know, that kind of thing. I think if it was all in one place, it would help a lot. Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Next on my list, let's see. With the rumor of a new macOS design,

I hope that means that Apple is bringing new ways, new gestures, a new way to navigate macOS and a new way to manage your Windows. And I sort of want to say that I kind of wish that Apple got rid of the traffic light controls for Windows because the red one and the yellow one, I understand. I cannot for the life of me understand what's the consistent behavior for the green one. There's a lot of things piled on top of it too. A lot of hover features. Hover, click and hold, hover.

Like, I honestly think that Windows does a better job. Like, it's maximize, minimize, and close. Like, and not to mention, you know, Windows has had for a long time support for tiling Windows, which macOS now also has. I just wonder if maybe there's a brand new UI convention.

that Apple could use to move your windows, to maximize your windows, and to have new types of controls. I really feel like a combat, like for example, one of the utilities that I've been using lately on my Mac called SwiftShift,

I really like it because it lets you move a window around anywhere on screen just by holding the shift key on your keyboard and dragging the window from anywhere inside the window. So you don't have to reach for the exact spot in the title bar to grab a window. And that helps because so many different windows...

of different types of apps, especially the ones that, you know, maybe are built with electron. Maybe they don't have the same sort of like native obsidian, uh, VS code, like all these apps that have a custom title bar and Vivaldi, for example, which I've been using as my main browser, that you gotta be extra careful where you grab the title bar. And that's why I've been using, um,

Swift shift because it's such, I can just hold down shift and click from anywhere. Even in the middle of a webpage in Vivaldi, I can just hold down shift and then move the browser window. So that's just one idea. Broadly speaking, new ways to manage your windows, to move them around and to resize them. I think that would be really nice to have.

Yeah, if I have a lot of tabs open in Obsidian, I have to open the sidebar in order to drag my window because you can't drag by the tab and it becomes difficult to move a window around.

You know, one of the things that I would like to see is a way for a system level way to manage your menu bar, because, you know, we've really had an explosion of menu bar apps. There's always been a lot of menu bar apps on the Mac, but I think it has accelerated in recent years. It feels like every single AI app that comes out has some component up there because they're toggling the microphone or doing something along those lines.

And bartender, good solution. There are other ones as well, but...

I think something that's just like a simplified version of bartender that just allowed you to two-tier your menu bar or toggle things on and off or easily arrange them would go a long way for average users. I mean, obviously bartender and some of the other solutions out there offer a lot more features than just those, but.

I find myself 90% of the time just using it to keep my menu bar from running into the menu items in whatever my active app happens to be. So yeah, I'd like to have something that simplifies the menu bar. Yeah, it would be extra nice if...

If Apple were sort of also, like the rumors are suggesting, bringing a status bar or a menu bar to the iPad, if they completely also rethought the menu bar on macOS and they made it consistent. So a brand new menu bar system, both on macOS and iPadOS with native icon management, you know, both on the Mac and on the iPad made by Apple so that you wouldn't have to use

And that will be like, they could launch like a brand new menu bar extension point. I'm sure somehow if they do that, App Intents will be involved. I don't know how, but everything these days is based on App Intents, it seems. So I could see that sort of native system made by Apple. That would be really nice to have.

Can I do a geeky one? Like a real one? Yeah, go for it. Okay, so I've been testing this Mac Studio that I have on loan from Apple with an M3 Ultra specifically for testing local AI models. I've been having lots of fun, lots to learn, lots to understand and to download.

Because these models are chunky. But one of the things that Apple has in its favor right now, despite them sort of lagging behind, not sort of, lagging behind when it comes to AI, they have this thriving ecosystem of local LLMs

based on the MLX framework. The MLX framework is the framework for optimizing large language models that you download on your computer for Apple Silicon. So they tap into the Metal API, they tap into the GPU, they tap into the unified memory system, and you can get

you can basically get better performance. So faster inference and just faster performance overall and smaller footprint, like a smaller footprint on memory especially when you're using a model in the MLX flavor as opposed to other open source formats.

But sort of discovering and using MLX is kind of a mess right now in the sense that some third-party clients for AI models on macOS have support for MLX, like, for example, LM Studio, which is a third-party app, has a built-in support for MLX. But Ollama, which is another popular client for testing AI models on a computer, does not. Right.

You can download MLX LM, which is a command line utility. It's a terminal-based utility for downloading MLX optimized models from the MLX community, but it's done using Python. So you got to know your way around Python. I just would like to see a developer utility built into macOS with a visual interface for discovering and managing and using MLX models.

Like give it a pretty UI, remove the, and I know that this is a developer tool, but let me tell you, even developers are happy when you give them a nice UI to manage things that don't necessarily involve using the terminal. I mean, you can keep using the terminal if you want. I just would love to see, I don't know, call it MLX playgrounds or something like a visual UI to discover and download and test and benchmark MLX models.

from the open source community, from GitHub, from Aging Face, from all of these third-party directories that allow you to download and test MLX models. So some kind of native utility for those would be nice on macOS.

Yeah, that would be fantastic. I think that LM Studio goes a long way. However, I think it could be improved on and that would be a perfect spot for Apple to kind of leverage the Mac as a platform for running AI models. You know, the other thing I want to talk about, Federico, is notifications on the Mac. And I...

I just think this is one of those areas where I don't have a good solution, but I know that the solution is not hiding notifications behind the clock.

And I think we ought to put some top designers on this problem. Right now, one of the things that I don't like is that widgets are crammed in the notification center along with the actual notifications. Get those out of there. I mean, we have them on the desktop now. We don't need them in two places. This reminds me of the Today View on the iPhone where, as far as I can tell, the Today View is still on the iPhone basically because there's nothing else to put there. So it's just still there. I feel like

notifications shouldn't be hidden. There needs to be a way to see that you have them besides kind of the slide out tiles, just maybe some sort of UI element. Maybe it should be done. Maybe there should, there probably should be multiple ways to access them. There should probably be some sort of doc item. There should maybe be a standalone window that can be popped up. You know, maybe it can be a widget too on the desktop. There are a lot of,

ways you could go but I think hiding them as a panel behind the clock is not the way to go and even if even if it is still a slide out panel from the side of your your screen allow it to be placed in multiple places and don't tie it to the clock tie it to something else give it its own icon you know and rearrange the menu bar I think

Apple has allowed for a lot of its own system icons in the menu bar. I think notifications can fit in there too, despite the crowd. So that's my pitch. What's one more icon, right? I mean, it's full of icons anyway. Right. Bartender and one more icon. That's what I want. Yeah. My last one for macOS is one that you hear often from people. I would love to see Apple merge Spotlight and Type 2 Siri in the same interface.

And I know that they're behind on Apple Intelligence. And I know that, according to Mark Gurman, we probably won't see anything related to Apple Intelligence and Siri improvements at WWDC. But still, I would love to have just one single interaction for Spotlight or typing to Siri, even the current version of Siri, you know, despite its limitations.

It's just nice sometimes to set a timer with the keyboard or to run a shortcut with the keyboard, but I can do that from Spotlight. I can't. I got to use Siri and I want them to merge both of these UIs into the same launcher command space. Now Spotlight is also integrated with Siri so that I can either launch my apps or find my documents or I can interact with Siri. Now,

Can they do that without ruining either of them while merging them? I don't know. But it feels like we have two typing UIs from Apple right now. Spotlight is a launcher and type into Siri is a different launcher, but they're separate. And I want them to be the same thing.

Yeah, I think that for a lot of people, Spotlight has been replaced by apps like Raycast or LaunchBar or Alfred, you know, actual launcher apps or things that can integrate with plugins. And that's a trend that I think Apple should just follow. They should do what you're saying and make it more than just searching. It should be the way you type to Siri. And that'll make it go a long way to kind of unifying what that kind of command prompt is.

interfaces like on the Mac across third parties and natively. I want to get your take, Federico, on shortcuts on the Mac because, I mean, this is not the place to go into all of our wishes and hopes and dreams for shortcuts in Apple intelligence, but

There are some very particular things about the Mac that have bothered me for a very long time. And I want to kind of see what you think having come back to the Mac more recently. One of those is the lack of personal automations, which

Especially if you have a desktop Mac that is always on, having just the ability to run shortcuts on a schedule would be fantastic. Obviously, there are plenty of third-party options for making that happen. I use them myself, things like Lingam X, but it really should be built in. And there are a lot of other things that could be built in as well. And I guess the second thing I would say besides personal automations is that

Apple needs to do more, I think, to integrate system-level things into shortcuts for the Mac. And this, you know...

it's really moved very slowly ever since we got this, got shortcuts on the Mac four years ago. And I just feel like they haven't really focused on it in a very long time. There are differences between iOS, iPadOS, and the Mac that need to be fixed, but there's also just unique Mac-level things that aren't there that should be there. Yeah, I mean, I don't disagree. I know that on macOS...

Thankfully, you have a way out. You can use third-party apps and integrations. I have been using the terminal a lot to the point where I kind of always have the terminal open at this point on my Mac, especially on the Mac Studio. When I'm testing AI models, I always have the terminal open with MacTop. Have you ever seen MacTop?

No, I haven't actually. So it's in one of the screenshots that I posted on Blue Sky today. It's this, basically it's a system monitor. It lets you monitor system resources with charts and bars and graphs in the terminal. So you leave it open. It's basically like a terminalized version of iStat menus, but it's very developer-y, very hack-y, you know?

But I always have the terminal open, basically. So I know that you can do things with the terminal in my quest. So that's why I would love to see more native integrations, especially for the kind of power users like you who absolutely hate the terminal. But I just don't feel like maybe they have the pressure to do it because they know that they release Valve. Yeah. Yeah. They know that, you know, worst case scenario, you can always use third party apps or the terminal. So the

I agree. And I've actually warmed up to the terminal a lot. However, I think if you're talking about bringing automation to the masses, the terminal is not the way to do it. And so falling back to things like the terminal and AppleScript, I think is kind of a disappointment if shortcuts is truly meant to be the future of automation on the Mac, as Federighi once said. But all right, I will get off my high horse when it comes to automation.

There's other stuff I'd like to see too. I mean, I think that...

Cloud storage vendors don't work very well with the Finder. And this is a change that happened a while back, a few years back. And since Dropbox is no longer hacking its way into the Finder and is instead a file provider, it just has never worked quite as well. And the same goes for Google Drive. There are other things about Google Drive that don't work very well when you are trying to synchronize files

files where some of them are local, some of them are in the cloud and dealing with them on your Mac. I just feel like that that is an area that so many people use for their work and their personal lives that there really should be a bigger focus on making that integration a lot more seamless for users. Yeah.

Yeah, these are good picks. I don't have anything else, I think, for my question. You don't? All right, all right, all right. Well, look, I think I will leave you with one last one, Federico. Okay. Which is pairing and unpairing Bluetooth devices.

It's time for Apple to allow their keyboards and their mice and their trackpads to easily be moved from one Mac to another, from a Mac to a Vision Pro, from a Mac to an iPad. All this has been done for years and years and years by companies like Logitech. And Apple has shown that they can do it too with AirPods Pro.

And I'd love to see something as seamless, even though, I mean, I know people have problems sometimes with their Mac grabbing their AirPods when they sit down at their desk. But I would rather deal with that than feel like I have to buy a second keyboard just for my Vision Pro. They're never going to do it. You don't think so? A man can dream, you know?

I don't think so because they would have done it by now. And they updated the Magic Keyboard, still didn't do it. You know, I don't know. I kind of lost hope. And I'm using this Logi keyboard right now with my mic. I absolutely hate it. Like I hate this thing so much. I cannot wait for the new keyboard that I ordered. I have a low profile mechanical keyboard on order. Oh, I bet I know which one you got. Which one?

The new Fii 75. How do you know? Because... How do you know? Did I tell you?

No, you didn't. Just because that keyboard vibes with me too. What? How? Yeah, no, I've had my eye on that keyboard for a very long time. I saw it at CES and tried it and it's a fantastic keyboard. The 75 V2 with, you know, it's going to have a USB dongle. So a 2.4 gigahertz receiver, which is super nice. And yeah, I mean, I'm ready to give up on Bluetooth so hard. I just, I really, really hate it.

So, yeah, I got that one coming hopefully soon. I also ordered the extra set of keycaps so that I can make it all white because by default it's not all white. It's got like this colored space bar and this colored S key or something, which I ain't got time for that. You know, I just, I need to make it all white. So,

So I ordered the all-white keycaps, and I'm going to make it all super clean and minimal Apple style, but it's going to be based on the wireless receiver. Yeah, I like those keyboards a lot. They do really nice stuff. The thing that always keeps me from getting a mechanical keyboard is not knowing which switches to order because people get all goofy with these switches and they're like,

you know, there's like eight different options. And so that usually keeps me from buying any of these things. I, did you get low profile? That's what I would have gotten. I got, I got a profile. I got, I think both the aloe and the cowberry switches, which I saw. So I watched some, some typing tests videos on YouTube. And those seem to be like the ones with the, with the, with the quietest sound of all. That's what I was going to say. I hate, I hate loud keyboards. I just, I, I,

I mean, I know people are into it, but it's not for me. I want it to be as quiet as possible. Yeah. So that's good. You're the guinea pig. I'll have to watch and see what happens to you. I saw some, I think there's Rosa key switches that looked pretty quiet too. But all right. Well, we'll see. We'll see. We'll have to do a keyboard comparison thing. Is this the one with the little knob in the corner that's red? No, it doesn't. Or is it?

It's okay. I know which one you got. Yeah. Those there's two different ones that I've been looking at. The one you you're getting in a different one that has kind of a retro video game look to it. Okay. All right. It's kind of a transparent. Oh, I see. No, I don't. I don't have that. Shall we get on to Visualize? We should. We should wrap. We should. Let's see. Where are we with Visualize? I.

This is a cheat, Federico. It's a hardware cheat, but I think it's not entirely a cheat. I think we should have IO for the Vision Pro. And in other words, the developer strap should be allowed to be connected to external storage, external, you know, Ethernet adapters, that kind of thing.

Well, it's not a hardware cheat. I mean, it all comes down to enabling in software. And I know that they have enabled video capture in software via the developer strap for enterprise apps. So requiring like an enterprise entitlement. I just want to have USB access, Ethernet access, and UBC. So that's a universal video class. So video support over USB-C, just like you can do on an iPad, for example. Now, I just want to be able to stream video

via USB 3.2, whatever they're using. I don't think they're using USB 4. Just let me stream video via the developer's trap from a connected device, like a PC or a console or a handheld. Just let me stream video over a cable to my Vision Pro. That's all I want. That would just... Even if Vision OS 3 is just that, I would be so happy.

because it means I would be able to use my Vision Pro with my Steam Deck or a future little Go. Like that would be extra nice. Yeah, it'd be really nice. I would string a King Cable all the way from my Xbox. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. I could do it. Yeah. I mean, for Vision OS,

- The big one for me would be iPadOS virtual display support. I just think it's unfair that we have excellent Mac virtual display with support for the keyboard interactions, the track pad, keyboard pass-through, but none of that for the iPad.

You can just do the mirroring for the iPad. And obviously the mirroring doesn't let you use the magic keyboard of the iPad to control your Vision OS apps with the trackpad or keyboard input. So I just want to have the equivalent of Mac virtual display, iPad virtual display. That would be another big one for me.

Yeah, that would be a big one for me too, I think. You know, speaking of keyboards, I'd really like to have third-party keyboard pass-through as well as controller pass-through. Oh, controller pass-through would be interesting.

Yeah, because you don't need to look at your, you know, I don't need to look down at my hands much when I'm playing a game, except that sometimes you're looking for that small button somewhere on the controller that you might not be able to feel out with your hands really easily. It'd just be a nice thing to be able to define a box that can be for your controller that you're holding in your lap. That would be that and third party keyboards, I think are, I would think that Apple's vision technology should be able to identify things

the controllers that they integrate with, as well as a keyboard. I think a keyboard's a fairly, to me, a keyboard should be a fairly easy thing to identify in, you know, vision learning. Yeah, I mean, they have,

They should have models to visually understand if the user's hands are using a keyboard or are they using a controller. I mean, there's all kinds of vision models right now. I'm sure they can. If anything, Apple has done really good research here in this field. They have vision models on iOS that you can use as a developer to recognize all kinds of gestures, for example, and hand movements and finger movements. So that seems sort of like a given to me. Yeah.

Let's see what's in my list. More native apps instead of iPad compatibility apps. There's still so many apps on VisionOS in compatibility mode, like reminders or shortcuts or the calendar. Just show me that you're really behind VisionOS as a platform by continuing to translate some of your compatibility apps onto the native VisionOS version of those apps.

apps. Native shortcuts, native calendar, native reminders, like I mean, you name it. There's still an entire folder for apps in compatibility mode on Vision OS. And if Apple wants to show that they're not abandoning the platform, they should continue to invest into making native versions of those apps. Yeah, that's a great idea. And the other thing I'd like is just an easier way to manage the apps and the pages of the apps. It's

I don't know. It reminds me a little too much of TVOS in that way, which we complained about recently where it's not worth trying to organize it because what you'll end up with is the same number of, you know, 10 pages of apps, but some of the pages will just have one app on it. And to kind of fix that, you have to be dragging it all over the place and it's just not worth the, worth the trouble. Speaking of apps and missing apps on vision OS, uh,

Give us a better way, a native way to save web apps from Safari to the VisionOS home screen, just like we can on the Mac with the dock or on the iPhone and iPad with the home screen. Let me do the same on VisionOS. Let me save PWAs. Let me save web apps.

from Vision OS Safari to my home screen. And that, you know, that would help for those apps that maybe don't even have an iPad version, but they have a web version. Or if they do have an iPad version and it's running compatibility mode, you're still getting the baby layout of the iPad experience. So yeah, you know, a better browser integration, that would...

sort of help, I think. - Yeah, the demand is there because obviously there are apps that are designed to be nothing more than a specialty browser for web apps that you can save bookmarks to. So it'd be great to be able to put those on the home screen instead of stuffing them in another app. I don't think I have anything else, Federico. Do you have anything? - I mean, the biggest problem I feel like with the Vision Pro, sure, it's the software,

But it's the Vision Pro itself. I don't think any of these wishes will change the fact that this thing costs...

$3,500 and it's heavy and it gets uncomfortable. So it would be nice to make it better for what it is. And that will never change unless there's a second Vision Pro model or a revision of the Vision Pro. But, you know, at least in the meantime, getting to this software, like there's so much low hanging fruit still on Vision OS.

Even though it won't change what the Vision Pro as a device, as a physical device is, at least it can make it nicer. That's sort of how, yeah. Yeah, I wonder if they launched it too soon. Because I do wonder whether the people who spent $3,500 on the Vision Pro, if a new one came out in a year or two, whether those people, those early adopters will be like, eh, eh.

I was burned once. I'm not going to do it again. Yeah, it's, you know, Mike and Jason always like to say on Upgrade that the vision pro was like this alternate timeline that Apple decided to go down instead of focusing on AI. They thought that AR and mixed reality was going to be the future. And in parallel, the emergence of AI happened. And so Apple was caught sort of flat footed going down that path, which

whereas they should have gone down another path. And so the Vision Pro is like this realization, this precious realization, expensive realization of a different timeline. Whereas now we're seeing companies making headsets, like Google is making a headset now with Android XR and entire platform, but it's rooted in the fact that you can use AI with it. So I wonder what the, you know,

it's a nice thought exercise to imagine what would have happened if Apple decided, you know, let's just focus on AI for now and then we'll get to make a Vision Pro that works with AI. But hey, this is the timeline we got. Yeah, it is what we've got. All right, Federico. Well, I think that's a good place to stop for those wishes. We'll be back in another week with another episode of App Stories. We are going to talk about some fun stuff.

in the post show, which you can get by joining appstories.plus. You can subscribe just to appstories.plus or you can become a Club Premier member and get all of what we do on Club Mac Stories as well as appstories.plus. Just go to appstories.plus to subscribe

Learn about all the details there. You can find the two of us over at MacStories.net in the meantime. And we are on social media where Federico is at Fatici. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I. And I'm at John Voorhees. J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-W-E-S. Talk to you later, Federico. Ciao, John.