Michael Tsai, the master of round-ups, has begun a list of WWDC wishlists, including mine. However, I wanted to highlight a couple of excellent wishlists that I only discovered because they linked to mine (yay for pingbacks!).

The first is by Steve O’Dell, who helps run a Girls Who Code after-school program at Bacon Elementary School in Colorado. His wishlist stems from a desire for Apple to once again become a major player in the education space.

Did you know that Apple has coding club packages that are (potentially) every bit as good as Code.org or Girls Who Code? If you don’t, it’s because the links to find it are all over the place, links to older versions haven’t been taken down yet, and instead of providing a club portal that does some of the admin for you, they aren’t much more than a PDF telling you how to get started and then leaving it up to you to execute.

I definitely did not know that. Apple has clearly committed itself to the areas of health and accessibility. Education seems like an obvious “third leg” to an overall strategy that seeks to improve global well-being. Health, accessibility, education. If I was in leadership at Apple, that’s what I would focus on.

The next wishlist I wanted to share comes from Daniel Andrews. It’s a great list; some of my favorite things are feature parity for Messages across platforms, the return of the magnification loupe, making better use of the iPad status bar, and improvements to search on iPad. He also mentions some specific improvements to Mail:

Better priority/VIP notification settings, snoozing emails etc would go a long way to making the default ‘good enough’ for most folks.

I would also add to that the ability to create Smart Mailboxes on iOS (as John Gruber mentioned), a search function that actually works (I can go to Gmail on the web and find what I’m looking for almost immediately. Mail usually comes up empty.), text formatting tools that aren’t all hiding behind a single button, the ability to easily see which email address an incoming message was sent to from the unified inbox, and yeah, something better than flags for assigning message priority.

E-mail should be so much smarter. How about a “This Week’s Newsletters” folder? How about a way to view all recent attachments? An email from the pharmacy that a prescription has been refilled and is ready for pick-up should automatically be transformed into a to-do list item in my app of choice. All of this should be possible. And that’s all I have to say about that!

Keep those wishlists coming! I’ve really enjoyed reading them.