With every new version of iOS, Safari ends up getting some new features, and designer Brent Caswell has some really good ideas about what should come to Safari in iOS 7, including a unified address and search bar, website push notifications, a better bookmarks manager, more advanced Reader options and more. Here’s a look at some of his better ideas:
Bookmark Stream is like Photo Stream in iOS 6, except it’s a stream of bookmarks shared by all of your devices to which you can invite other people to contribute. For example, you and your wife could share bookmarks with each other.
This is part of what Brent Caswell imagines Bookmarks looking like in Safari for iOS 7. Favicon support helps make websites more visually distinctive, and cleans up the appearance of Bookmarks, making it seem more modern than a list of text.
One of the major changes Caswell sees happening in Safari for iOS 7 is a unified Google search bar and location bar, similar to Chrome’s “Omnibar.” The major reason why Apple doesn’t do this already is because there’s a different keyboard in iOS for the location bar than there is for entering a text term, but a modified version of the standard keyboard like the one above solves that problem.
Caswell also envisions a new pages manager in Safari, that not only puts more thumbnails of open tabs viewable at a glance, but also hosts iCloud Tabs: a more sensible location for that feature, I think, than under Bookmarks.
Here’s another great idea: why not give Reader all of the readability options as iBooks, considering you’re just as likely to spend hours reading text in that view?
Finally, Caswell imagines Safari gaining push notifications. What he means here is that websites could send you push notifications through Safari if you had them bookmarked or gave them the option. So imagine every time Cult of Mac posts a new article, you get a push notification under Safari. It would work almost like RSS. It’s an intriguing idea, but I hate Notifications, so I’m a little aghast at the idea of another iOS app getting them. What do you think?
Caswell has a lot more great ideas for Safari in iOS 7, I suggest you read his full post for more. There’s a lot more there, and they are all incredibly well thought out. Food for thought, at least.
Source: Brent Caswell