I always have a hard time coming up with a Christmas list to give to friends and family. That’s partially because there isn’t too much I actually want at any given time and partially because I buy most things I want throughout the year.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been looking for some ideas of what to put on your wishlist. And aside from the obvious suggestion — Initial Charge merch — I have a handful of others that I’d like to share.

A Compact USB Charger

I have a bit of an obsession with USB chargers. There just seems to always be a new one that’s slightly smaller and with more power output than the ones I currently have.

I’m a massive fan of Anker’s USB chargers and I have a couple on my wishlist this year:

Anker 715 Charger (Nano II 65W) — it offers a single USB-C port that can provide up to 65W of power. It has foldable plugs and is significantly more compact than what you’ll get from just about any device maker. I have their slightly smaller 30W version, but with my recently acquired Framework laptop, I want something that offers more power output.

Anker 523 Charger (Nano 3, 47W) — a two-port USB-C charger that can output 45W when charging a single device or 47W when using both ports. I have the 40W version of this and absolutely love it, but the plugs on that one aren’t foldable and it obviously outputs less power.

A Great Game Controller

Video games are fun. And if you want to play video games, you should get yourself a proper controller. I own a bunch, but there are two that I recommend to everyone that asks.

Backbone One — one of those fancy retractable controllers that you slap on your phone to turn it into a handheld console. I have a few others like it, but always end up coming back to the Backbone. It’s comfortable to use, is available in a slick PlayStation variant, and they offer a carrying case. My only wish is for them to swap the d-pad and analog stick on the PlayStation Edition to match Sony’s controllers.

8BitDo Pro 2 — sometimes you just want to sit back on the couch and play a little Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 in RetroArch on your Apple TV. But if you want to make that happen, you’re going to need a Bluetooth controller. This one from 8BitDo is what you should get.

A Nostalgic Camera

I had a realization recently that I’m just not taking enough photos. How do I fix that? With a new hobby, of course. This year I’ve added the Kodak Ektar H35N to my Christmas list. It’s a super cool half frame film camera. It uses standard 35mm film, but each photo only takes up half the frame of a normal 35mm camera. This means you can get twice as many photos per roll.

I don’t expect the photos that I take with this camera to be as crisp as what I get with my iPhone, but that’s not the point. I’ll get to toy around with a nifty little gadget, explore the world of film stock, teach my kids about film photography, and capture memories along the way with a retro style.

An Excellent Wireless Charger

Who has time to connect cables to their devices to charge them? It’s so much easier to slowly slide your phone around while watching an LED, waiting for it to illuminate, indicating that you’ve found the sweet spot on your wireless charger.

You still have that experience with the Nomad Base Station, but it does feature magnets to help align iPhones with MagSafe. And you don’t have to mess about with USB cables that fall behind your nightstand because you bumped the alarm clock that was holding it in place.

The Nomad Base Station has three wireless charging coils on top and two USB ports on the rear — one A and one C — which you can use to top-off devices that don’t have wireless charging support.

And if you’re the kind of guy that has an Apple Watch. Nomad has an Apple Watch Edition of the Base Station that includes an integrated Apple Watch charger.

A Retro Gaming Handheld

Maybe you don’t want to use your phone as a handheld console. Perhaps because you’re tight on storage and just don’t have the room for all those rom files. Or maybe you feel too restricted by Apple’s asinine rules around JIT and emulators in the App Store.

If you have an iPhone and want to emulate systems beyond the PSP and PlayStation, you’ll probably start looking at dedicated gaming handhelds. I’ve been a fan of Retroid’s offerings for a couple of years and if I was buying one today, I’d end up with either the Retroid Pocket Mini or the Retroid Pocket 5.

These two devices offer nearly identical performance — although, the Retroid Pocket 5 has a bit more memory. The largest differences are the display and the physical size of the unit.

The Retroid Pocket Mini has a 3.7-inch display with a 4:3 aspect ratio and is, as the name implies, smaller than the Retroid Pocket 5. The larger of the two has a 5.5-inch display with a 16:9 aspect ratio.

I think I would lean toward the Retroid Pocket Mini. If only because the vast majority of games I want to play are from the GameCube and PlayStation 2 era where a 4:3 display would be more fitting. But I could see myself settling on the Retroid Pocket 5 since the price difference is negligible — only $20 — and the larger display could come in handy if I wanted to use it for watching video or on the off-chance I end up playing more modern games on it.

A Dedicated Music Player

The iPod Click Wheel Games Preservation Project has had the iPod on my mind a lot more lately. Phase is one of the best games of all time and that’s not a joke. As far as rhythm games go, there’s not another one that has brought me as much joy as Phase has. The ability to play with music from your own library is dope.

I have a few iPods, all purchased from Elite Obsolete Electronics. And unless you have a specific model that you’re nostalgic for, I’d recommend either the third generation iPod nano because of it’s minuscule size or the fifth generation iPod because of it’s impressive feature set and the ability to modify it for additional storage and battery capacity.

You get yourself one of these, install some Click Wheel games (Phase, seriously), setup a virtual machine to install an old version of iTunes, and sync over some music. You won’t regret it.

WWDC is just two weeks away and just like every other year, we should expect to see what’s next for iOS at the event. Although rumors are pointing toward a rather modest update with iOS 12, I still have hopes that we’ll see at least a few tentpole items in the change log. The following is an unordered list of features and enhancements that I’d like to see included in the next version of iOS.

• Keyboard Shortcuts for Share and Action Extensions: Application extensions are such a vital part of the platform. They give users the ability to process and move data between applications mitigating the downsides of a sandboxed operating system. But activating these extensions through the touch interface can be tedious at times — especially if you’re used to having some applications’ keyboard shortcuts available system-wide, as they are on macOS. Giving users the ability to setup custom keyboard shortcuts for their most-used extensions would greatly improve the speed and fluidity with which power users navigate their devices.
• Family Photo Libraries: My wife and I have resorted to using Google Photos to keep all of our images backed up. We set it up in the early days of the service, before you could automatically share your entire library with a loved one. We just share a single account that all of our devices are logged into. This gives each of us access to every photo that we’ve ever taken. If one of us wants to find a specific photo of our niece, we can each find it, regardless of who actually took the photo. I’d like Apple to give us this capability in iCloud Photo Library.
• iOS Remote Access: Over the last couple of years, my father- and mother-in-law have both received iOS devices from the family — an iPod Touch and iPad, respectively. They’re both fairly new to the platform and it would be invaluable for troubleshooting if my wife and I could login to their devices remotely. Talking them through various processes over the phone gets the job done, but there’s often a communication breakdown because of their unfamiliarity with the terminology. Being able to take control of the device remotely to show them while explaining what you’re doing would be a powerful tool to help them learn the system.
• Activity App on iPad: I already share this data with a handful of friends and it would be nice if Apple utilized that same syncing system to let me view this data on my iPad. The app could make use of the larger display size with beautiful charts and graphs, giving me a better big-picture overview of my fitness activity.
• iOS Trackpad Support: Many iPad owners have discovered the benefits of a keyboard on the platform. Keyboard shortcuts and comfortable touch typing are an indispensable aspect of some users’ workflows. And the addition of trackpad support to the platform could be a great way to improve ergonomics and accessibility. Limiting this to trackpads specifically (instead of external pointing devices in general) might prove foolish in the long run, but I believe iOS should remain as a touch-first operating system. And trackpads would let us continue to use many of the same multitouch gestures that are already built into the system.
• Photo Printing Services: Apple’s photo printing service is one of the best on the market. But its still only available on macOS. Apple should add a Projects tab to the Photos app and give users access to the full suite of printing services — photo books, prints, cards, and calendars.
• Ability to Change Any Application’s Icon: You can hack this functionality together with Workflow, but the experience isn’t ideal. What I really want is something built into the system, either in settings or within each application’s force touch menu.
• Clipboard History API: Clipboard managers are severely hindered on iOS by their inability to monitor clipboard changes in the background. This leads to clunky solutions that rely on the app’s Today View widget, action extension, or drag and drop. iOS should keep a clipboard history of a dozen items or so and let applications access it through a new API. Users would have to explicitly allow access to this data through a modal dialog in the same way they give access to their location. This would prevent nefarious developers from accessing your data without your knowledge while empowering an application category that has been limping along for the past decade.
• Cover Sheet Remembers Previous Location: I use Today View widgets dozens of times throughout the day and iOS 11 made accessing those widgets much more cumbersome. Prior to iOS 11, the system would remember whether you last accessed your widgets or Notification Center and would display the previously accessed view whenever you swiped from the top of your screen. But that’s no longer the case. Cover Sheet always displays your notifications first and requires an additional swipe to see your widgets. I hope Cover Sheet in iOS 12 is a little less forgetful.
• External Storage Support in Files: iOS already has support for external storage devices through the Lightning to USB and Lightning to SD Card adapters, but at the moment this is only used for importing photos. I’d like to see thumb drives, external hard drives, and SD cards appear within the Locations menu in the Files app.
• Customizable App Shortcuts in Control Center: With iOS 11 we were given the ability to customize the items that appear in Control Center, but we’re still limited to the small set of shortcuts that Apple offers. I’d like to see this opened up and give users the ability to place shortcuts to any of their applications in Control Center.
• Save Workflows as Standalone Action Extensions: I’m an avid Workflow user and have built several action extensions that help streamline my work. But I’m not fond of having those automations hidden behind Workflow’s action extension. I’d like the ability to set some number of my workflows as top-level, standalone action extensions that live alongside all of the other apps in my share sheet.

I don’t expect Apple to include all of these features in iOS 12. Especially if this year is going to be a modest upgrade. But even if they only tackle a few of them, I’ll walk away from WWDC as quite the happy camper.

I’ve dropped Twitterrific like a hot potato and am using Tweetie full time now as my Twitter client of choice. The app is clearly better but it does have its flaws.

• I would like to be able to remove the Tweetie icon from the dock. The menu bar icon is good enough for me.
• Why can’t I hide my avatar in the sidebar? This feature is probably useful for those with multiple accounts but is just clutter if you only have one account.
• There isn’t a favorited items view. And, along those lines, why do I have to right-click to favorite a tweet?
• There aren’t any notification sounds.

Tweetie is still better than Twitterrific but it would be (nearly) perfect if the above flaws were addressed.