If Steve Jobs were Santa and you were sitting down to write out your Christmas wish list for iPhone 5, iPad 2, and iOS 5, what would you ask for? Last year we got multitasking but the lack of notifications made us think we’re still more naughty than nice. What about 2011?

If you heard a clatter and snuck down to Apple, and lo and behold you caught Santa Jobs with a bag full of features, and you had the chance to ask him for anything for iPad 2 or iPhone 5, what would it be?

Give us your list, TiPb community, and we’ll check it twice!

Dear Santa Jobs, all we want for Christmas iPhone 4.0 is… Well, grab your cocoa (touch) and take a long sip, because just like our buddy Derek, we’ve a bit of a list this year.

Don’t get us wrong, you revolutionized a lazy, arrogant smartphone industry with your UI in 2007, shook up mobile app delivery with your store in 2008, and re-defined the “budget” $99 price point in 2009, all the while pushing software updates and evolving hardware that forced your competitors to catch up or re-invent themselves completely. But if the merry little elves of the Round Robin have shown us anything, it’s that catch up they have. And more than that, even though we got stockings chock full of iPhone 3.0 cut-and-paste, stereo Bluetooth, MMS, and other goodies last year, there’s still a sleigh-full of things we’d love you to resolve in 2010.

(And yes, we’re aware almost all of these suggestions are straight out of Cydia and already available for Jailbroken iPhones. That’s not coal worthy, it’s a holiday miracle!)

Comfy? Good, because here’s the naughty and nice of it…

Multitasking

You worry about us, we get that. You don’t want to bother us with nasty little task managers like Windows Phone, or no helplessness in the face of crash dialogs like Android. But Palm webOS took a play from your own MobileSafari Pages and showed that background app managements can be handled elegantly. Sure, they have issues with lag, but they can choose to open or close their cards, and we’d like our iPhones to give us that option as well. Heck (can we say heck to Santa?), ProSwitcher and Backgrounder have done it for you on Jailbreak.

Limit it if you’re really worried. 8 Safari pages are it, maybe 2-4 background apps are more than enough for most people, especially as the iPhone 3GS is 2x as fast, and presumably the 4th generation iPhone will be yet more capable still. Push Notification is working great for many things, multitasking Pages would fill that final gap.

Notification System

Speaking of Push Notifications. Gifting us with that service in 3.0 was right jolly indeed. Binding it up in old-school 1.x model dialogs was pure bah, humbug. Why force us to deal with something immediately or lose it forever, and why have a new notification obliterate one that came in half a second earlier? Android hinted at how to handle this better in 2008 and Palm upped the ante in 2009. They both queue notifications without locking up the system, and both let you go back and see what you’ve been notified about later. You’ve got them, you’ve got Apps like Boxcar that place notifications into a list view, and you’ve got several Jailbreak options, including GriP that’s similar to Mac OS X’s Growl (which we’re still not certain why you haven’t bought out and integrated yourselves).

Full on Android or webOS-style services would be fantastic, but at this point we’d even settle for a Notifications App that we could go to and see all our alerts, like our missed phone calls, stored and ready for access when we want to access them.

Widget-ized Lock/Home Screen

All our friends over on Nokia and HTC (that’s who’s basically taking over Windows Phone and Android) all got these things called Widgets now, which we really thought we’d have gotten too, given you’re the same Santa Jobs who gave us Dashboard and Dashcode. But those Widgets are Apps on our iPhone, like Weather and Stocks, and instead of being glance-able they’re only launch-able.

And see, we’ve got this lovely large screen here that when it’s locked just stares at us anemically with the time and date and nothing else but boring, static wallpaper. Look at that lovelier, larger HTC HD2 screen and its animated weather. Look at the Nokia N97 (or even MotoBlur, if you can without turning to stone) and its Twitter and Facebook status bites. We know you could give us this too. You have the technology. And yes, Jailbreak has been doing this for a while as well. (Our friend James basically Jailbroke the equivalent of Sense UI onto his iPhone. Don’t give him coal!)

You could also do it with a Home Screen or several. We can already swipe left to get to Spotlight. Make widgets the default screen and let us swipe right to get to all the apps. It’s do-able. Do it.

Instant Access to Settings

The iPhone is wonderful for multi-touch. Everywhere except for the bar across the top. Sure, we can tap on it to scroll all the way up (and wonder why there’s no equivalent to scroll all the way down), but when we tap on the 3G or WiFi icon, we get nothing. Zero. Zilch. Certainly not a quick and easy way to toggle Airplane Mode, WiFi or Bluetooth on and off, or anything else. Palm webOS does have that. SBSettings for Jailbreak too. We bet you could figure it out. We’d bet milk and cookies on it!

Theming

To be honest with you, theming is not really our thing, but what’s even less our thing is theming not being available for those who for whom theming is their thing. (And they shouldn’t have to resort to WinterBoard or put up with obtuse Verizon commercials either).

Maybe the mere thought that someone outside Apple might change the “look” of your beautiful dock, but de-harshen that mellow. Let it go. Figure out some awesome theming system, elegantly package it and make it ready for developers to sell in packs on the App Store for the 30/70 split good of all.

Pull Down to Refresh

With Tweetie 2, that Spirit of UI Future that is Atebits introduced a “pull down to refresh” action that’s just so intuitive we end up trying to do it in Mail, in Safari, in every application that pulls and presents net-based content. And it doesn’t work. Fix that, would you?

Back

Right now most apps implement a soft “back” button, but it’s not consistent across all apps and it’s not that intuitive. Other platforms have a hardware “back” button. We know you probably think the iPhone has too many of those already, and we don’t want another one anyway. Still, you could better use the one “home” button you have. Holding it down activates Voice Over on the 3GS and Triple-tap can turn on Accessibility. Those are fantastic services for iPhone users who need them. For those who don’t, how about letting us customize what those controls do? For example, let us click “home” to go back, and double-click to go to the Home Screen SpringBoard proper. Or hold down. Whatever. You’re Apple, you can figure out how to give us “back”.

Palm even has a “back” gesture below the screen. Gesture areas are the new black (slab). They stole your rubber-banding. Steal their gesture area. We’d be fine with that. You could use it right-to-left for “back”, left-to-right for “forward” (hey, doesn’t the Magic Mouse do something like that already?), and maybe down-to-up for that notification service we asked for earlier?

Landscape Lock

It took you until 3.0 to give us pervasive landscape mode, and we’re grateful, really, even when we lie down to read and the screen flips back and forth like it’s dancing to Randy Newman. Actually, not really then. Then we really wish you’d stick a little toggle in preferences that let us lock the keyboard to portrait or landscape more. Sure it’s not dynamic. If that’s your concern though, think up a gesture for it. We’ll wait, honest. Even until 4.0.

Turn off Alerts

Last year the neighbor boy, CrackBerry Kevin asked you to let him turn off incoming email alerts while he was talking on his seldom-charged iPhone. You gave him coal instead and fair enough. This year, what with Push Notifications and everything, it’s gone from beep and buzz to worse. Now we can’t even hang up before dealing with dialogs.

Resolution Independence

Okay, we’re trying to sneak that in again, but you must be disassembling Droids and Nexus Ones and HD2s in the dungeons of Cupertino, so we know that you know that we want something BIG, something iPhone HD-esque next June/July. Sure, that’s way after Christmas, but we’ll wait. Promise.

Check it Twice

Okay Santa Jobs, that’s it for our list, but we’ve brought all these TiPb readers with us and they might just have a demandment or ten of their own to hit you up for on the holidays. It could include Google Latitude baked into the Maps app, podcast subscriptions, those nifty iTunes LP and iTunes Extras Apple TV keeps talking about, real, honest-to-Rudolph push Gmail via IMAP IDLE, 720p (or 1080p) video out, working AVRCP for our little Bluetooth stereos, Lala streaming iTunes, and Chad still has a huge list that just says Mobile iChat over and over and over again!

If there’s anything we missed, or anything we didn’t ask for strongly enough, we’re sure they’ll sort you out.

Happy holidays!

Dear Apple: yesterday, as part of your huge pre-holiday product launch, you announced a new iPhone-inspired multi-touch Magic Mouse with gestures. It looks nice. It might even (finally!) be a decent mouse. But TiPb’s left to wonder — for those of us who already have iPhones and iPod touches, wouldn’t it be even nicer to have an official “Magic Mouse” app? Scratch that, given the greater functionality in the MacBook (and MacBook Pro) multi-touch Glass Trackpads, wouldn’t it be great if you could just give us that in the App Store?

We have the Apple Remote (no, not the new doohickey, the app!), true enough, but that’s limited to iTunes and the Apple TV (not even Front Row!), and we have the Keynote Remote, but again that’s limited to presentation software. And granted, there are some great third party remote apps that do way more than just Mac. But you make Mac. Why not just take that wonderful technology you’ve built into Snow Leopard, hook it up over Bluetooth (until you get WiFi Direct going), and let us swipe, pinch, rotate, one-finger, two-finger, three-finger, four-finger move our way around the Mac just like the Magic Mouse — or the Glass Trackpad — from anywhere in Bluetooth range?

Dear Apple, we have the device, you have the technology. Hit the “launch” button on this one already! Sitting 10′ away on a sofa, using our iPhone or iPod touch to seamlessly gesture through everything on our media center Mac Mini or massive 27″ new iMac… t’would be sweet!

(And hey, Microsoft and Windows 7 developers — feel free to hook us up for your phenomenal multi-touch support as well!)

Dear Apple, if you’re releasing a new wireless keyboard, why not take this opportunity to make it work with iPhone? If the rumor-mill is to be believed, you’re set to release new iMacs and Mac Minis (and hopefully a 27″ or 30″ LED display!) perhaps as soon as next week (hey, there was a Spotlight Turns to Notebooks event last October!). And if the FCC filings are accurate, you’ll have a new multitouch mouse and wireless keyboard to go with them. Apple, in the name of everyone whining on the internet for it — let that wireless keyboard work with the iPhone.

You introduced enhanced peripheral functionality last March during the iPhone 3.0 SDK event, including dock and Bluetooth access, but you didn’t add the Bluetooth profile or any drivers for keyboards. That led to many sad, irritated messages sent our way via comments, email, and tweets. Now, with MMS in the US finally off your miss-list, wouldn’t it be nice to scratch external keyboard off that list as well? Since we haven’t even seen a beta for iPhone 3.2 yet, mightn’t you not introduce said drivers there?

No need to answer now. We’ll just wait for your next event (which we’ll be liveblogging right here at TiPb, ‘natch) and hope for the best.

UPDATED: Dominik Balogh from PoweryBase, developers of the iPhone 3.0 Push Notification-powered NotifyMe reminder app wrote in to let us know:

We have just received (now, sunday morning in Cupertino) an apology from Apple App Store Staff.

It’s looking more likely that Apple is working behind the scenes to make sure their servers can handle the Push Notification load before they let 40 million potential users light up their network. Once they’re confident, however, will the push apps roll?

ORIGINA: Sure, some have trickled out of the App Store during the last week, but given the high profile iPhone 3.0 release, and given that we know some high profile push-enabled apps were submitted to the iPhone weeks ago, TiPb has to wonder — where are all the Push Notification enabled apps?

Due to server load and battery life, is Apple putting them through even more stringent and lengthy reviews? Is there some concern about Apple’s Push Notification server load capacity so they’re releasing them a few at a time so as not to suddenly have a MobileMe-style post-launch crash? Or are they just more seemingly random victims of the still-opaque, ever mysterious iPhone App Store review process?

Hopefully it’s reasons #1 and #2. We can handle minor delays now to ensure solid apps on a solid push platform going forward.

But please Apple, keep developers in the loop and — hey! — throw us a bone. Or push us a notification. Something.

Meanwhile, which Push Notification app are you waiting for the most?

I was just listening to Dieter and Mike’s latest PalmCast, where they were crowing in duet about how sweet it was that the Palm Pre has an app that can book movie tickets and automagically add the movie event information to the Palm Pre calendar.

I know, I know. If they love the Palm Pre so much, why don’t they just marry it? (Dieter is, in fact, looking for a state that may allow it…) But they raise an excellent point — where’s the iPhone version of that functionality? Why can’t we push a button on our movie ticket app, or concert tour app, or tradeshow app, or whatever and have that slice of time booked off for us in our calendar?

While the iPhone SDK allows access to the Contacts database to do all manner of glorious, 3rd party app-powered magic, Apple has thus far not surfaced any APIs to do the same for calendaring. I don’t believe the new 3.0 SDK has announced any improvements in that area either.

What makes calendar so different? MobileMe and ActiveSync push both. Apple’s even giving Calendar some much-appreciated CalDAV and subscription love, with no CardDAV that we’re aware of for contacts.

We’re sure developers would appreciate it. We know users would adore it.

Anyone have any idea why we don’t have this yet?

It’s summer 2009 and iPhone OS 3.0 has just been made available via iTunes. You have it up and running along with next gen Twitter clients, instant massagers, RSS readers, and all manner of Push Notification-enabled apps ready to alert you the very instant anything new is piping hot and ready.

Then it happens. 20 new Twitter DMs. 3 co-workers IM you. Every tech blog you follow updates about iTunes not crashing this time. You calendar reminds you about that meeting coming up. And your entire FPS combat team all invite you to come join their game. Suddenly Push Notification is trying to pop up 30 text boxes all at once — while you’re in the middle of an urgent phone call.

How will you handle this, Apple?

Right now a single SMS pops up a message box that you either have to deal with right away, and if you dismiss it, it’s gone. If you forget what it was for… well, that’s tough. Imagine 30 of those, all at once. Will you even be able to hang up your phone call before canceling out all of them? And if you do cancel out of them, what chance to you have to really see and process alerts #1-29?

Both the Google Android with its top-down slider and the Palm Pre with their bottom loaded notification area provide a far less obtrusive and simultaneously more persistent — and dare we say more elegant? — notification solution.

Could you, Apple, have an improved system ready to drop on us in a future 3.0 beta? At WWDC? Or is that waiting on 4.0? And if you do have a way of handling it, what is it? What can you do given the current architecture, gesture library, and frameworks of the iPhone to better handle the onslaught of notifications you’re about to drop on us?

Pull down the topmost menu bar a la Android? Create a dedicated Notification app on the Home Screen we can launch to see, like recent calls, what we may have missed?

Maybe our readers have some ideas that can help. They certainly proved smarter than us on the Bluetooth toggle question. What say you, readers, any ideas on how Apple can prevent the notification equivalent of “ping death” befalling us come iPhone 3.0 and Push Notification Service this summer?

A while back Dieter asked for a fast way to toggle Airplane Mode on the iPhone — a triple click of the home button, perhaps. Yesterday he and I were talking about all the new Bluetooth functionality in iPhone 3.0 and the same point came up — right now, to turn Bluetooth on or off you have to:

Wake the iPhone, Slide to Unlock, (type a Passcode perhaps), (return Home perhaps), tap Settings, tap General, tap Bluetooth, and then toggle the ON/OFF switch.

That’s a lot of overhead, in terms of mental “work” and physical interactions.

With Bluetooth headsets, Stereo Bluetooth speakers, Bluetooth connectivity for accessories, Bluetooth connectivity of tethering, P2P gameplay and P2P app exchange, etc. a much faster way to flip the Bluetooth switch would be really appreciated.

Triple-click may not work in terms of usability, but surely there must be some other way? Maybe surface the ON/OFF toggle on the main Settings page, just before the drill down arrow? Jeremy thinks letting users add Settings shortcuts as icons on the Home Screen (like we can currently do with Safari bookmarks) would work. Anyone have any other ideas?