iPadOS • Hacker News Board

Re: iPadOS

#141

Post by pjmlp » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

cfors wrote: post #10

Cool, but nothing about any focus on making the machine realistic for development. My current MacBook Pro is getting a little long in the tooth and after suffering through the 2016 and later versions at work, I will not be buying one of those until the keyboards are fixed. If iPadOS has first class terminal support I would consider making it my full time machine. Looks like the waiting game will continue.

Until Apple acquired NeXT, terminals were meaningless on Mac OS, developers were doing just fine with IDE REPLs.

Re: iPadOS

#142

Post by saagarjha » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

savoytruffle wrote: post #34

jdlyga wrote: post #26

I've had the iPadOS beta for a while, and it's basically just iOS 13 with some iPad specific features. There's no significant divergence yet.

A major thing that iOS doesn't have and even iPadOS 12 didn't is the ability to do a side-by-side view of two windows of the same app (two Mail windows, two Safari, two Pages, etc). Sounds pretty basic, but previously the split-screen view had to be two different apps.

That requires app opt-in: it's not automatically enabled (your apps will need to update for this to work).

Re: iPadOS

#143

Post by Spivak » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

tachion wrote: post #127

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #100

Track record for Apple when it comes to iOS/iPadOS updates has been impressive, but once they stop updating their device it becomes more vulnerable than their android counterpart for basic Internet browsing just because Apple doesn't update Safari via AppStore and doesn't allow any other browser engine . Case in point : Google Project Zero's latest iOS Exploit chains on webkit shows how easy it was(*is?) for an iOS u…

How come? You can have Firefox and Chrome installed on iPad just as on iPhone?

Sorta, the actual browser chrome is provided by the 3rd party but the underlying rendering and JS engine are required to be the OS provided facilities (i.e. Safari)

Apple’s security model is that Apple has to be able to inspect and review all the code you’re app is going to run. There is a special exception for JS provided that you run it though Apple’s interpreter.

Browsers are caught in the crossfire of a much broader rule that applications can not run code that Apple can’t see. They don’t sign anything that allows for arbitrary or semi-arbitrary code to be downloaded externally and run in principle. Apps get around this by using JS but you aren’t, as a rule, supposed to expose native API’s to your JS code.

Re: iPadOS

#144

Post by _ph_ » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

One thing which has increadibly annoyed me on the iPad so far was, that even if you had music files in your iCloud drive, there is no way to add them to the Music app. The same applies to videos and the TV app. There doesn't seem to be an iPad based flow to add your content to those apps.

Also, while I love the ability to play video as picture in picture, I cannot grasp, why the video size is limited to 1/4 of the screen size - if something interesting comes up, you cannot enlarge the video beyond that limit.

Re: iPadOS

#145

Post by neilobremski » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

I think it's great that Apple is attempting to design an OS for a specific form-factor and the use cases that go along with that. I worked on Windows 8 and the idea of putting the same UI on every device regardless of its size or inputs was really abhorrent to me. (If I've got a keyboard and a mouse connected to a big screen then I want something keen to that.)

Re: iPadOS

#146

Post by cfors » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

chadlavi wrote: post #134

darklion wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cool, but nothing about any focus on making > the machine realistic for development. What are you developing? What would you need?

built in terminal with access to (even a sandboxed) filesystem where I can do the stuff I do in the terminal on a mac -- install and use packages (homebrew might work? it's Darwin underneath iPadOS too, right?) and do other bash/zsh stuff; text editors/IDEs (I'd personally like an iPadOS version of vscode); and some mac-only software, like Sketch. If they had those, I'd switch to an iPad Pro today.

Pretty much all of this. If I could have sandboxed dev environments, a terminal interface is all I really need since I do most of my dev work in a terminal. I suppose some nice-to-haves would be the ability to spin up local servers that I could access from Safari.

Re: iPadOS

#147

Post by ogre_codes » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

zmk_ wrote: post #105

Analemma_ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Apple's defense, the SOCs on iPads are improving much, much faster than PC chips. Intel chips have been getting faster at something like 5% per year for the last decade, compared to 50% for Apple's A-series. So I think supporting 5 years worth of iPad devices is somewhat comparable to supporting 20 years worth of PC hardware: in both cases it's about a 100x performance difference between the bottom and top, and be…

Microsoft supported Windows XP for 12 years, Windows 7 for 10 years (+4 years if you are willing to pay for extended support). During the lifespan of XP the Moore's law was very much working.

The big difference here is Windows XP and Windows 7 had nearly static feature-sets over their lifetimes (or in the case of XP, SP 3 quickly became the baseline). For the vast majority, Windows XP that shipped with your computer was the same for the lifetime of that product. iOS changes features every year, often quite significantly. The challenge is whether the next version of Windows supported your hardware and this was often not the case. If your OEM had funky components and didn't want to update the drivers to the new version of Windows you were SOL. Windows has changes a LOT since XP/ Windows 7 and their update model is more like iOS than XP now so it's hard to use the old model as a baseline.

Re: iPadOS

#148

Post by yodon » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

ascagnel_ wrote: post #114

yodon wrote: post #95

Was there some sort of connect your bluetooth mouse announcement, or was that speculation of something iPadOS would support that never happened?

There was, but it's more of an accessibility feature -- the cursor is a relatively large circle, simulating a fingertip, rather than a pinpoint cursor.

That sounds almost vindictive in its desire to make sure no one uses a mouse for anything important while still checking off some legal accessibility requirement.

Re: iPadOS

#149

Post by _ph_ » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

robohoe wrote: post #15

cfors wrote: post #10

Cool, but nothing about any focus on making the machine realistic for development. My current MacBook Pro is getting a little long in the tooth and after suffering through the 2016 and later versions at work, I will not be buying one of those until the keyboards are fixed. If iPadOS has first class terminal support I would consider making it my full time machine. Looks like the waiting game will continue.

Blink shell on the App Store is a fantastic terminal that works wonderfully on iOS/iPadOS. Highly recommend it even with its steep price of $20. It supports mosh out of the box and has ability to store/import private/public keys. Multiple terminals can be opened as well. It even has a limited native shell which you can use to SCP files from your iPad to servers.

I am using Blink as it seems to be the best terminal app I could find so far and would recommend it, but it does struggle a bit in some corner cases, as split-screen and switching between apps.

Re: iPadOS

#150

Post by Conlectus » Tue, Sep 24, 2019, 5:37 PM UTC

ascagnel_ wrote: post #110

Conlectus wrote: post #92

The biggest problem I've found with using my iPad pro as a full time device is that the iPad does not have a real concept of keyboard focus. This is a big deal in split-screen apps, where hard as I try I can't get my terminal emulator to accept keyboard input -- I just keep typing in Safari. Hopefully this is something that Apple addresses now that they consider iPad OS to be a real OS and not a scaled-up iOS.

What happens when you Command-tab into your terminal emulator directly? I agree that split-screen input/output priority is wonky -- for example, if you have a video player app and Safari side-by-side and an external display connected, the video player app will only output to the display if it's the app on the left.

That does not shift focus reliably.