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The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
331–340 of 617 posts
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#332As someone who uses his iPad Pro regularly, I love all the multi tasking of the iPad. I know many have written that they have issues with multiple windows on the iPad, but for me it's never been better or easier. My main gripe is keyboard behavior which is very buggy, but not related to how easy/hard it is to make and move apps around the screen. The fact is that the iPad is only useful because of its software. In my…
Fully agree.
I think Gruber’s dead wrong, and folks should try it for a couple months. Leave the Macbook or Win10 laptop at home, and force yourself to rewire your brain into the iPad affordances and apps.
Aside from being able to turn his complaint off:
To turn Multitasking features on or off, go to Settings > Home Screen & Dock > Multitasking then turn off Allow Multiple Apps if you don't want to use Slide Over or Split View.
I think it works fine for business and development consumption and creation, both.
I’ve daily drivered iPad Pro with Apple keyboard for last 3 generations of iPad 12.9”. It started as an experiment to see if we could move employee population over for less support costs, and then became a habit because it’s just too ideal if you’re mobile for travel or even between multiple offices and meetings.
Each new Macbook model, I get nostalgic for MBP days and carry it around for a bit, and then realize too many compromises carrying a laptop compared to carrying or traveling with just the iPad Pro.
I’m on a two week trip right now, with the brand new top of line Macbook Pro 16” with full dev and Adobe setup in my bag. But it only came out of my carry on once in two weeks, and that was a failure.
Tried to display a web demo, some custom diagramming, and a PowerPoint on conference room screen from the laptop. Unable to use the enterprise guest WiFi due to their security proxies, and the hotspot was too slow. Popped the same USB-C HDMI adapter in the iPad, and showed all the content over LTE.
In a room built for Windows world, people struggled, and failed, to get HDMI from their HP or Dell or Lenovo laptops working, via HDMI ports or USB-C ports. Both the Macbook and iPad “just worked” with Apple’s same latest USB-C to HDMI adapter.
With the always on networking, all day battery life, decent choice of text based dev tools including code editors, git clients, and terminals like Blink (mosh) to do git-commit based development/deployment, Citrix and RSA and enterprise VPN, not to mention full O365 and Adobe suites (though I recommend Affinity now), it’s hard to figure out what it is I need the laptop for enough to deal with the PITA of carrying it.
This was not true 10 years ago, but today, iPad Pro can be the sole computing device even for an enterprise technology executive.
Bonus anecdata, I’ve recently noticed the iPad Pro is what’s used by 80% of folks in the board room, even though it’s a Windows based enterprise. Something’s changed.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The worst thing is that the forced over-simplification of the UI features did not make it easier to use for beginners. I believe Gruber argues completely the opposite: that the recent changes to add features like split screen make it more confusing (e.g. the example of his mother getting stuck in the split screen and calling him). He continues in the very article we comment here (emphasis mine): "if I could go back…
"if I could go back to the pre-split-screen, pre-drag-and-drop interface I would. Which is to say, now that iPadOS has its own name, I wish I could install the iPhone’s one-app-on-screen-at-a-time, no-drag-and-drop iOS on my iPad Pro. I’d do it in a heartbeat and be much happier for it." Weirdly there is just a setting and it is strange that Gruber doesn’t know about it. Settings->HomeScreen & Dock->Multitasking->All…
I like multiple apps except for in Safari, where I semi-regularly accidentally activate slide-over by dragging a link when I'm trying to scroll a page. Getting out of this mode is a pain in the ass, because AFAIK, you have to drag the slide over into split-screen mode before in order to close it.
Anyway, in desperation I turned off multi-tasking, but it doesn't disable the drag-link-to-create-slide-over-behavior. Instead it becomes even worse because the dragged link replaces the previous window. Even worse, you can't click the Back button to get back where you were. Doubly-even-worse, Safari's history is and has been broken for a long time... not every link you've visited is in the history, titles don't match the page you were on, etc.
Anyway, whatever the hell Apple did to Safari as part of iPad OS... I hate it.
edit: I didn't realize there was a slide-over-switcher you can activate and then from there swipe-up to kill the slide-over you don't want. Still a PITA. https://www.imore.com/how-use-slide-over-and-split-view-ipad...
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#334An ipad/tablet is halfway between a laptop and a phpne, amd worse than either. For a while, phones got bigger (phablets), but any bigger and they don't fit a pocket, nor usable one-handed. The convenience of a phone form-factor is overwhelming.
Rhe next big thing going to be VR/AR/glasses, but have stalled. It might be foldable displays, but I think they'll suffer the same fate as tablets, for the same reasons. Convenience is kimg.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#335As a programmer, I absolutely gave up on the multitasking on my iPad Pro. I don't use it in such a way and usually don't care. And the very few cases I wanted to use it like that I couldn't succeed in doing it even after my wife showed me 3 times (she uses her own iPad Pro in split screen very often and gotten used to the gestures; and even she makes mistakes occasionally). Just an anecdote. I am a very technical use…
I also can't figure it out. I still have some window that appears on the side and I can't figure out how to completely get rid of it (from my experiments with multitasking while I was reading the documentation, or at least some website describing it). I don't know if that's intended but I have no idea how to use it, so don't.
I had an easier time learning Xmonad back in the day, which might say something about Apple's UI design these days.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#336I do digital painting on the side, as a hobby. In that field, the iPad Pro, specifically the Procreate app, has been revolutionary -- every single famous digital illustrator, concept artist, and comics artist I follow on Instagram has one, and they post gorgeous work done on them regularly. It's the only tool that comes remotely close to challenging the gold standard workflow of Wacom tablet + Photoshop, and Wacom an…
Would you mind sharing some of your favorite IG follows for illustration? I'm just getting into this on the iPad.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#337> How would anyone ever figure out how to split-screen multitask on the iPad if they didn’t already know how to do it? I actually recently got my first personal iOS (okay, iPadOS) device and this is how I feel about many of the UI features. Touching some side of the screen triggers this or that surprising feature and I'm struggling to undo what I did to get back to the business. Maybe what's needed is good old RTFM,…
> having heard how easy Apple device are to supposed to be to use That was a rule for very good reason, and it will take some time to erode, but it’s definitely not as true today as it once was. It’s no consolation, but the first iPad - from the era of usable Apple design - was much better. Not in terms of power or weight, of course, but the OS didn’t have all these weird mystery-meat controls, gestures, broken multi…
Swiping is not discoverable, but no one noticed at first because the iPhone TV ad campaigns all showed how to use it. So most people who got an iPhone already had that bit of knowledge in their brains and thought it was intuitive.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
iPad succeeds in these examples because it's a consistent environment with updates. The problem with the cheap Android tablet is that unless the entire world standardises on a single model of tablet for these purposes you'd have all kinds of quirks around hardware, etc. Updates are also another issue even on premium-priced Android devices, so the cheap one is a lost cause.
Updates themselves are an assumption. I imagine a large percentage of cafe checkout and meeting room booking tablets are never updated once installed. The distinction here is Appliance vs Computing Platform. And so far many tablets are seen as appliances, not computers.
I doubt it's so much doing updates as it is about support. If they have a vendor app (like Square on a tablet to take payments) and that abandons older OS versions to lower technical debt or for security reasons then at least they can update.
On Android you'd sadly find the lack of kernel compatibility with the chipset means that ever happens.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#339An article written by a technologist. Only 1% use multitasking. Software is absolutely the strength. The extraordinary social impact of iPad on education, bringing technology and books to the masses, especially the non technical , education and entertainment to the young (who can use this device even before they can read), the elderly and most importantly the enablement of the disabled are the greatest achievements o…
You should talk to some teachers about the iPads impact on education. Teachers hate the devices in their classrooms. It makes their job much harder.
Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
so the captain tells us to switch off all electronic devices and then proceeds to navigate the plane via iPad?
I haven't had a captain tell me to turn off electronic devices for years. The flight attendant asks me to remove headphones for the safety briefing, which is reasonable, and we're told to put it into airplane mode for takeoff/landing
I accidentally left my iPad in the seat-back on a recent flight — my case, it turns out, is a perfect match for Delta-leather-blue. Even though this is an iPad with cellular, I'd switched it to airplane mode and thus was unable to locate it with "Find My". After three days the airline hadn't found it, and I chalked it up to an expensive lesson learned.
On day four, I received a push message (from Find My) that the iPad had come to life. An airport staffer had found it and charged it up. Presumably it cold boots with airplane mode switched off, so it connected to the cellular network, received the "lost device" command, displayed my contact info, etc. I received a call shortly thereafter.
When I picked up the iPad at baggage services, I chatted with the staff a bit. They let me in on the "secret" that most airline employees never switch their devices into airplane mode anymore, and for this exact reason.