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Unifying iPadOS and macOS

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Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#151

Post by zozbot234 »

canuckintime wrote: post #145
zozbot234 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad that we can only think of touch screen interfaces as "dumbed down". The affordances of a touch-centric interface have yet to be fully explored; at least in principle, there's no reason why they could not be made just as capable as a keyboard+mouse.

It all comes down to text input. Steve Jobs launched the iPhone with only a touch screen but he launched the iPad with a hardware keyboard accessory (discontinued after a year but then reintroduced with the iPad Pro). So with iPadOS it’s always really been touch+keyboard and frankly mouse+keyboard is better. If Apple managed to offer a revolutionary input for the iPad (perhaps subvocalised speech input or a a redesig…

Gestural text input is very much a possibility. It was available on palmtop devices some 20 years ago, and these had far worse touch sensitivity than any modern tablet or even a modern phone.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#152

Post by joshtynjala »

cwizou wrote: post #12

Interesting take, there's 0 doubt that iPads are incredibly more intuitive to use, and anecdotally, I've also seen the same observations regarding young and elderly. I think a good portion of that is the indirect pointing method (mouse or trackpad) that takes some use to, but there are certainly inherited conventions, features based on past limitations and other things that look just weird to a new audience picking i…

Have you tried creating a .pkg file instead of .dmg? Much better user experience, in my opinion. The developer controls where the .app goes, and there’s nothing for the user to unmount when finished.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#153

Post by api »

criddell wrote: post #60
api wrote: post #27

I need a real computer. I don’t mind a few UI ideas being borrowed where they make sense but if I can’t run anything I want on it and can’t multitask or combine things together it is not a real computer. iOS works fine for a phone. It’s worthless for my job or my personal interests.

That's kind of the beauty of an iPad. It isn't for everyone. It hasn't been designed as a lowest-common-denominator type of device. There are a few things it's great at and those aren't necessarily the types of things a lot of people want. I have a 2018 iPad and it's easily my favorite computer to use. With a keyboard, it's lovely to write on. With the Pencil and Good Notes it's a fantastic note taking device. Get Pr…

I agree, and the same applies to the Mac and anything that narrows it. They are for different audiences.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#154

Post by emodendroket »

zozbot234 wrote: post #149
flohofwoe wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI discoverability has massively declined with the advent of touch UIs though. You can't hover a UI item to see what it does, and there's a lot of non-intuitive "magic swipes" and hidden UI elements in smartphone UIs which you just have to know about.

Touch UI items tend to be larger by necessity (and to have surrounding padding as a safety factor, which increases their "effective" size even further), so you don't really need to do the hover thing. Just redesign them to be more self-explanatory as opposed to wasting that space. "Magic swipes" could also be redesigned to be more intuitive, e.g. with some background soft-3D effects that make swipe-sensitive areas "s…

Aren't magic swipes basically the analog to keyboard shortcuts?

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#155

Post by ratww »

flohofwoe wrote: post #4

It's not about the touch screen, the UI, the hardware or "casual" vs "professional" users, but simply about the ability to create(!) and combine small specialized tools into something that's bigger than the sum of its parts. The "walled garden app ecosystem" is exceptionally bad for this, and the UNIX shell is exceptionally good, but both are extremes. It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved…

> the ability to create(!) and combine small specialized tools into something that's bigger than the sum of its parts

Funny, the possibility to do that currently exists in a walled garden, for audio apps: https://audiob.us . This is used by creators and live performers, exclusively. I don't think anyone uses applications in this ecosystem for "consumption" purposes.

The problem was never was the current OSs, it was just about app makers not willing or not knowing how to collaborate amongst themselves. It was also never about open vs closed, since AudioBus is proprietary and 99% of the apps that support it are also proprietary.

The thing about UNIX pipes is that they use plain text. AudioBus uses audio. Those are two things that naturally impose limitations. Developers seem ok with those "natural limitations" but whenever you want to impose limitations to something else you immediately get pushback.

You wouldn't be able to do that in a business CRUD app for example. The amount of wheel-reinvention is too big on those, compared to audio/video/unix-tools.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#156

Post by whywhywhywhy »

CDSlice wrote: post #148
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #138

The signs are all in the air, MacOS will not exist maybe even 5 years from now. The merge will absolutely happen but it will be less of a merge and more of a takeover. iPadOS apps running on MacOS is just the thing to ease you in, eventually at a WWDC down the line the words “Most of our legacy MacOS users are spending most of their time in iPadOS native apps…” and your old versions of Photoshop or whatever will be s…

> imagine you’re an Apple exec who gets to see earning charts, iPhone, iPad and MacOS. One of these things is not like the others in both usage numbers and profit. You are correct, one of those is not like the others, but it isn’t the Macs. According to their latest earnings report, iPhones made Apple $39.57B, iPads $7.37B, and Macs $8.24B [0]. I wouldn’t be surprised if iPadOS and MacOS merged in the near future, es…

>According to their latest earnings report, iPhones made Apple $39.57B, iPads $7.37B, and Macs $8.24B

These are just device sales right? You have to remember iPads have the App Store revenue and the cream scooping of IAP/subscription revenue of most applications running on them.

Apple doesn't get a cut of my Photoshop subscription on Mac, it absolutely gets a cut when I buy Procreate on iOS.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#157

Post by walterbell »

jon-wood wrote: post #121
walterbell wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to version-control shortcuts and import/export them between devices, especially for those unwilling to use iCloud and associated keyring upload and content scanning?

Not that I can see, but frankly if you’re not willing to use iCloud, give up on Apple devices because it’s what makes basically all the good stuff work. (This is not an invitation to get into yet another debate on recent events)

There are enough good iPhone/iPad apps to use Apple devices with self-hosted storage (WebDAV, CalDAV, SMB/SFTP/DLNA, Git).

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#158

Post by diegof79 »

adrusi wrote: post #114
flohofwoe wrote: post #4

It's not about the touch screen, the UI, the hardware or "casual" vs "professional" users, but simply about the ability to create(!) and combine small specialized tools into something that's bigger than the sum of its parts. The "walled garden app ecosystem" is exceptionally bad for this, and the UNIX shell is exceptionally good, but both are extremes. It's hard to imagine how a UNIX-like flexibility can be achieved…

That's just it. The future is very likely most people using iPad-like devices. They will need some kind of keyboard, so I'm not sure it's going to be tablets mostly, but the software will resemble that of smartphones. But no desktop operating systems are well suited to being used primarily by professionals, not even Linux. The desktop paradigm is fine, but it was designed with the idea of making computers more access…

> The desktop paradigm is fine, but it was designed with the idea of making computers more accessible, and it inhibits composing different pieces of software together,

The Xerox Parc and Smalltalk are the ancestors of today’s WIMP UI. If you look at Squeak (or Pharo) you’ll see how is possible to make a desktop UI that’s more composable than the usual Unix shell. The problem is not the desktop paradigm, but a lack of commercial interest.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#159

Post by adrusi »

diegof79 wrote: post #158
adrusi wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just it. The future is very likely most people using iPad-like devices. They will need some kind of keyboard, so I'm not sure it's going to be tablets mostly, but the software will resemble that of smartphones. But no desktop operating systems are well suited to being used primarily by professionals, not even Linux. The desktop paradigm is fine, but it was designed with the idea of making computers more access…

> The desktop paradigm is fine, but it was designed with the idea of making computers more accessible, and it inhibits composing different pieces of software together, The Xerox Parc and Smalltalk are the ancestors of today’s WIMP UI. If you look at Squeak (or Pharo) you’ll see how is possible to make a desktop UI that’s more composable than the usual Unix shell. The problem is not the desktop paradigm, but a lack of…

I wouldn't call smalltalk systems part of the same paradigm as mainstream desktops, although if historians call them both desktops then we can use that name for both.

I think we can do better than squeak/pharo, but they're fine, really. They're at least the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Re: Unifying iPadOS and macOS

#160

Post by 1123581321 »

derefr wrote: post #70

Y’know Samsung’s DEX, where you plug a Samsung Android device into an HDMI output and the output is not a mirror of the phone’s mobile UI, but rather a full Android desktop UI? There’s little reason that Apple couldn’t do the same thing with iPads, where the “desktop UI” is macOS. Unify the kernels/userlands, keep the “Desktop Environments” distinct, but ship them both on iPads, with the macOS DE just waiting around…

Adoption rates of these new features is too low to train a substantial portion of users.
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