181–190 of 217 posts
You can hack macOS using macOS, but kids won’t be able to get that level of understanding how OS works on iPadOS. This is bad for IT. Maybe not as dramatic as an existential crisis but it’s certainly a lost opportunity. My friend's daughter is 10 and she could pass job interview for a junior software developer any day simply because her first PC was running Ubuntu (it’s Arch now).
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…
You can automate and glue iOS apps together using Shortcuts, script them with Scriptable or Pythonista, etc.. It's somewhat analogous to using Automator and/or macOS' Open Scripting Architecture.
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…
Thought it will still be interesting to see where that will go in the next 20 years. Like you said with the convergence of desktop and mobile devices on the one hand I can't see traditional OS's surviving but on the other hand I don't se another option given that's the only medium to build the higher level software.
You can hack macOS using macOS, but kids won’t be able to get that level of understanding how OS works on iPadOS. This is bad for IT. Maybe not as dramatic as an existential crisis but it’s certainly a lost opportunity. My friend's daughter is 10 and she could pass job interview for a junior software developer any day simply because her first PC was running Ubuntu (it’s Arch now).
>This is bad for IT. Maybe for how we do IT. But consider the future where 99% of apps are developed on a tablet or phone (for a tablet or phone) using a cloud web interface with mostly low-code or no-code widget drag and drops.
This will simply never happen. Just given the history of low-code / no-code, they are great for prototypes and small apps but as soon as you do anything more then that's when things start falling off a cliff. Of all the apps I've been contracted to build or help build I can think of maybe one that we could have glued together using low-code. Everything else just has too much custom logic behind the scenes.
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…
I feel like a traditional OS will always stick around because of software developers. I couldn't imagine trying to build an iOS app on an iPad, even an iPad Pro with a keyboard. There will always be some more advanced tool that is used to build the tools. Thought it will still be interesting to see where that will go in the next 20 years. Like you said with the convergence of desktop and mobile devices on the one han…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But no desktop operating systems are well suited to being used primarily by professionals I love macOS and I’m a professional. I mean, I get paid for what I do. I’m a professional, right?
Well it's roughly as good as your other two options, none of which are terrible. I'm not trying to insult the people who use.. literally any operating system available today. But surely you can imagine ways that macOS could be better suited to your needs. Why (to give an example that's easy to explain briefly, not necessarily the most important one) are the various things you have open organized primarily by which ap…
I see a bunch of posts about the iPad being a "consume" only device and that's totally totally wrong. I've had an iPad since day one, generation one and took notes with an aftermarket stylus. I used Keynote and OmniGraffle to make slideshows and diagrams. I even bought an Apogee JAM and was able to record my electric guitar in GarageBand and used several other apps for guitar effects and simulated amplification. My f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There's a natural limit to what may be achieved with low/no code tool. Kids might be able to drag a few elements on screen to create charts and games, but that sort of work doesn't really advance the field. Ahhh, who said the point in the future would be to advance the field? That is how we think. Future generations might be content with a few "programming geniuses" and everyone else making simplistic apps for work…
A bit like today, I feel like a toddler playing with Java coloured cubes, while the “real programmers” are the Linux contributors, people who write drivers and so on. Tomorrow it will be 3 layers: The C programmers, the people from Atlassian or Apple who build the platforms, and us, programming with the subset of the language they give us.
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…
> Unify the kernels/userlands, keep the “Desktop Environments” distinct, but ship them both on iPads, with the macOS DE just waiting around for you to plug your device into a monitor. I want basically what you’re describing, but rather than having 2 distinct desktop environments I posit that the iPadOS environment, with a few refinements, would be better for desktop usage than macOS’ DE. Specifically, the refinements…
iPadOS 15 has limited support for floating windows and more than three "windows" on screen at once. I'd posit that they are preparing the APIs for floating window support for external displays in a future version of iPadOS.
>As a daily user of tiling window managers on a Linux desktop, floating desktop windows seem like a UI dead end that we’ve somehow been trapped in for decades
As a Mac user, I agree. On my 13-inch notebook, I more or less always use applications in a full screen configuration. The notebook screen is too small to allow for effective uses of floating windows.
However, even on a 27-inch display, I still find myself using full screen applications more often than not.
In fact I'd be ecstatic if a future version of macOS stole some of the multitasking features from iPadOS. Managing fullscreen apps on the Mac is a lot clunkier than it is on the iPad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Yes, Windows and Mac copied the WIMP UI. But, they ignored the composable message passing architecture. The goal of Smalltalk was to make a computing environment with a GUI, the programming language was like C to Unix.
During the 9x-2000 there was a lot of hype on providing the same system composition capabilities in Windows and Mac: ActiveX, Windows Scripting Host, AppleScript, etc. But, these things are dying. Those frameworks are not cross-platform, and they were not designed with security in mind. The interest shifted to the web.
My point is: It's possible to make a programable/extensible desktop UI. But, today the cost of doing it is high, and the interest is low.
> I think we can do better than squeak/pharo
I agree. I used Smalltalk -to work- for 3yrs. Smalltalk is full of good ideas, but it also has many bad ones.
I'll love to see something better too... In a sense JavaScript and the browser share some of the St GUI capabilities: you can inspect, experiment, and browse the code of any app. But, in other aspects the web platform is terrible.
I hope that the competence between Apple (pushing for apps in iOS/iPadOS) and Google (pushing for PWA), will renew the interest on creating environments where anybody can code and tinker with other apps. (if PWAs evolve to have the same capabilities as native apps, Apple will need work hard on removing the app creation barriers to compete -I don't see native Android apps as a competence to Apple iOS... but I might be wrong)