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The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

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Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long touch the space bar in the keyboard to get the trackpad-like functionality back.

Thank you. I had trouble activating this feature. On iOS it seems to work anywhere on the keyboard, not limited to a particular key.

Two-finger touch anywhere on the keyboard also turns it on, though I usually find that pretty awkward.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What do you use for text input? A case with integrated keyboard, or separate bluetooth keyboard, or something else?

FWIW, I use the Smart Keyboard Folio from Apple for a somewhat different use case (pure writing) and I am pretty comfortable sitting down in a coffee shop and writing a few thousand words. It's certainly not as good as a mechanical keyboard, but it's convenient enough to make me comfortable traveling with just the iPad.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#373
post #20

This is a very good take on the subject. I love the iPad, I use it all the time. It's an unbelievably good piece of hardware with a number of really good software applications. It is a surprisingly good thinking and note-taking tool, it's the best tool (period) for reading datasheets (or any large PDF documents), it is a great music workstation if you connect a MIDI keyboard and/or an external USB audio interface. Bu…

I literally have no idea how any newbie will know how to use the iPad via the array of gestures to show the dock, go home, switch apps, move an app over another, move them side-by-side, know that you can use mutliple fingers on the keyboard to use it as a cursor pad.

I used to think the meaningless icons with zero text or popup hints were bad (they are!) and the zero differentiation between a UI item and ordinary text (a button or link just looks like ordinary text, so you have to fumble around with the UI to guess what you can press; horrible flatness) was bad, but the inability to discover gestures other than behaving like a 2-year old with their first "feeling/textures" toy is the worst.

It just isn't obvious.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#374
post #269

I completely agree with this article. The iPad hardware is absolutely wonderful, it's light, gorgeous and powerful. I got the latest iPad pro to watch Netflix in bed and it fills that purpose completely. However, the OS running on the machine is bad. Very bad. The multitasking is horrifying. The Files app is unusable (especially if you want to access your files from an FTP server). You have to use your finger to sele…

My single biggest problem on the iPad is the way Safari just randomly kills your background tabs. Filling out a web form? You'd better hope that their half-baked tab state saving worked! (Spoiler alert: it probably didn't)

It's particularly annoying because of the headline features of iPadOS was that you could finally use Google Docs in Safari! It's actually amazing how well it works...until you switch tabs or apps and have to wait for your entire spreadsheet to reload.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#375
post #322

As 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…

> 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.

I use the iPad for the vast majority of my non-development computing. For me—and clearly for a lot of people—multi-tasking on the iPad has never been as good as it is on the Mac or even Windows. At the same time, it is absolutely as good/ easy as it's ever been. It's just still awkward and sometimes frustrating.

> This is all way out there right now, but it makes me think that the iPad is still just getting started.

I think so too, I love the iPad and wish I could use it as my primary computer. Every year when WWDC (the show formerly known as WWDC?) rolls around I hope we'll see some improvements that would allow me to run some of my web development workflow on the iPad and I'm generally disappointed.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#376
post #322

As 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…

> Instead of trying to rebuild the editors we had we build something else designed for testing, iterating, and managing the AST.

Considering that they barely managed to design working "regular user interfaces", the next-generation editors and development tools won't come from the teams currently working on iPad OS.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#377
post #322

As 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…

> 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.

This sounds like more a symptom of wifi's universal awfulness than a failure of the MPB though. I generally use my phone as a wifi hotspot when I'm on my laptop for the same reason.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#379
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO to be revolutionary the iPad should convince you not to buy a laptop The key thing sitting in the way of that for me, at least for the most part, is the lack of true background multitasking. I understand the need to avoid the battery problems of the Android ecosystem, but there needs to be some way to take an app and say 'yes, I really want to let this sit active indefinitely until I intentionally quit it'. For…

> For a simple example, consider an IRC client: it's useless if it drops the connection every time you turn off the screen or switch to another app for too long. I believe the "correct" way to do it would be to have a server in the middle, which keeps the connection alive, buffers the necessary data, and sends a notification to the device when appropriate. That is, unlike a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or smartphone…

...and that's the problem.

To be less pithy, 'just have a server in the middle' is completely impractical for some things, because that doesn't always exist.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#380
post #322

As 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…

I agree that Gruber is wrong but only in his details. The iPad should have been much more than it is and, although I have seen it revolutionize the way that many field workers are able to do their jobs, I still think it could have been more.

On another note, I also agree with the sentiment that people should try to force themselves to use it for a bit. I used to work for a company that did corporate software/hardware training and we'd always get people that were switching from a PC to a Mac that never bothered to even attempt to use their Macs differently and constantly complained about their company forcing them to switch. Once they stopped trying to right-click on everything and got used to dragging and dropping and just trying to discover things, they always got won over and preferred their Macs. This was during the early days of OS X and reached peak around Snow Leopard. I really like the newer macOS releases too but I wish they would focus more on fixing bugs and driving back to that discoverability that really made things intuitive to use.

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