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The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

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Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#381

Post by lukifer »

adamsea wrote: post #119
zozbot234 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're deploying "thousands" of these devices, you can standardize on a single model and even get custom support. The iPad might still be a good choice then, but it's definitely not the only one.

Yeah but you have to think about it. I feel like for many businesses thought/effort/time — even only a little - is more valuable than money. [edit] and you also need to have someone whose aware of those options to begin with which is less common outside prigramming enthusiasts imho. Because Apple has amazing marketing discovering an iPad solution is easy.

"No one ever got fired for buying iPads" is the new "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM".

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#382

Post by ASalazarMX »

fulldecent2 wrote: post #353
cactus2093 wrote: post #126

Good points in the article. I also find the model names weirdly confusing, how did the iPad become the smaller, less powerful variant when the Air still exists? They did this with MacBooks too, though I think the tiny one may be discontinued now. And why is the iPad peripheral system such a mess? The released the pencil 2 which is a significant usability improvement and had every indication of replacing the pencil 1,…

The main design theory of Apple is simple: come up with a great usability feature and deploy it on one model. Then spend the next 5 to 10 years spreading this out to their other models. When people stop buying, just swap in a higher specced component from Intel and talk about how it is 2x faster.

The Apple watch case is infuriating.

Since the new series 5 is a very minor incremental upgrade from the 4, they discontinued the latter, but still sell the 3. This way the comparison table between 3 and 5 make it seem like the 5 was a bigger improvement.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#383

Post by simonh »

72deluxe wrote: post #373
jwr wrote: 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 tex…

So we need to add multitasking controls directly to the visible UI. That means they could be accidentally triggered much more easily, so we'd need to do that in a clear and obvious way that isn't confusing, doesn't lead to accidental triggering and is easy and obvious to get out of. Also they need to be unobtrusive and minimise the impact on the display of applications and content.

Clearly having obscure gestures trigger functionality isn't ideal, but are the alternatives actually better, or even viable?

I do agree with Gruber, the current gestures and behaviours are awkward. I can think of some alternatives that might help. One would be to run your primary app, then have a Control Center widget activate a multitasking layout, then it display the home screen as an overlay, so you can choose any app to go into the 'second slot' of the chosen layout. That may well come with negative tradeoffs, but at least the app selection/launch process would be familiar. There may be things that can be done.

However there are no magic wands here. Getting rid of gestures sound great, but then what do you replace them with?

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#384

Post by sneak »

> The iPads Pro outperform MacBooks computationally.

How quickly Gruber falls in line with the propaganda machine the moment that official guidance (Airpods Pro) comes out. :D

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#385

Post by RandallBrown »

dkarl wrote: post #344
Terretta wrote: post #332

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…

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 Stop using other devices and give yourself a few months to learn the basics? This is how I used to encourage people to try desktop Linux in 2001.

It's not giving people time to learn the basics. It's giving people time to retrain their brain because it's a different device that solves problems differently.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#386

Post by sixstringtheory »

dkarl wrote: post #344
Terretta wrote: post #332

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…

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 Stop using other devices and give yourself a few months to learn the basics? This is how I used to encourage people to try desktop Linux in 2001.

I share a similar experience as parent. I only use my laptop for compiling iOS apps, almost everything else happens on my iPad Pro 10" with keyboard (want to upgrade to the larger size next). I don't think it takes months to learn the basics, but it does to work out all the little annoying differences between an iPad and MBP in your workflows, some of which aren't everyday things. The iPad isn't perfect, but it is great IMO.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#387

Post by 0xCMP »

Fiahil wrote: post #376
0xCMP wrote: 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.

I agree it’ll probably have to be third party developers and we’re seeing that. Short cuts (originally third party “workflow”) is already pretty powerful. If you play with Audulus[1] you see a UI not too dissimilar to Dark except for Audio Synths instead of programming.

Both obviously need to be greatly iterated on, but the bones are there.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/audulus-3/id1027525593

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#388

Post by bnjms »

Lots of good discussion here about the state of iPad tablets.

My SO is returning to school and wants a tablet for school. She likes her iPhone. Is the iPad ready to be a primary note taking solution? I have seen its note taking app used to great effect but how is external keyboard support? Does anyone use an ipad in uni as their primary input device?

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#389

Post by 0xCMP »

ogre_codes wrote: post #375
0xCMP wrote: 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…

Yea there are some ugly hacks to make that work.

If you worked in Python I’ve seen people do work in Pythonista on YouTube, but the best way I’ve seen to develop “locally” without a jailbreak is setting up a RaspberryPi4 to provide an Ethernet device over USB-C which you can connect to via SSH. Definitely a major hack and you’ll still need to either turn on the hotspot or connect the Pi some other way to the internet.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#390

Post by sillysaurusx »

FreakyT wrote: post #374
Fiahil wrote: 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 a…

Whoa, they do this on iPad? Is that a new iOS thing?

I have 500 tabs in Safari on my iPhone. It's a nice time capsule of what I used to be reading. (500 is the cutoff limit, apparently.)

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