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The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

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Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#441

Post by Terretta »

BryantD wrote: post #372
mediaman wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agree with you, it’s easy to type.

For whatever reason, I prefer this new generation iPad Pro smart keyboard from Apple over the MBP keyboards from 2015 till this fall’s re-released ‘old’ keyboards on MBP.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#442

Post by Terretta »

dkonofalski wrote: post #380
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…

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…

My guess, it’s something about how a developer team or UX team experience the device themselves.

Given the mockery of the “what’s a computer?” ad, I’m guessing most are spending a majority of their time on other devices, and not living with this enough to envision the experiences it’s more than capable of providing.

Failure of imagination vs. failure of technology.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#443

Post by coupdejarnac »

amelius wrote: post #239
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…

> it's the best tool (period) for reading datasheets (or any large PDF documents) Sounds intriguing. How would I go about copying the PDFs that are currently on my Linux PC onto it, though?

I love that all the proposed solutions here totally suck. If the iPad would just work as a USB flash drive, all these convoluted transfer methods wouldn't be necessary.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#444

Post by ashonalla »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #244
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…

> The worst thing is that the forced over-simplification of the UI features did not make it easier to use for beginners. I can see many people (including myself) struggling. So we have been forced into a "compromise" with all the downside, but none of the upside. I wholly disagree, at least at the beginning. When the original iPad was released, I remember seeing multiple viral videos of two-year-olds being given iPad…

>> people who are not familiar with computing

It's pretty amusing that IOS and Android are likely the reason that it's the year 2020 and "people who are not familiar with computing" still exist.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#445

Post by bhewes »

Terretta wrote: post #332
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…

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…

Same here. Though I forced myself to use Android exclusively for two years as my mobile computer. I added an 11inch Ipad Pro to my daily bag and I could not be happier.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#446

Post by ashonalla »

mortenjorck wrote: post #351
davedx wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> struggling to undo what I did to get back to the business You'll love this one: to undo (don't think it works for everything, but it does for typing), shake your device rapidly from side to side.

This was replaced in iOS 13 by a less comical, yet equally undiscoverable three-finger tap gesture. Considering that command-Z is not discoverable either, it’s not too bad, especially as there are undo/redo/clipboard buttons on the keyboard in most cases.

>> Considering that command-Z is not discoverable

Traditionally, the keyboard shortcut for undo has been listed next to undo on the edit menu. That's pretty discoverable...

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#447

Post by gregjor »

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…

Working Copy and CodeHub handle git repos. I code from an iPad Pro sometimes with Blink (mosh/ssh client) and Working Copy with Textastic.

I sympathize about not running local dev environments, but for the actual work I do the apps won't run on a laptop or local PC anyway without a lot of trouble, so I'm used to working over ssh to a dev server. That works very well on an iPad, even better with a decent keyboard with an escape key.

As someone else mentioned Pythonista gives you local Python.

I work on multiple large web applications for a few clients and I've tried using my iPad Pro exclusively. I've only run into two issues that make it less than ideal: No web inspector/JS debugged in Safari (though workarounds exist they're clunky), and difficult text selection (not an issue in a terminal window with vim but imprecise and fussy in iOS apps). Otherwise it's great and I do use my iPad a lot. My main work setup is a Chromebook (Pixel Slate), which I only prefer over the iPad Pro because of the trackpad/mouse text selection and Chrome web developer tools.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#448

Post by downtide »

_red wrote: post #294
slantyyz wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I get that designers hate skeuomorphism, I tend to think there are still significant benefits to it with seniors. With my dad in particular, if the icons were literally photos (as opposed to "graphically designed" icons) of real world objects he was familiar with, I think it would help... a little. He doesn't seem to process abstractions very well. For example, a shadowed head in a contacts icon has absolutely…

For the life of me, I can't understand how neither IOS nor Android offers some type of "Simple UI" setting. It should only consist of 4 Icons: Call, Email, Text, Web It is a crazily under-served market.

I have this odd contacts thing. Start there for calls and chats, or start with a call or chat then find the contact? Not so simple.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#449

Post by downtide »

ksec wrote: post #228
qmmmur wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me recount an experience I heard second hand of a researcher developing user interfaces for research tools. Keep in mind the target audiences are people with PhD's and who have to comb through lots of data in order to do their job. They struggled with _double click_ as a concept. How fast, not moving the mouse in-between clicks etc, etc. Some people are really virginial when it comes to anything other than doing…

I would have thought Double Click was something "Death would take care of it" [1] by now, so may be not. I remember twenty years ago teaching my parents double click, they then spend years on computer and they still cant understand it. They have 4 modes in their mental model, Left Click, Right Click, and Double Click on both Left and Right. They dont understand when to use which. A lot of nerds / geeks/ tech people t…

Double clicking is dreadful. So horrible to learn.

Re: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

#450

Post by simonh »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #406
Firaxus wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider looking into iSH, it let's you access a Linux like environment where you can download and use common packages like vim and python in a terminal. It has to emulate x86 calls, but for my use case of writing notes in vim and compiling and running simple c++ programs, it works. You can see some more information here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ish/ But I completely agree that it's practically a moral crime that th…

This can't be installed like a regular app, can it? Also, I wonder why they emulate x86 – isn't the iPad CPU ARM64? Couldn't this simply use binaries for that architecture?

Then you’d be running unsigned, unreviewed binaries bypassing iOS controls directly on the CPU, which would be a security nightmare for iOS. This way it’s a completely emulated environment that’s isolated from the underlying system.
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