Mouse support could change the way you use your iPad | Hacker News Reader

Mouse support could change the way you use your iPad

theverge.com

29 pointsTomte37 comments

> If you’re thinking “that sure sounds like a lot of steps just to enable something as potentially fundamental to the user experience as mouse support,” well, you wouldn’t be wrong. Apple clearly doesn’t see this as a mainstream feature just yet, though, and isn’t going to be pushing it on people.

Because touch and mouse in one interface don't mix well for the large majority of use cases. So you'll end up with awkwardly large and cumbersome controls for mouse users and to small and finicky controls for touch users to interact with.

That is probably the reason it's 'hidden' in the accessibility settings. It's a feature for those people who are not able to use a touch interface and using a mouse-like device is their only solution. For all 'normal' users this mouse option will just feel like using the iPad with a handicap.

Exactly. I got a Windows tablet, and was extremely frustrated by the dual pointer interface, because only some programs supported touch. I decided to swap it for an Android tablet and just get used to using alternative (to Windows) programs to do my tasks, just because they would all be optimized for touch.

> So you'll end up with awkwardly large and cumbersome controls for mouse users and to small and finicky controls for touch users to interact with.

GTK+3 gives you touch-sized controls anyway, even on mouse/keyboard-only systems, and it works quite well - at most, it adds one or two steps for rare operations (click a hamburger menu, whatever) compared to a solely mouse-focused interface. They were striving to be "touch-ready" from the very beginning, and managed it quite well.

It is really only e.g. dragging/swiping that works very differently between touch and mouse interfaces. And of course mice come with extra buttons and scroll controls that make up for that.

> It is really only e.g. dragging/swiping that works very differently between touch and mouse interfaces. And of course mice come with extra buttons and scroll controls that make up for that.

It's this that I think will be the problem. Normal buttons and textfields will probably be usable on both control systems. But if you want to leverage the advantage of one of the systems you loose out on the other. So you either have to develop your UI twice or leave on of the two with a lesser experience.

If Apple should go through with this I hope they will set strict requirements in the store guidelines that ensures lazy app makers provide a proper experience for both kinds of controls.

A couple good examples: When you touch the screen, and drag, the mouse equiv. action is clicking the button and dragging. But with touch, in many cases you want the screen to scroll, whereas with the mouse you want to select / highlight text.

Also, with touch you don't have a "hover" operation, so you have to make "click" (touch) initiate a "hover" type of action in some cases, but in other cases you want touch to actually be the same as a mouse click.

> GTK+3 gives you touch-sized controls anyway, even on mouse/keyboard-only systems

Which is my biggest (in both interpretations) issue with Gtk3: Gtk2 already had oversized controls compared to Windows that wasted a lot of screen space, but Gtk3 took it to another level.

> it works quite well

All UIs that use Gtk3 i've experienced suck to the point where i try to avoid anything that uses that toolkit. I saw that Geany -the editor i mostly use when on Linux - switched to Gtk3 and i fear for the moment it'll drop on Debian. I have a Debian VM with everything i need preinstalled, just in case, but this is a stopgap solution - i'll need to find some other editor. I'm not a fan of Qt but i think Qt5 applications can be made to not waste as much space as Gtk3.

Or i can go back to NEdit. The main things i'll miss is a sidebar to browse the files from and some sort of toolbar to launch stuff from.

> They were striving to be "touch-ready" from the very beginning, and managed it quite well.

Where "quite well" really means "made it worse for desktop only, keyboard and mouse only users".

Gtk3 is a disaster. Gtk2 was the last decent version and that was mainly because everyone had agreed to target it as a de-facto standard for Linux GUI applications, otherwise it had several issues itself. Of course the Gtk3 devs shat the bed (i'm not even sure if the Gtk3 devs are the same people as the Gtk2 devs, i cannot imagine the same people making such awful decisions) by breaking backwards compatibility, breaking theming, forcing smartphone interaction on everything in an attempt to mimic Apple's success with iPhone as if people with iPhones would suddenly switch to Gnome because of its oversized buttons, huge icons and boulevard-wide gaps between everything.

If you cannot tell, i don't like Gtk3 or Gnome3 or anything associated with freedesktop.org (mainly because most of it comes either from Gnome people or people who design things like Gnome). I'd be on the KDE bandwagon but their reliance on Qt means they rely on the whims of a corporation whose primary interest is not in maintaining a stable desktop environment API but on providing a toolkit for whoever pays them (which is fine for Qt, but breaking changes sucks for a platform like KDE). And it isn't like they're free from freedesktop.org infestation either.

Perhaps adding theme support to Motif will be what saves us all.

> Gtk2 already had oversized controls compared to Windows

GTK+2 can actually be run with a Windows 9x/2000 widget theme ("redmond9x" IIRC). It's a tiny bit more compact, but just doesn't save a real amount of space compared to the default look. Unfortunately GTK+3 has moved to CSS which was probably necessary for things like proper support on high-DPI screens, but has broken the existing theming support altogether.

I do agree that the current lack of a "compact" mode for touch-free, mouse/keyboard-only use is a bit of an annoyance. But, like you, I don't necessarily view Qt as being all that better. And the default Adwaita theme in GTK+3 is tolerable enough.

You do not need CSS for proper high-DPI support, you just need a scale factor for your windows that your code doesn't ignore. AFAIK this is what Qt5 does.

Also AFAIK Gtk+3 cannot do real scaling and instead pretends the display is always a low DPI device and applies integer scaling to everything - their "fractional scaling" is really rendering with integer scaling upwards to a bitmap which is then downscaled (AFAIK^2 this is only done on Wayland because they rely on the compositor for that even though there is nothing that forbids them doing it on X11 too - but i guess they need to push their awful tech somehow). This is where things such as "there are no half-pixels" come from when they talk about fractional scaling.

FWIW personally i use the OneStepBack theme for Gtk3 because it makes the controls actually visible (especially your selection in menus, tabs, etc that isn't just a blue line beneath the control) and saves a bit of screen space.

Android tablets already have mouse support. Handy for remote desktop sessions before I switched to a Surface Go for lightweight travel use.

Android has mouse support. Be it phone or tablet, it doesn't make a difference. Even more fun: my Nexus 4 had no issues when I used my Apple Magic Mouse on it. Felt truly magic.

I can connect my Pixel 1 to the same USB-C dock I use for my laptop; the mouse and keyboard are instantly recognized, and it just works.

Your usb-c ethernet cable will work too. I was downloading a torrent at 100mbs on my phone and it blew my mind.

I love this too. Too bad it doesn't pack enough power to handle the HDMI port too :)

It even works on an Android watch.

That's new to me. I thought Android Wear was a "slave" device. Would be fun to have some pictures/videos :)

Yes, I also paired my new bluetooth Thinkpad keyboard with my phone on the day it arrived, just to see how it worked. I laughed pushing the newly appearing mouse cursor across the screen with the trackpoint (pointy stick) on the keyboard.

It was comical to be using an input device so much larger than the phone, but also enlightening. Suddenly, the Slack app felt just like a shrunken version of the desktop app and I could type fluently. I can now appreciate the two separate compromises of the phone as completely independent issues: the small screen that makes browsing and reading less efficient than on a 27 inch monitor, and the touch-based UX making me feel like a frustrated aphasic.

Yeah, I remember hooking up a USB hub to my Motorola Xoom back in the Honeycomb era and for giggles, decided to attach a mouse and keyboard. Both worked with the mouse surprisingly so (if memory serves, it was a blue dot in the color scheme Honeycomb used for UI).

I'm pretty pleased with mouse support coming to iOS. I wanted the 12.9 iPad Pro, but initially couldn't bring myself to do it because there are cases I want mouse and keyboard (remote desktop) and there were even cases I was interested in using a XB1 gamepad (figured I'd go with Shadow or similar for game streaming). It didn't offer any of these at the time in which case I was hoping Samsung would bring out a newer ~13in tablet in the s5e/s4 design. Thankfully, WWDC alleviated both concerns.

An escape key would also change the way you use the iPad (pro).

I’ve commented in the past about potential workarounds I though I had found, but still haven’t found a solution that works.

Funny, an escape key would change the way I use the MacBook Pro as well.

How about Home and End keys that just "do the right thing".

In Blink shell (paid app) on iPad Pro you can remap the ESC key to ~ or CAPS LOCK.

I wish that was a system-wide feature for external hardware keyboards like Apple's "Smart Keyboard Folio" (exactly like the modifier settings for keyboards available on the Mac)

That would be amazing. It’s interesting that several native, Apple apps, specifically around media playback, don’t support common key commands using the official iPad keyboard. Things like space to play/pause or arrow keys to go back and forth, or jump scenes. I use the iPad more when traveling since I have a lot of media on Apple TV, but there isn’t really a comparison UX wise.

There was a jailbreak tweak that enabled Bluetooth mouse and pointer support on an iPad over five years ago.

It was surprisingly good. Combined with another tweak that enabled multi-window support it made for a pretty good, though slow, experience.

Seriously, those jailbreak tweak authors were geniuses, adding necessary features years before Apple got round to it. Like file browsers and non-image attachments in Mail.

Why was some random developer able to enable BT mice on jail broken IPads nearly 7 years ago, with a 3kb patch, and apple is just now getting around to this?

Being able to use a mouse in word outlook and excel would make it a much more viable platform for literally millions of people who don’t have an iPad and aren’t going to buy a MacBook.

Having mouse support to enable a high quality remote desktop client could be a real game changer. I'd love to use an iPad, but can't develop on it. While I don't need it to be a primary development environment by any means, the ability to RDP into a machine and get work done seems great.

This exists. Jump desktop and Citrix X1 mouse.

But it only connects to their environments, correct? With their special mouses

Incorrect. It’s an ordinary rdp and vnc client. The X1 is a total rip-off - it’s just an ordinary Bluetooth mouse - but jump and the x1 work really well.

Was it not the whole point of touch-based devices to make keyboard and mouse obsolete?

It made it possible not to need one.

That doesn't mean it can't ever be beneficial to have support for one.

Keep in mind that to Apple, this is for accessibility. The mouse pointer and associated protocols are very important for some assisted computing devices.

It's just another type of input, there's distinct advantages and disadvantages to all of them. None of them will ever obsolesce another. Apple's extreme stance on keeping things as simple as possible pushed the market for a long time, but things are starting to swing back around now that bringing back the inputs of yesterday appears to be the only way to separate a product from all the others. I'd like to see trackballs and spinners (like on Tempest) make a comeback too.

The real whole point of touch-based devices was to redefine the meaning of a personal computer so that it can be locked down and under control from the device makers, forcing artificial limitations towards their users under the pretense of usability and security.

The keyboard and mouse stuff was just cherries on top and quite rotten cherries at that.

That doesn't make any sense considering there are plenty of touchscreen devices that aren't locked down.

It makes perfect sense considering the vast majority of touchscreen devices are locked down. Also a hint: if you ever thought that the ability for "sideloading" means that a device is not locked down, you have fallen victim to PR-speak even though that very word is an indicator of how they see that ability: something not normal, but something that happens from the side. This sort of speech, changing the normal "installing" to mean something controlled by the vendor of your OS and renaming the previous "installing" to "sideloading" (which is optional and this sort of ability to disable it is condoned by the OS maker) is affecting the way people even think about these devices.

Try to do a spreadsheet, or just write up a document, on a touch screen.

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