iPadOS
apple.com
apple.com
It's like the manual that Apple forgot. Case in point: you can swipe from the bottom-right corner of the screen with the Apple Pencil and it'll take a screenshot of the webpage and open it for marking up.
Extensive coverage of multitasking features, as well. There's definitely a learning curve with all these possibilities - split view, side view, copying and pasting, etc - so it makes sense to get comfortable with them now.
1: https://www.macstories.net/stories/ios-and-ipados-13-the-mac...
I... but... how in the world is anyone ever supposed to know that exists???
I remember spending a good 10 minutes trying to work out how to eject a CD from a Macbook/iMac until someone explained to me that you simply drag the CD icon from the desktop to the trash can...
It’s just that "drag to the trashcan" gimmick was present since first Macintosh introduction keynote in 1984 and is still usable as of today so no surprise it’s the first answer on every Q/A.
I can’t yet skim through the footage but it might even appear in the 1984 LIVE DEMO (more emphasis needed) of the first Macintosh : https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA
I’m not sure about intuitive vs unintuitive, but as a desktop windows & Linux server user, the Mac was very unfamiliar to me and took a long time to learn its quirks.
Ref: Intuitive = Familiar ... By Jeff Raskin
It reminds me of all the old Windows users accidentally dragging their start-bar and covering the whole screen.
I want to search to see if an app is installed. I expect an Overview screen that's easily accessible for this like Android, Gnome or Chrome OS, but on iOS I have to swipe left a few times? Weird.
I want to switch wireless network I'm connected to. I correctly guess that I can swipe down to make a wireless icon appear. I expect that from the icon I can get into the settings, but that doesn't appear to be the case. It only seems to toggle the wireless networking on or off.
Sometimes I have good luck telling Siri what to do, but other times the comprehension of what I'm asking falls flat compared to Google's AI.
You can now also long press the wifi icon (twice) from the control centre in iOS 13 to quickly switch wifi networks without going into the settings app, you can also do the same with the bluetooth icon.
A lot of this stuff is really hard to just discover though if you're not already aware it exists to begin with.
I really REALLY wish buttons would come back in style.
Can you imagine if there was a persistent button at the top of your screen that said “Open Notifications?”
Does anyone happen to know of any other applications that use this kind of UI, or even better, a windows utility that adds this kind of functionality across the OS, building custom context-menus for each application?
You can discover some functionality you're looking for by searching for it and activating it from the palette for the first few times, and if you find the functionality useful enough you can spend a few brain cycles learning/configuring the shortcut to accelerate it.
I think a similar paradigm can work for gestures on mobile as well. Some master gesture to open up a searchable list of context sensitive commands, and some mechanism to map new gestures to frequently used commands.
YES PLEASE! I've had enough of modern design. Text, links, and buttons all look the same. Sub-panels are hidden behind random things in random places and behind random swipes.
We're ready for a renaissance of discoverability in UI.
Apple products have been like this for ages. I.e., they present a "simple" interface for the "typical" user, and then they provide "advanced" features for the "power user" that are only accessible via keyboard shortcuts, or what have you. (E.g., doing a screenshot on MacOS is via Command-$.)
Their success in achieving the right balance, however, has been quite mixed IMHO.
How do you find out about the "advanced" features? Via Google or Stack Exchange or reading a book or guide, I suppose.
I remember when google maps changed from having a from location box and a to location box to just letting you type "from address A to address B", which is pretty nifty. However this was never actually documented so I spent months pressing randomly to get the old UI up (it still seemed to exist, but only in some states of the application) before I finally realized that was the new way.
In iBooks you can download all the user guides for all devides
I don't know if there is or isn't official documentation everything you might typically want to know for Apple products. Clearly, they don't document the answer to every question that anyone might ever ask, but they do document many things that you might not think they do.
I know this because often when I Google for how to do something on a Mac, I often end up on some Apple page that tells me how to accomplish what I want. E.g., a page that documents a bunch of MacOS keyboard shortcuts, or what have you.
Of course, one problem is churn. I.e., the features in the software are changing frequently, and consequently, documentation can get quickly out of date. Also, Apple is likely to be cooperating with book authors. There is the "Missing Manual" series, which often seems to contain a lot of useful information (though, as I mentioned sometimes out-of-date), and I'm sure that David Pogue and friends don't figure all of this out via just trial and error. It seems like they must get some sort of assistance from Apple in the form of release notes or rough documentation, or something.
What is the solution? Make people sit through a 2 hour video? Or not include functions that are hard to find?
I hate undiscoverable UIs, but at least in this case the documentation is right on the device.
Advertising teaches a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Glc2mHLPRM
Since the WWDC, Apple has promoted that feature wildly. There are many other features people will miss, but not that one.
Joking aside, the iPad clearly has too many features for they all to be immediately discoverable. The solution to this is for the community to share knowledge, through articles like this and through word of mouth.
12.9-inch iPad Pro
11-inch iPad Pro
10.5-inch iPad Pro
9.7-inch iPad Pro
iPad (7th generation)
iPad (6th generation)
iPad (5th generation)
iPad mini (5th generation)
iPad mini 4
iPad Air (3rd generation)
iPad Air 2The iPhone 6 had the A8 with 1GB RAM and is not supported by iOS 13. The iPad Air 2 has the A8X with 2GB RAM and is supported by iPadOS 13.
In the past the break on unsupported older devices has been down to hardware. Usually memory, but also on the 64bit transition. I’m not aware of a single break in support that wasn’t determined by hardware requirements.
So a windows xp machine "could" run windows 10 but you don't really want to. In apple's case you can't downgrade your OS version, and I've seen an iPad 2 go from "smooth and fluent" to "crashes before I can even unlock it" from OS updates.
You can if the old version is still being signed by Apple.
For example with the iPad Air 2 both iOS 12.4.1 and iPadOS 13.1 are currently being signed by Apple so you can downgrade for the time being. When will stop signing 12.4.1? Who knows.
I wrote about my experience at https://captnemo.in/blog/2019/08/11/ipad-downgrade-ios-6-8/
I wouldn’t say that you need to be too technical. I’ve helped elderly people do a restore of their iPhone over the phone. The process is basically this.
Step 1) download the software package from Apples servers. Places like https://ipsw.me/ make it easy to see what is currently signed for your device and get the download link.
2) Install iTunes if you don’t have it already on your Computer, Open iTunes and connect the device to the computer.
3) In the device options in iTunes, hold shift/option and click update, point the file dialog to the software package downloaded from Apple and confirm.
4) Watch bars progress across the screen of the device.
To this point, I wonder how much Apple is struggling with this "problem". There is very little value in upgrading to newer iPads. Even for those of us that have the disposable income to spend on them, we can use a 5 year old iPad which acts almost identically to the newer ones. Yes, Apple has pushed some of the power features that the newer ones can do, but for those of us that just use it for notetaking, internet browsing, social media consumption, etc there has been virtually no need to upgrade. The second hand market is saturated with perfectly good devices for $100-$150 that perform in ways that are nearly indistinguishable from brand new iPads for the 95% of the population that are using these devices for media consumption.
Sure if you use the iPad for media creation then you can benefit from a newer one. But for media consumption, the older iPads perform nearly indistinguishably from the new ones.
Do you mean mean an iOS update? iPadOS was not released until today, 24 Sep 2019.
"iPadOS (then still called iOS) update".
My original specification was a small, but my response to you makes a larger point.
iPadOS did not (publicly) exist prior to yesterday. Before its release, iPadOS was definitively not “then still called iOS”. Up until its release, iPadOS did not exist (publicly).
EDIT: add preposition to first sentence.
Version sometimes, names no. iPadOS=iOS 13 for iPad.
Or are you going to tell me that Windows 10 is much better than windows 8 because it is called windows 10 and not windows 9?
To be clear, iPadOS is not the same as "iOS 13 for iPad", whatever that might mean. iPadOS comes chronologically after iOS 12 but that's about it.
iPadOS has distinct code, features, and APIs not available on iOS. Period.
Saying iPadOS is "iOS 13 for iPad" makes no sense except in the most superficial sense that it comes chronologically after iOS 12.
EDIT: scare quote iOS 13 for iPad.
However, my Thinkpad X220 (maybe circa 2011?) still runs Windows 10 and Ubuntu, allowing it to stay up to date on security patches. In a way, Apple's support levels are only impressive because we're inured to quick device expiration in other contexts (e.g. phones).
A 2011 MacBook Pro 13" is comparable to your X220 (dual core i7 available, 8GB supported RAM, Intel HD 3000 graphics) and while it does fall off the supported list for macOS Catalina (mid-2012 MBP is the earliest supported) there's no reason to expect it wouldn't run Windows or Ubuntu comparably to the X220.
When comparing (tablet) apples to (tablet) apples, I wonder if any of the tablets mentioned here are still supported in 2019 like your iPad mini 2 was? https://www.zdnet.com/pictures/best-android-tablets-septembe... It's a genuine question as I'm not that familiar with the Android ecosystem.
On Android if you are lucky, you would get one OS update and around one or two security updates. This on flagship devices.
Even Google's, are only guaranteed to get updates for three years, starting from the year the model was initially put on sale.
In any case, at least in most European consumer shops, you will see that the large majority of OEMs are migrating to hybrid laptops, convertibles with Windows 10 on them. The Android tablet section keeps getting smaller.
They (be Google, Apple or whoever makes OS and/or phones) have the know-how and the tech to support older devices for a longer time. Even if they limit that support to only publish security updates for older systems (which, IMHO, I think it's the correct thing to do). Come on, see the Windows XP latest updates.
A phone it's not different. In it's core, It's a f computer running software. The main difference is that the average Joe is accustomed to replace them even quicker than desktop/laptops.
Apple et al are fixing the "errors" they made with the personal computer market: support them for a long period of time, or giving the devices a longer (and secure) life via security updates, so your sales plummet.
Of the 9 tablets and 8 phones in my sock drawer purchased since 2012, only the iPad Pro 10.5", Kindle Fire HDs, and Galaxy S8 are subject to continued upgrades. The rest are likely vulnerability Petri dishes that should never be allowed on the internet unless unlocked and moved to community builds (for the Android devices).
Using two apps at once is beyond confusing. A simple use case, like copying an address from a Safari tab into Gmail via split screen requires so many mysterious, undiscoverable gestures, I doubt almost anyone is doing that.
I think Jobs was right that convergence between workstations and mobile devices requires too many sacrifices, at least in the near term.
I think the obvious solution could be an old one discovered by PARC decades ago: applications in windows and a mouse.
You should first and foremost be able to do everything on the iPad (or any touch device) with touch and/ or gestures. As soon as you require a mouse (or stylus, trackpad/ whatever) on a tablet you've screwed up. The whole beauty of a tablet is in its portability. Having to rely on a mouse or trackpad screws that up.
That said, mouse support for the iPad can and absolutely should be much better. Just never a requirement.
With more time and effort put into development it may be surprising just how effective they become. Most young kids I see are far more exposed to touch based interaction than trackpad, keyboard or mouse and I expect that will continue to be the case for most of their lives. Those of us who grew up with a physical keyboard as a primary input device can't relate.
I don't think this is as much of a problem as people make it out to be. They've managed to keep the iPad just as accessible to everyone, and they prod you occasionally with notifications from the Tips app for people who are willing to learn more.
As far as moving a URL from a Safari tab to Gmail, why not just copy and paste it? Tap once on the URL bar, the keyboard pops up with all the text selected, and there's a copy button right there. Or you can tap on the selected text to bring up the cut/copy/paste buttons.
Pressing and holding the URL to initiate a drag and then dropping in a text field also works for me, but I didn't test in Gmail. It's possible Google has some custom behavior that breaks this.
Indeed, I'd say the opposite: Most older folks simply do not discover stuff, or do so very rarely. They ask someone to show them how to do something, they memorize it, and they generalized/abstract from that only slightly. So they aren't missing the discoverability when changing to the tablet, while gaining a bit more intuition for swiping compared to the mouse.
Not the GP, but I can think of one reason not to copy paste, which is to avoid overwriting whatever’s already in the clipboard. However bad the discoverability may be, this function is just drag and drop, and need not involve the clipboard unless the user wants to.
Taking it one step further, the screen recording was uploaded by drag and drop from Photos to Imgur (the webpage in Safari, not an app).
You just need to get used to the fact that “press and hold” is an action now, just like we’ve all come to accept tap, swipe, and pinch. Sure, it’s not as much of a direct physical metaphor as those, but fundamentally there’s only so much room for functionality with a finger on a piece glass. If people want more advanced features than the copy/paste from iPhone OS 3, I think it’s fair to expect them to learn one new thing.
My youngest doesn’t use any of that, but then she’s a magician with ProCreate and the pencil. It’s just a matter of what matters to you most.
I've tried both ways with tablets: using a pencil or a mouse. The mouse is a bit inconvenient because you have to carry something around with you that's a bit bulkier but the interaction with the computing device is so much more easy. It's annoying to have to pick up a pencil and doodle-gesture or touch the screen IMO.
Of course, the apps you use have to support these new features. There are some, like Kindle, that don't work well at all.
Used to be true but not any longer; recent versions of GNOME 3 are now quite usable on tablets (and touch-screen enabled laptops) as long as the bare hardware support is there. Sure, this is largely a side effect of Librem's work on smartphone UX support, but the effect is quite real nonetheless. And Linux on a tablet can achieve things that are quite hard or even impossible on other "mobile-ready" OS's.
Also, less folks forget...
Android is Linux.
I really really don't get this. I like the iPad, but Apple wants to sell me this idea that the iPad is an actual* computer. It's not. It's a toy computer. It's fun. It's not serious. Stop pretending, Apple.
*) An actual computer lets you mark pages as executable.
I've done production deployments with an iPad + smart keyboard + blink shell, works just fine.
In other words, you did use an actual computer, but remotely.
Google keeps their own hardware updated quite well, I liked the monthly security updates.
With regards to the rest of the tablet market, basically only Samsung and Lenovo are left, and Samsung lost me as a customer a long time ago.
I've been looking at the iPad Air 3 recently and while it looks nice, I just fell in love with the Apple pencil. The fact that they update even their ancient hardware is just a huge plus -- that's commitment to the customer.
[1] https://www.androidcentral.com/pixel-3a-does-one-more-thing-...
Imagine the travesty if Microsoft could turn off Windows updates like this and write off general purpose computers just a few years old or even five years old per Apple. This is a joke, we should not be making exceptions for Google or Apple, their software should not be allowed to render 10s or 100s of millions of competent devices obsolete annually.
This is anti-consumer and stupidly-bad for the environment, and we can see from Windows it is entirely optional and we can see from their $100+ billion in savings each, that Google and Apple could do it too.
The fact that single individuals in their spare time have been doing ROMs for devices that achieve this for years proves that this isn't the maintenance burden it's sometimes made out to be. The device tree stuff means that even closed source modules aren't that bad to deal with these days.
(I bought a Pixel 3 this spring when it was on sale for $400, but support ends in 2 years - October 2021.)
It works the same with Apple devices too, though the supported period has typically been longer than in the Android world. For example, the iPhone 8 (introduced in 2017) that Apple continues to sell today as the lowest priced iPhone wouldn’t get five years of software updates from today. It’d likely get its last update sometime in 2023, before iOS 17 is released (assuming that iPhones usually get software updates for about five plus years).
I've been buying Google phones (Nexus/Pixel) because they do get the longest support, but I still get frustrated by the fact that if I buy one late in the cycle, I only really get 2 years of support for it.
Apple on the other hand is at date of discontinuity + 5 yr hardware support.
The Nexus 4 launched November 2013 and got it's last major update to 5.1.1 in May 2015 according to Wikipedia. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_4)
I do agree about repair options. It's pretty much impossible to repair the screen on a Pixel C.
I also belive Android tends to have fewer breaking OS changes that render modern apps incapable of running on both older and newer OS versions, compared to iOS, so it's significantly worse for usability on iOS with a device that is ~4+ years old.
I will grant shitty devices like the 5X is something that happens slightly more often with Google devices than Apple (although the Macbook pro keyboards kind of brought parity).
I still think for the layperson consumer, apps continuing to work even if they are not being actively developed is a bigger deal than continuing to receive constant security updates, from the perspective of device usability past 3 years at least.
shouldn't be that difficult to support your own fabbed SoC, but yet they sorely lack updates.
I guess they got fed up with Android tablets just being bigger phones, running upscaled phone apps.
You are saying that as long as the OEM updates drivers for components support is possible. I agree. This is a reason why Android is often not updated even in the modding community (Qualcomm is not releasing drivers). If only Apple was responsible for both the software and hardware... Oh wait...
I don't think five-year-old are a hundred times slower than today's models.
That alone actually takes the iPad a long way towards actually being real/Pro/whatever.
I sold my first Gen iPad Pro over this stuff. It was just to painful to do a lot of real world stuff that involved files.
Maybe today the experience would be a heck of a lot better.
I first got excited that it can connect to USB webcams — I have some modded webcams I use as microscope — would be super useful if I could interface it with a camera app. But it didn’t work, last I tried. Are you aware of some way to do that? :)
I'm not too familiar with how it all works, but I imagine it has a lot to do with the individual apps that are running to be able to read/write to the USB port.
A long time ago on an iPad now far far away, I had the cordless little SD card reader, but the iPad itself wasn't much use for editing RAW photos in that generation.
[0]: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK0W2/lightning-to-usb-3-...
>From a security architecture point of view, we did not want to have file system drivers running in the kernel communicating with external media that could have been tampered with. Getting all of our file systems to be isolated from the kernel, it was real hardcore engineering efforts.
Had my iPad supported USB devices, there's a good chance I wouldn't have used it at all.
http://osxdaily.com/2018/01/08/get-terminal-app-ios-command-...
Bit limited, but it’s a start. Personally I prefer Pythonista with the Stash shell command extensions package.
Remember when the Mac was the "digital hub" ? https://www.imore.com/evolution-apples-digital-hub
Clearly many people are using iPads in the real world for all sorts of things and are satisfied with the results. You mean "laptop/desktop like things" which is a reasonable comparison to make, for the small subset of people who want that kind of functionality. But to say that that stuff is "real world" while other uses cases are not is condescending.
It's like the people who say MacBook pros "aren't really designed with pros in mind". I've written over a hundred thousand lines of code for work on MacBook airs and plain old MacBooks which are just great for my particular work flow. Doesn't mean I'm not a pro, any more than it means that people who need a larger machine to run Xcode etc are more pro, or less pro, than I.
I don't mean to harsh on you but I do think this is an important point.
Case in point : Google Project Zero's latest iOS Exploit chains on webkit shows how easy it was(*is?) for an iOS user to fall victim to browser vulnerabilities by just visiting a website.[1]
The exploits covered targeted only 64-bit, so technically devices < iPhone5S which were not part of the update cycle wasn't mentioned in the GPZ research. But many of the exploit chains did use public jailbreak exploits and Semi-unthethered jailbreaks exist for 32-bit iOS devices running up to iOS 10.3.3.
I don't know whether complete exploit chain as detailed in the project zero wasn't possible for 32-bit devices or the attackers just didn't care about those devices. It is safe to assume, they are vulnerable.
Where as a 7 year old android device can still download Firefox for Android with latest security updates.
In any case, I don't think there can be any opposing arguments on the side of security for Apple not updating Safari via AppStore or now allowing proper 3rd party browsers.
[1]: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-d...
Third party browsers entitled with dynamic codesigning poke a huge hole in Apple's security model for iOS devices.
A common mitigation to that is “write xor execute” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%5EX)
From that page: ”Without such protection, a program can write (as data) CPU instructions in an area of memory intended for data and then arrange to run (as executable) those instructions. This can be dangerous if the writer of the memory is malicious.”
JIT compilers are collateral damage to that mitigation; they have to write bytes to memory and then make the CPU run those bytes as code, and W^X doesn’t allow that.
Also Apple has been allowing coding apps for years now which can download and run executable code, so it is hard to buy the argument.
Another reason is that it's extra work to decouple the browser with the OS.
> Also Apple has been allowing coding apps for years now which can download and run executable code, so it is hard to buy the argument.
Not native code.
It is expected of a company which boasts about security and privacy of its users as a premium selling point, although it is questionable now[1]. Besides, MacOS has been receiving Safari updates separately.
Also android has been decoupling several system services with every iteration now, soon crucial system services would be updated from PlayStore and so even if the manufacturer doesn't ship OS updates, important services would stay updated.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/09/apple...
Sure, but the company is doing extra work to provide this. It might be a worthwhile decision to make but it’s certainly not a free gain.
I thought that argument was rejected already in 2001[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
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(edited to fix link formatting)
What they’re talking about is IE the OS component didn’t mean that IE the user-facing general-purpose browser had to be the default.
MS made the exact same argument 15 years ago.
If I can oversimplify, 3rd party browsers on iOS are just like a theme for Safari.
Apple’s security model is that Apple has to be able to inspect and review all the code you’re app is going to run. There is a special exception for JS provided that you run it though Apple’s interpreter.
Browsers are caught in the crossfire of a much broader rule that applications can not run code that Apple can’t see. They don’t sign anything that allows for arbitrary or semi-arbitrary code to be downloaded externally and run in principle. Apps get around this by using JS but you aren’t, as a rule, supposed to expose native API’s to your JS code.
So, it doesn't make any sense for Apple to not allow 3rd party browsers apart from its intention for a walled garden even if it means compromising security for its users.
Python, for example, typically gets compiled to bytecode, but the bytecode is interpreted.
In the developer agreement, the second paragraph of section 3.3.2 gives special permission to programming environments, but that’s for executable code, which won’t work on iOS anyway.
> In any case, I don't think there can be any opposing arguments on the side of security for Apple not updating Safari via AppStore
I don't really follow. It's not about just updating it via the AppStore, it would also require making all future changes to Safari compatible with old hardware and old versions of iOS. They have a pretty impressive track record lately of supporting devices up to 5 or 6 years old, but they can't support everything forever. The security argument for it is that almost nobody is using these devices anymore, so their resources are better spent securing systems that have more users.
Apple released iOS 10.3.4 on July 22, 2019 for iPhone 5 and iPad 4g.[1] So it's not completely unheard of for Apple to release iOS updates after officially dropping iOS support for old devices. From the Apple website:[2]
> iOS 10.3.4 addresses an issue that could impact GPS location performance and could cause system date and time to be incorrect. This update is recommended for all users.
I wonder if this update quietly fixed these exploit changes.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222 [2]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208011#1034
Also, Google Project Zero article(link in parent comment) gives the clear timeline of the attacks and that the exploits were updated to mitigate patches with every new OS updates; so even if 10.3.4 had security patches older devices still might be vulnerable to later attacks.
If Windows desktops have shown us anything, it's that (given NAT) few vulnerabilities are easier and more profitable to attack than a browser.
In fact, I have a Nexus 7 (2013) nearby, so I know that firsthand.
Edit: Upon further inspection, it may just be horribly buggy? It seems to sometimes attempt to zoom out on double tap (despite being at 100%), which means somewhere the code is still trying to work...
If you pinch zoom slightly and then double touch, it works on some pages, including this page, but it's off center. On others not at all. On others it works as it should.
In fact Apple originally got rid of this gesture too in iOS 12 but so many people still try to force quit apps out of habit from their desktop computers that Apple was forced to bring the gesture back in 12.1
More reading: https://daringfireball.net/2017/07/you_should_not_force_quit...
In theory, yes, but not in practice. For example, the chromecast icon sometimes disappears in Hulu, which requires killing the app and reopening to get it back. The stock Mail app used to get stuck in fetching mail and refused to refresh, again requiring you to kill the app. Facebook Messenger's text input sometimes disappears entirely, requiring you to kill the app. Some apps get badges stuck, requiring you to kill the app. The list of bugs in apps that are only remedied by killing the app goes on and on.
The iOS 12 issue was just an example of Apple being overzealous and believing there's no reason to kill an app, when even their own apps had issues that were only remedied by force quitting the apps. The uproar was well deserved.
All of those are examples of unresponsiveness..
Unresponsive = the app’s main event loop is not processing events. On macOS this is when the beach ball cursor is shown. In fact there’s a built-in watchdog in iOS that’ll kill your app after 10 seconds if the main thread is not processing events.
On the other hand an app can break in a variety of ways which won’t involve blocking the main thread, e.g. by simply opening a popup that can’t be closed, or getting stuck inside the wall in a game, etc.
> an app can break in a variety of ways which won’t involve blocking the main thread
I’m not saying you’re incorrect, but for the vast majority of users, any input that doesn’t yield an immediate response = unresponsive.
My current MacBook Pro is getting a little long in the tooth and after suffering through the 2016 and later versions at work, I will not be buying one of those until the keyboards are fixed. If iPadOS has first class terminal support I would consider making it my full time machine.
Looks like the waiting game will continue.
It's GPL3 [1], so you are welcome to compile and install on your own personal devices even if you do not have a paid Apple development subscription, though I'm pretty sure that this would require periodic compile/install cycles (every couple of weeks?).
So you have some commands including most obviously "mosh" and "ssh" but also a few others. To get a GUI configuration window you enter "config" and hit return.
Unfortunately, lately I have found that it drops input on spotty WiFi connections, both in ssh and mosh. Mosh works fine if I go offline for a while, but if the connection is really weak and packets are getting dropped I start losing input which gets scary when doing "sudo apt blabla."
Still happy with my purchase, just hoping it gets more reliable.
Expecting it to replace your development machine is probably not realistic.
I think it was and has been for many people.
What are you developing? What would you need?
If they had those, I'd switch to an iPad Pro today.
I've thought about doing the same, but it just kinda irks me that I have this insanely powerful and robust tablet-form computer with good security, and I can't even have the equivalent of a Docker container. So instead I mosh into a Digital Ocean droplet and grind my teeth whenever the café's WiFi drops out. :-(
* Lack of a common file system so you can't use multiple apps to edit/ compile source well. * Inability to build and run locally (for iOS/ local apps) * Inability to deploy locally (for example to a web server running on your machine) * No virtualization... which would solve the above plus a few other issues. * Inability to establish persistent network connections in the background.
For terminal apps here's a couple good starters: https://ish.app https://panic.com/prompt/
You can use Coda to do remote web editing which can be useful if you have a remote build environment. There are a few other decent ways to do remote work, but building out a full local workflow on iOS is pretty much a non-starter right now.
The Files app kinda works for this.
> Inability to deploy locally (for example to a web server running on your machine)
You should be able to do this.
> You should be able to do this.
I'd love to see this. We have a fairly straight forward web development environment: Node.js + React + Typescript to build the client. The server runs on Koa and uses a MySQL database as the backend.
You think I should be able to get this going? ... I love my iPad, and I've dug around and looked for solutions and come up largely blank. Just getting the client stuff up and running using local files is... exceedingly difficult and impractical. Getting Koa + MySQL running seems like a non-starter.
This isn't some obscure stack, these are some of the most common web-dev building blocks around and it's just too much of a PITA.
I'd LOVE for this to work. So if you have some secret sauce, please share.
I won’t even use macOS due to the limitations that don’t exist anywhere else, but mostly because I think Apple makes bad decisions and then does not give me any options to change the behavior. They are such a “one size fits all” company that I just don’t understand why creative people would want to support them. Their tech is more draconian than anything.
They’re like the China of computing.
It's beyond frustrating to have to type in terminal commands in a special recovery zone to have a functional computer. Reminds me of typing grub commands at each boot to get graphics on Linux computers circa 2000 or so.
Not even the really, really big obvious (and recursive) one?
And, it’s recursively limited because of the limited choices even within their own lineup.
Enjoy your censorship I guess!
Your sarcasm is misplaced.
But you moved the goalpost on me because first you just asked for a limitation and I gave you probably the largest one. You didn’t say anything about it being an unknown limitation before I got started using it… You said “I’ll bite“ as if you could not think of one limitation of the platform. I knew about the main limitation, that you can only run it on Apple hardware, before I bought it but I decided to go forward anyway because I want to compile an app for iOS and I decided that it would be much better than trying to maintain a hackintosh.
There was zero sarcasm in my response. Not even the part where I said “enjoy your center ship I guess”, because Apple fans seem to love making my text disappear for others if I don’t gush over Apples products. If you really want to know about all of the limitations that I did not know about before I purchased into the platform I’ll be glad to do that.
Here’s a big one: you simply cannot operate the entire OS with just a keyboard unless you add some third-party usability-correction utilities. It’s impossible. And those utilities are suck and they don’t work well and there’s a chance that Apple will take them away from you or cause problems with them in any given update. That’s why Stephen Hawking always used Windows, same as just about every other disabled user in the world.
We were all using a mix of MS-DOS/Windows, Amiga and Ataris.
What I remember was getting Small-C and K&R C compilers to kind of get corporation/university work done at home, no one was that rich enough to pay for telnet connections over long term dialups.
Hopefully this is something that Apple addresses now that they consider iPad OS to be a real OS and not a scaled-up iOS.
I agree that split-screen input/output priority is wonky -- for example, if you have a video player app and Safari side-by-side and an external display connected, the video player app will only output to the display if it's the app on the left.
My brain was going, two text cursors -- that's not supposed to happen!
Any thoughts on why Apple wouldn't be pushing this as a major advancement for iPad?
All I want for them to do is allow third party applications to support real mice in the way that you'd expect a real mouse to behave. The killer app would be remote desktop. I understand that there's literally one model of mouse that works with one specific remote desktop app, but I don't want that, I want to use my own mouse.
I would also imagine the latency that comes with that would be annoying.
I wonder if Apple will ever do what Microsoft did with the surface and just put full blown Mac OS on it. I'm going to guess no due to this iPadOS with swipey gestures thing.
I'd buy it if they did... I think.
I've done a fair amount of dev work on the iPad, if you have a good SFTP friendly editor like Coda, you can do development work on a remote server, but ultimately you are tied to that server for a build environment. It works fairly well, but since remote shells tend to disconnect in the background it can be frustrating to build stuff.
Another reason might be because Apple has been avoiding mixing touch screens with mice. Not sure why. Maybe because Microsoft did it first or maybe because Apple doesn't want to canibalize sales between products. Anyway, a macOS touch laptop would be amazing or an iPad pro runnning an iOS/macOS combo. Sidecar will get us a bit closer to that.
Windows didn't implement it properly. The last time I tried it something as trivial as changing the screen brightness in tablet mode required you to open the Windows setting if you wanted to be able to use a slider. The quick shortcut was tapping the system clock, then tapping on a setting that would cycle through 20% increments IIRC.
Some apps like Bitwig Studio or even some Adobe apps IIRC change the UI depending on whether you are in tablet mode or mouse mode.
See this video about Bitwig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grM8exKd7mM
The Logitech M535 worked without hassle, and fit her hand well. We combined it with a OMOTON Ultra-Slim keyboard for a full "PC peripherals-like experience."
I still feel like mouse support is half baked. Almost like Apple hobbled it on purpose to make sure you KNEW it wasn't the primary way to interact with an iPad. It should be a first class citizen like the keyboard support in my view, with basic settings like auto-hiding the cursor when it isn't connected and cursor configuration (no more giant blob).
Same thing with the fix it folks saying Apple's products are "unrepairable". There is a great market for both repair and reuse / re-sale in apple products.
It's interesting comparing a 4 year old android tablet or phone (which was sometimes a year behind when shipping already) to apple's products.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macrumors.com/2018/04/19/gr...
Let's say you're thinking of buying a used iPhone. If you had reason to believe that used iPhones were mostly repaired by 3rd parties that didn't necessarily know what they're doing, or were using cheap or even dangerous (in the case of batteries) parts. Would you buy used, or would go just buy some cheap new phone? And if people weren't interested in buying, would you bother trying to sell your old phone or would you just throw it away?
Making sure the quality of second-hand market is high is essential to encouraging re-use. I think a lot of those who are criticising Apple when it comes to repair should remember that. It's not that they're wrong in saying that Apple should support 3rd party repair, but their complaints are not gonna come to much unless what they propose is actually reasonable.. i.e. makes it easier for 3rd parties to repair iPhones while maintaining a healthy second-hand market for iPhones. And that's not easy.
This was a business decision for sure. Apple doesn't want anyone but Apple to work on their devices. Now maybe you can say that alone is good for resale, but it's extremely shitty for customers, especially when their attitude is to tell people they need a new board and all their data is gone when a repair, often even a simple one is entirely possible.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/expert-disputes-apple-on...
The lie you are spreading, that you can’t use non apple batteries is false. The phone will work fine, but apple will let you know it can’t model the batteries health.
Having the phone recognize if the battery key has changed is a simple and effective way to manage this.
For MANY people, being able to rely on the apple battery health check is far more important than allowing scammers to do a cheap battery swap, sell phone with a “near new” battery, and then have customer in apple store complaining a few weeks later only to be told they were ripped off
This is incorrect. Apple issued a recall due to known issues with their own batteries! These are not 3rd party replacements.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/15-inch-macbook-pro-battery-...
As I pointed out there's fairly simple ways for them to resolve this without these practices. No where did I suggest that the batteries don't work at all. The extents people go to on this site to defend Apple's shitty anti-consumer behavior is utter insanity.
If by "brand new" battery you mean an unused battery there are actually issues there, sellers do sell "unused" batteries as "brand new" but the mfg date turns out to be really old. Technically true I guess - the battery has not been used? Would I want a 3-4 year old battery? No - who knows what SOC it has been maintained at.
What is interesting is apple's focus on "shitty anti-consumer" behavior which is "utter insanity" has resulted in a lot of consumers buying their product.
I now have a place where I can sketch my architecture diagrams, wireframes, live sketching for my team when I work. Everything is in one place and does not get lost. I can plug it into a projector and write notes on things to explain things to my team. Doing presentations is easy. I now pretty much only use my MacBook Pro for coding. Almost every other task is done on my iPad Pro.
My 2 most used apps at this point are Concepts and Flow by moleskine.
It’s become a boon to my workflow.
All of the presented features seem to be thought through and made to increase my productivity. Back in the day, I was one of the first people to own the original iPad in my country (small, central European country) and I regretted that decision almost immediately since it was just a bigger phone that I could use on the couch, albeit one that couldn't even do phone calls. I finally get the feeling that tablets get to be real devices.
My elderly mother has gotten into photography in the past few years and shoots with what I assume is a prosumer camera (high-ish resolution, swappable lenses). The Windows laptop she plugs into is a disaster waiting to happen, in that I’m pretty sure nothing is properly backed up. I think she also barely understands what’s happening on her computer at any given time.
If an iPad, plus camera kit, plus external storage, plus maybe some iCloud backup is a reasonable way to manage photos, I'd consider getting her one.
What might an iPadOS + camera workflow / setup look like? Is this likely to be a replacement for a camera + traditional computer photo management setup?
Edit: I should add that, while I’m comfortable with Linux and coding and other nerdly pursuits, I know nothing about current norms and tech for photography.
>https://www.howtogeek.com/220986/how-to-use-all-of-windows-1...
There's also a multitude of cloud solutions. Instead of forcing your mom into some weird ipad work flow, work with what she already does and is familiar with.
Once you’ve enabled Photo syncing in iCloud and pay the monthly fee (€3 per month for 200GB etc) then that’s all there is to it.
My parent’s iPad backs up all their encrypted device content to my iCloud storage via Family Sharing, they don’t pay a thing. I’ve no access to it but it eats slightly into my quota. My mother has the USB A to lightning dongle and she’s can easily import from her Canon P&S. Normally I have to explain every step to her but I was away when the dongle shipped to her and she managed it just fine.
The Photos app has a reasonable editor that get the job done. Add Afinity Photo to that and it’s ability to open from iCloud and you’ve a Photoshop killer.
The nice thing about Apple Photos Library is that it keeps the original image and all edits so you don’t lose anything.
Also, the deep integration of Siri Shortcuts with iOS opens up so many possibilities for automation for this - maybe OP can help their mother with setting up one or the team at an Apple store could help (I've had some experience with making an appointment with them to help me with a shortcut I was building for Apple Health.)
But I also agree with some of the other commenters that just leveraging iCloud / Apple Photos out-of-the-box should suffice.
I'm not a pro photographer by any means, and my workflow is pretty simple, but here's my hardware workflow is: iPad Pro, Fujifilm X-series camera(s), USB-C Memory Card reader, and a Samsung T5 SSD.
I import directly into my iCloud Drive from the memory card, then plug in the SSD, and move the unnecessary files onto the SSD. Edit the photos from iCloud Drive via Affinity or Darkroom. I'm mostly just doing exposure adjustments to RAW files, and both apps work incredibly well. Export the edited images back to either the iOS Photos app, or just back to the directory on iCloud Drive. It's incredibly quick and efficient. I've been running the iPadOS beta since July/August, and haven't encountered any reason to be concerned.
I have been travelling a couple times this summer with this setup, and don't miss my Macbook at all. iPadOS with the new storage support, and a real USB-C port really feels like a computer replacement.
If she isn't using Lightroom or shooting raw, the siblings cover it. Just use Apple Photos with iCloud backup. If she wants most of the photos in full-size on local disk, buy the largest capacity iPad you can.
If she is using Lightroom, they have their own cloud storage that is included (or discounted?) with the monthly software subscription. So, you can still use the iPad, you just have an extra step of importing into Apple Photos, then exporting into Lightroom (this may have changed, but AFAIK, iPad still doesn't allow direct import of files into non-native apps).
There are a few tutorials and blog entries that describe the above process, though I expect there will be updates or new coverage in a month or two, once people have time with the latest iPadOS updates.
FWIW, I use an Ipad and the camera kit on vacation, use Apple Photos, and also have a MacBook at home (it's a bit easier to do some tasks with a mouse, but an all-mobile workflow is possible). My mother use a hodgepodge of Lightroom on Windows, with some photos synced to her Apple product ecosystem, but I don't know the details.
How seamless is the iCloud backup when the total volume of pictures is greater than the local storage? Does the photos app smartly fetch the full photo as needed?
As noted by another post, iCloud will delete a photo from the whole system if deleted on one device, so you may want periodic backups elsewhere. I just drag the entire photo library file (MacOS keeps the library, photos included, in a single “file”) from my Mac to an external drive. Can’t speak to the best way to do this from an iPad, but with the new external drive support, that might be easy?
Thanks for the heads up.
As a half measure, I'm gonna see if I can use sidecar with my macbook lid shut.
Not sure if it has the power to do anything beyond light web dev, but would still be amazing.
Wasn't the promise of iPad that it was much easier than a Mac or PC? I don't find that to be the case.
Anyway, I use mine as a couch browser. I still can't find a heavier use case for it.
Seems like the system is working as intended.
As a productivity device, the device is basically useless since app switching is annoyingly slow.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/youtube-watch-listen-stream/id...
But my 2016 iPad still remains one of the best devices I've ever owned. It's effortlessly useful and still as sharp as ever.
Great to see Apple taking it more seriously.
Also, while I love the ability to play video as picture in picture, I cannot grasp, why the video size is limited to 1/4 of the screen size - if something interesting comes up, you cannot enlarge the video beyond that limit.
…like that’s not too much.
it's not, because you can enter whichever (anonymous) name you want :) ...and the e-mail address can be anonymised too:
My fiancee has been looking for a mobile drawing computer. The only thing I could recommend until now was the Surface Book since Apple doesn't make anything mobile that could run the full Adobe suite. If you can sketch with the iPad Photoshop and there is sidecar support for Illustrator and the other apps, it might be a good deal.
In that regard, the only valid input for me has been the pencil.
So the two most intriguing aspect are (1) mirroring with macOS Catalina and (2) the new text input UI.
I’ve often wished for simple text editor on my iPad to follow along with books.
Are there /any/ good touch inputs for text?
I have been playing with low-key streaming with the iPad Pro, and have been pleasantly surprised at how well I can prop up the iPad to stream, and use the extra real-estate to read or check-in on stream chat.
I don't want / need the super high quality tools of a professional streamer, but I don't want grainy 2001 feature phone video - just something that can allow me to keep it as a fun side hobby without investing thousands of $ in a set-up.
And there are a bunch of decent apps to do some light video editing, but iMovie tends to satisfy my needs.
One other thing, the icons have become smaller on my iPad Pro 10.5. Looking at it in landscape mode right now there is room for 5 rows of icons where I believe there used to be 4?
Maybe I'm wrong and missed something? There's a long list of improvements and I definitely skimmed it.
Are there plans for this to be added for phone keyboards too? As one that appreciates it on Android, I imagine it'd be welcomed by many.
I previously used the swype 3rd party keyboard, and I’m not really a fan. It’s ok I guess.
Interesting. This is iPadOS 13.1 (not 13.0).
iPhoneOS is also 13.1 today.
So innovative!
iOS13 had for the past two weeks fixed one of the biggest annoyances in Apple's horrible keyboard UX: For people like me who type in multiple languages, the keyboard switching button cycles between "English", "Portuguese", and "Emojis". iOS13 FINALLY put a dedicated emoji button in there and after 2 weeks living with it on the iPhone, iPadOS apparently completely forgot to port this over and the feature has been taken away from me.
This is just one example out of probably a crap-ton of things that they forgot to bring along from iOS. This crap happens all the time with Database vendors too, when they try to keep a separate closed-source Enterprise version. I get that feature flags are annoying, but thinking you can manually keep two different OS codebases synced and consistent is delusional.
_On a side note, the rest of the keyboard is still a mess._
No number row (not even as an option in Settings), no hold for punctuation, but worst of all (especially if you're coming out of Gboard to try their keyboard again), Slide-to-Type is just horrible. The accuracy is SO bad, I tried typing "hello world", and not only it just couldn't understand that I was trying to type "world", it wouldn't even suggest it as an alternative, the best I got was it suggested "world's" once, and if you tap it and try to delete the "'s" it just deletes the entire word.
Not to mention that since I use two languages, it even tried portuguese words before it tried "world", even though I had the english keyboard selected (and there is no way to disable multilingual typing like there is on Gboard, even IF it worked decently). Also not being able to turn off Memojis on the Emoji keyboard... why?