Comment by robenkleene | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robenkleene | Hacker News Reader

The difference between macOS and iOS isn't about discoverability (although, in one important area macOS far more discoverable that iOS: multi-tasking). The problem with iPadOS is that since all the expert controls are hidden, and there's no such thing as shortcuts or right-clicking on iPadOS, it means doing anything useful with iPadOS requires using many slow gestures in succession.

macOS, with a combination of Bash, AppleScripts, and system-wide third-party utilities like Keyboard Maestro and LaunchBar, provides extraordinarily efficient ways to do powerful things, whereas doing anything on iPadOS is like being stuck in quicksand. Just the minutia of navigating the OS with only Apple's provided gestures is so slow and clumsy that I wouldn't bother to do anything complicated with it. It just takes so much effort, it's exhausting. So neither OS is great at discoverability, but only one OS can be used efficiently by a proficient user.

I'll say it again and again: The measure of a platform is not how easy it is to use for it's weakest users, it's what it's more proficient users are able to accomplish with it. Until Apple takes proficient users seriously, iPadOS will be nothing but a side dish, because no one will use it to make anything that anyone else would ever want to emulate.

[0]: https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/

[1]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

I'll add the best thing Apple could do to fix iPadOS is make the developers working on it bootstrap[0] it. E.g., by running some version of Xcode on it (or CLI tools until they have Xcode working). Those developer would then fix it right up.

I contend that iPadOS is so sluggish to use because it's a compile target from a real machine that developers respect and work on, not a machine that those developers take seriously itself. That Apple is pushing a platform so hard that their own developers would never use for their work is everything you need to know about using an iPad for productivity. Sure, there are other tasks you can use a computer for besides programming, but sorry, programming is the task for computers, everything else stems from it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)

I think of the iPad like a car. It does a few things well... but I would never use one car as the means to build another. My computer(s) function much better in those roles.

+1 Good product design is as much about what a product doesn’t do as what it does. Jobs was very good at that. The current design committee… not.

Making a toolchain for iPadOS is trivial. The issue is that Apple does not provide the facilities to do this.

Porting the toolchain is arguably trivial, but making a pleasant developer experience on a computing platform that may or may not have a keyboard is another concern entirely.

Making a pleasant developer experience is a lot easier than getting iPad to load your compiled code at the moment, and the current state of developer tools reflects this.

I see, your gripe is having to be a part of the Apple developer program to develop for iOS. A 10+ years stale debate.

No, my issue is with the fact that even with a developer program account you cannot compile and run code directly on your device.

This is news to me as an iOS developer. I wonder what I’ve been doing all this time.

Compiling code on your computer and then transferring it to your device?

Sure you can. With a developer account nothing is stopping you from running a compiler on your device. You don’t need root or jailbreak to run a compiler.

As other poster alluded to. It’s not the difficulty, it’s that given the environment of the iPad, there isn’t a compelling use case.

> Sure you can. With a developer account nothing is stopping you from running a compiler on your device. You don’t need root or jailbreak to run a compiler.

You can run a compiler, but you cannot run the generated code.

Easier for everyone other than Apple itself. But GP was suggesting that Apple build it, and Apple can easily modify their own code signing restrictions.

I took the comment to mean that developers should bootstrap it. Perhaps I misinterpreted it…

It's like developing Macintosh software on a Lisa. Surely that could never produce anything usable, right?

My iPad is probably my most-used device, but it is also the device that I most often feel like throwing at a wall. Wading through quicksand is exactly how it feels like to do anything "advanced".

Not to mention the madness that is the Files interface. Far too often I find myself selecting a file, wanting to do something simple with it (like move it to a a location managed by another app) and just being stuck. Again, the quicksand feeling. I just want to get to that place right over there a few steps away, but there is no obvious way of getting there.

/rant

> Far too often I find myself selecting a file, wanting to do something simple with it (like move it to a a location managed by another app) and just being stuck

Have you tried drag and drop? You can still navigate between folders while one finger is dragging the file.

Alternately you could open two instances of Files at the two locations and drag it straight there, but that approach means sorting out how the multitasking works.

Almost nobody takes proficient users seriously, because there aren't enough of us. Only one demographic gets design priority nowadays, it seems, and it's definitely not power users.

(This message brought to you by UX designers declining your feature request because, "you think you want it, but our testing shows that you really don't")

> The measure of a platform is not how easy it is to use for it's weakest users, it's what it's more proficient users are able to accomplish with it.

It depends on who the target users are and what the platform's trying to do. An OS like iOS which is designed for complete novices should be judged on how easy it is for them to use (and it does this reasonably well, or at least it did until they started getting silly with the undiscoverable multitouch stuff.)

This boils down to one concept: will apple accept outside ideas.

I don't think it does, but if it did, we have an answer. Yes, Apple implements ideas they did not originate. Right-click is sort of the canonical example, because they fought it for a long time. Tool Tips is one I wish they hadn't, I hate them. Tabs. Unix. Enterprise management. The command line(!)

I'm not really talking about will apple adopt outside ideas, I mean will apple allow people to change or customize the interface on their own device.

Nope. It's more about educating users about some basic concepts of the OS.

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