Yes to everything
morrick.me
morrick.me
The killer app for smartphones was having a web browser in your pocket. Super damn useful. Maybe tablets just don’t have a killer app on the horizon, and that’s fine? Like how hard drives for 5.25″ bays got replaced by 3.5″ drives, and now SSDs. It completely upturned the industry, but as a consumer I just don’t care. An SSD is just nicer than a 3.5″ HDD for general use and that’s enough for it to take over.
The iPad gets a few years of life as a pure tablet computer, and it has a whole ecosystem of apps designed around that. Now it gets an optional keyboard + mouse, and it will start getting apps built around that paradigm—but you can’t ignore the fact that the keyboard is optional. If the iPad had appeared with a keyboard + mouse from day one, half the apps would never have worked without a keyboard or mouse because they would be simple ports of desktop apps running full-screen.
What I get out of this is a decent, comfortable device which is easier to use than a smartphone and more convenient to carry around than a laptop. A reasonable niche doesn’t have to be a revolution. Half the apps I have on my iPad are half-baked ports from iOS. I’m looking forward to seeing a bunch of half-baked desktop ports join them.
I just want to hear peoples ideas for killer tablet apps.
What do ya'll think would be the killer app? Feel free to get sci-fi with it.
EDIT: thinking about it more, I also want to include peripherals in this question. Maybe it's not so much an issue of apps as functionality.
What could make a tablet come alive for me? First, a precise stylus technology like wacom or similar is a must. The only tablets I've ever found regular use for had this feature. I currently use my remarkable tablet the most, if you want to even call it a tablet. If I can't write on it, I think a tablet is pretty useless. It's clunky and hard to hold and move around with. But I regularly carry books or a pen and writing pad, etc.
Next up, the real breakaway technology would be some type of hybrid screen that can act as both an E-ink screen and something more conventional with back-lighting and color. Something good enough to watch a movie on.
Next, input technology on a tablet sucks. I think tablets should have physical buttons and multiple USB ports and things like that. Bluetooth can be done right, but it's so often done with such cheap hardware that the end result is just unusable, and it's not a real option. A better wireless connection standard could work, particularly one that specified hardware capabilities that were actually sufficient.
Finally, in terms of software, I think the real breakaway technology would be a really seamless and effortless cloud syncing where you never really have to leave one computing environment for another. If I'm reading something on my computer, and I realize its time to make dinner or something, I'd love to be able to just pick up my tablet and carry on where I left off without really having to do anything. Just turn on my tablet and it acts like a seamless extension of my desktop or something.
There's a LOT of technologic magic that would have to happen to make that work though! It may not ever be quite possible, and worse, it may not even be desirable for a broad user base! And none of the above really address the complete scope of user input issues. Keyboards are great. Most modern UI design is crap compared to old-school keyboard navigation. (Though I must once again give a shout-out to Microsoft's Office approach to this. No need to remember an impossilby long list of shortcuts. One press of the alt key and your path is illuminated before you. Whoever designed that concept deserves a medal.)
I think a lightweight 2 in 1 workstation concept with a stylus is probably just a superior idea all around.
Currently, it's mostly used (1) to consume content, (2) as a large touchscreen input device for skeuomorphic apps, and (3) as a drawing tablet.
For me it’s digital sound boards.
But make it actually work.
Applications that require handwritten input is what the tablets should all be stretching towards.
I can fat finger things on my phone. I can type on my laptop.
But I can't write on anything.
Motorola Atrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G#Accessories
Microsft Display Dock (Windows Continuum): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Display_Dock https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/continuum
NexDock: https://nexdock.com/
Samsung DeX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_DeX
Apparently Android 10 has a desktop mode as well
1) It somewhat feels like it could be less wasteful. It may only be on the appearance level, but I end up with a new phone about every 2 years, a new computer about every 3, a new monitor...much less often. If my phone was a smart client for these other input devices, I feel like I would be upgrading my phone about the same, but wouldn't be upgrading a laptop as often.
2) It "feels" like the same device. Though I have file sharing, I don't have desktop sharing. The file I stuck on my desktop on my laptop isn't in the same space on my phone. It feels like they are synced, rather than just being my workspace.
3) I have to duplicate my apps on each device, and that is not always possible, so I end up with a comparable app, or having to switch devices. This is becoming less common, but still, do I need to have multiple versions of the same software on each different device and different OS?
4) Notifications everywhere. When I'm being summoned on multiple messaging apps, I'm getting notifications on at least 3 devices! Yes, I could turn notifications off, but obviously, I need some notifications. If I had only one device, acting as the smart hub to other input devices, in theory, it would know which device I'm active on, and just ring that.
At the same time, we work a bunch with graphics, so I don't think I'm getting decent developer capable graphics card in a mobile device anytime soon, but I think other users could move to this sort of paradigm fairly easily.
When it’s not trying to be all things to all people, Apple has a good story: there’s a single computing surface that spans the edge and the cloud, and whichever device you pick up should give you a window into it, though not always the same window.
So I can read web pages and send mail from my phone, but in many contexts my laptop is superior. The iPad is great somewhere in between but doesn’t leave the house. What the iPad did let me do was switch back to a smaller phone.
Another way to look at that last issue: the phone is hyper mobile. I can open an excel spreadsheet on it, in a pinch, and even edit it if it’s incredibly necessary. But never would I use it as my primary spreadsheet interface. And that’s OK. Likewise it’s a pain to pull out my laptop to look something up when I’m standing up someplace outside my office. That’s OK too.
I switch to the Air for complex sites like Github, or when I want to save bookmarks.
I find that I rarely reach for the iPad for anything, even reading technical Kindles, although it’s fine for that, once I get started.
The iPhone is ever-present and fits comfortably in my hand.
I generally sit with my feet up, and my Air is more comfortable resting in my lap than holding an iPad.
And yet I keep eyeing the big iPad Pro and its pencil....
They're ubiquitous anywhere a programmable display is needed. In tractor cabs; in recreational aircraft; in warehouses.
Just like the Mac Mini. I’ve heard people ask why Apple doesn’t kill off the Mac Mini since it’s not an extremely popular consumer device. But apparently it finds lots of embedded use. I’ve read for example that some casino floors have thousands of Mac Minis hidden behind cabinets controlling gaming machines.
They got used in Texas in gas pumps. Our whole inventory, bought out for this embedded use. Never mind they had a screen and keyboard (kind of a terminal-like deal). They just mounted them sideways inside the pump!
But the "killer app" is the product-making application that defines the product, pulling it into ubiquity (the original example was VisiCalc and the Apple II). The iPad has yet to find one that makes people say "oh, it's an X". Instead, as you say, it's spread around on a bunch of relatively small-volume apps.
I'm not saying they are - I'm an iPad Pro owner and user and there's a few apps I use on a regular basis - Shapr 3D most recently but there are certainly no apps that mean I absolutely need an iPad Pro for as there are equivalent apps, usually better, on desktop or smartphone.
I'm not a gamer but have a few iPad games which are good but again, other platforms tend to have the same or similar games that are either better suited to that platform (console or PC) or are just better than the iPad equivalent.
What the iPad only, sadly, does better than smartphones and better than laptops, is YouTube. And that is possibly it, at the moment. I hope things improve because my iPad Pro cost me a lot of money.
I've developed a number of workflows that would never work on a Macbook. For instance, I take handwritten notes with the device in my lap during a meeting, convert them to text, and add them to either project management software, or Roam (plug: https://roamresearch.com/).
The pencil is a total joy. I've taken up drawing and painting again and the more laptop-like the iPad becomes, the less I miss my old Macbook Air. In hindsight, it's the laptop form factor that makes less sense. When I need a full OS for some tasks, I use a desktop computer with commodity PC components.
Apple has been doing this since the first Mac. Make things simple and pretty on the surface for the happy path, but overly simple, so that there's a bunch of secrets to get actual tasks done.
For example: They knew all about the Star and Smalltalk and friends, which had a consistent use of three mouse buttons for actions, cut and paste, whatever. Apple instead insisted on the false simplicity of a one button mouse, which doomed future users to a maze of difficult to remember modifier-click finger Twister instead.
I don't feel like this is true. One thing I'm consistently impressed by in the original MacOS is how well the chosen abstractions map to the actual way things are. There are some exceptions, like the trash can and its famous relationship with removable media, but on the whole it works a lot better than what we have today.
There's a similar "swipe a surface that doesn't look like an active surface" trip on the apple TV remote as well.
I may be old-fashioned, but those are very unintuitive in my estimation and I consider them poor design. The look good in pictures, though.
I love, however, my iphone 11. There's somehow more of a conceptual root to all of it- to the point that after I had it for two weeks and someone asked me if I missed the home button I really couldn't remember what all the home button did. I do have to fool around with it to get a screen shot, but it was the same with the home button. Could never remember the order of operations.
It does feel sometimes like it's "design first- hack the UI" though with Apple and it leads to a few annoyances.
This feels like some user-specific customization.
The ctrl-click context-menu right-click-substitute has been around since 1997 (Mac OS 8), and various Apple input devices have had different sort of "right click shortcuts" since then (at least after 2007 or so? it took a while) but I don't know of a tap-to-right-click default. "Click the right side of the apparently-buttonless-mouse" and "two finger click" are the most well-known. None of these are intuitive - the context menu stuff was a power user thing in the Mac world in the late 90s), but fairly unchanging.
So ideally I would have a medium power device with high portability and 4G built in and I could remote in to the big iron PC for the heavy lifting. But iOS is just too limited for this.
Maybe Microsoft can push out a good surface with Windows in the next iteration.
If it just only had developer tools in iOS Safari or better yet allowed alternate browser engines, I could do just about everything on one.
Life after the mac is not that bad. I miss some nice stuff, but the esentials are there.
A lot of window's problems seem very solvable on the surface. Some have been solved well by aforementioned 3rd party applications, but I still find myself pulling hairs when some others seem so easy to solve, yet no one has solved them.
I sometimes wish I was a Windows app developer with a lot of time on my hands, and no need for money. There are so many little things that once fixed, would drastically improve the UX...with so little effort.
It's like how reddit is a 100x better with RES, which is built by 1 guy. But a company worth $2 billion can't offer the same features natively.