Apple’s Universal Control
500ish.com
500ish.com
The other thing to consider is that Apple will be able to integrate at a lower deeper level than third party apps. It’s the drag and drop between devices that is going to be the game changer, that isn’t currently possible with the iPad with a third party app, the APIs don’t exist.
So yes, it’s not new but it is new to 99% of people. Just like smart phones, tablets or portable music “jukebox” players weren’t new but apple took them mainstream.
Touch screens, FaceTime, AirDrop, Handoff, Sidecar. These are generally polished and reliable iterations of existing ideas that don’t require a bunch of other apps and configuration. They are usually marketed and smartly named, unlike Windows where they can’t seem to name anything or features are locked behind different tiers of the OS.
Even the PC Master Race brigade who love to shout that they could build a better machine for less than whatever desktop Apple releases miss the point. Macs are appliances. They work reliably and do so for a long time and you know what you’re getting in terms of functionality.
The thing that really blew my mind was the shared clipboard, I’ve always been sending myself messages through Signal or Discord to share my clipboard. Now it’s just automatic. The only thing I would have liked was a better way to discover this, I only did by accident.
I’ve used KDE connect in the past, and this feels like the polished version of it.
edit: Mac Pro -> MacBook Pro
For the windows and Android users (of which I am one), the first party "your phone" app in windows 10/11 gives you this along with a lot of other amazing features (running your phone apps on desktop, access to photos and sms, notifications, calling and answering through your computer).
I wasn't aware this was a thing, and my mind just got blown. Thanks.
Thanks for reminding me about it. My problem has been kinda the opposite: I trigger the notification center by accident too often. So this was enough for me to finally rebind it to a hot corner.
I’ve seen so many students upload images for online exams via things like cam scanner unaware that they don’t need third party solutions. They complain about the time needed to get the images off their phones and onto their laptops for exams because of these supposedly hidden features.
(On Windows you can browse your android’s phone’s photos via the photos app via USB)
Similarly they go to extremes with various oddball apps to make PDFs with cam scanner images in all sorts of orientations with nasty watermarks because they’re unaware of the power of Preview.
Also most people don’t know that when you Screenshot a webpage, there’s actually a tab at the top to capture the entire webpage (even if it’s way taller than your screen) as a pdf. Essentially “print to pdf”.
It's infectious. So much so that I'm constantly annoyed that Music supports neither Continuity nor some form of remote control. It feels like the feature was released and then they suddenly stopped adding more apps to support it.
You can also use an Apple Watch as a remote for music playing on any device in your home. Apple want your money.
Apple locks their ecosystem so nobody else can make a smooth seamless experience. They ensure that only they can deliver such an integrated experience. I respect the effort of their engineers, but there are countless smart UX people and engineers in the world.
KDE Connect and GS Connect do virtually the same things between Linux and Android, and sometimes even more than what Apple can do[1], and is proof that you don't need vendor lock-in and a 3 trillion $ valuation to achieve the same features, just a group of dedicated enthusiasts with a vision and free time on their hands. That's the beauty of FOSS.
Unfortunately, the Apple apologetics brigade will shout loudly that vendor lock in is the key to Apple delivering these features and that openness is somehow bad as it will only hurt the ecosystem and get you hacked.
Not hating on Apple or Apple users, just stating my POV.
It's entirely possible that a closed ecosystem enables a large number of features with a certain set of tradeoffs, and an open ecosystem enables a large number of features with a different set of tradeoffs, and there is overlap between the feature sets.
Does that mean that there is no need for an open ecosystem, when you can get what you need from a closed ecosystem? No, because while all the features you care about may be in both, the tradeoffs you have to make to use the closed ecosystem might not be the tradeoffs you want to make.
And the converse is equally plausible: That you can get all the features you care about in both, but it does not mean that there is no need for a closed ecosystem, because while all the features someone cares about may be available in both, the tradeoffs they want to make may align more closely with the closed ecosystem's tradeoffs than with teh open ecosystem's tradeoffs.
I think it is true that given some set of features, we can nearly always find a set of open source products/packages to deliver the required functionality, and for a very pedantic literal sense of "need, " OSS does everything people need.
But hardware and software products are more than just a set of features. They're the other tradeoffs that form a messy collection of affordances and pain points, and different people have different needs from the entire product's perspective.
This feature is indeed innovative yet iterative - it’s like a zero-configuration Synergy or Logitech Flow where you can use the same mouse on multiple devices - but it requires basically no configuration at all to do so. And the impressive part is how it built on top of previous work to add shared clipboard between devices and other “handoff” features, plus has a similarity to features that shipped before handoff such as airdrop.
To underscore how impressive it is, Microsoft still has yet to ship a suite of such features and they should have very similar resources available. Apple might be all marketing and sometimes buggy, confusing or unexpected, but there is an undeniable sense of progression when you look at the 5-10 year improvements.
The caution I would have is that it works so well I was confused when my mouse cursor disappeared and showed up on another screen. And it can’t automatically figure out the positioning of displays or computers, which is annoying now that Apple is experimenting with chips that can precisely position devices relative to each other. [Full disclosure, I have a couple shares in Apple.]
It does way more than that:
It will pause your PC music/movie when you get a call.
It lets you sync clipboards.
Syncs notifications, SMS, etc and can even reply to SMS from your PC.
Remote view of photos and files on your phone from the PC.
Take phone call on your PC.
And I might be missing a couple.
But, yes, the fact that Microsoft hasn't delivered such features on Windows is baffling. They did try with the Your Phone app, but that's worse than KDE connect.
I agree with the other commenters - it's nice, but it's not nearly the same. The beauty of it is really that 'it just works' - you don't need to know about it, you don't need to open a specific app, find something by name and press 'connect', there are no options. The behaviour just slots in perfectly between the existing model of icloud / sharing / handoff. This kind of long-term design vision is difficult to achieve and very rare in FOSS, maybe with the exception of Elementary.
> and is proof that you don't need vendor lock-in and a 3 trillion $ valuation to achieve the same features
> the Apple apologetics brigade will shout loudly that vendor lock in is the key to Apple delivering these features and that openness is somehow bad
Can't have it both ways.
I buy a new iPad and MacBook, log in with my iCloud account, and boom, it works.
Sure, but now we're moving the goal posts and arguing about semantics. The original comment I replied to, said Apple features are only achievable due to their ecosystem and I disproved him, that's it. The fact that the Linux community doesn't have billions of $ for marketing and commercialization of their products is a separate issue that's been the thorn of Linux adoption on the desktop since forever.
>I buy a new iPad and MacBook, log in with my iCloud account, and boom, it works.
Unfortunately, some people in the world that don't earn western wages can't afford to own several Apple products worth multiple times their salaries to enjoy the ecosystem, so it's great that FOSS alternatives exist that do the same things so those less fortunate can enjoy them at a fraction of the cost.
No, they said those features are only achievable on Apple systems by Apple because of they close everyone else out of their ecosystem.
> so it's great that FOSS alternatives exist that do the same things so those less fortunate can enjoy them at a fraction of the cost.
I agree 1000%, but that's not what we were talking about.
I have the western income and I have multiple Apple products as a result, and I should really appreciate that more than I do.
Why did my comment bother you? I did not insult anyone.
Now that I have a comfortable middle class western lifestyle I can appreciate the appliance nature of Apple’s products. I use them for work because they are reliable and do indeed just work.
In the lab I can still tinker with computers but I try to leave that to my students so they can have the same wonderful experience I had.
I haven’t build a PC in a few years and hope to build something new in a couple of years. It’s not a monoculture just because I prefer Macs for getting work done and I’m not going to apologise for my situation. Apple know their users and I’m happy that they can meet most of my needs.
But it has ZERO sleep modes. There are 4 exposed to the OS in most cases, non are supported by the BIOS...the only thing I can reasonably do is 'hibernate with lid close.'
The mac is half the price, half the weight, twice the CPU...I'm a little disappointed in Dell and sad that my office requires it use.
But in the context of this thread, I really need a dose of humility and a recognition of what I have due to my geography.
In a windows/linux/notApple ecosystem, you've got to give permission to an application to fully control other devices...that's...not a good idea, from a security standpoint. It's how Bonzi Buddy gets a really crappy hold of your information. But apple has spent a lot of time building a reputation where they can be trusted to do so()
=and yet...
Apple should provide safe defaults - but ultimately the user should be making that decision. Its entirely possible to do this safely, Apple simply chooses not to and pretends its something to do with security.
> But apple has spent a lot of time building a reputation where they can be trusted to do so()
Regardless of whatever "reputation" they've built, Apple products are riddled with bugs and security problems. As a technical user, I never think "security" when I think Apple. I guess for most people security is something that is easily marketed.
Feature bloat has plagued Apple developers to the point nobody knows how to wrangle all the gestures and interactions properly. Even a man as diligent as Steve, I suspect, wouldn't know what to do with the current state of things. He'd probably just burn it all down and start over with the front end, as is the natural order of things.
Music works fine. Passwords work fine. The window manager works fine.
Revolutionary? No. Needing an update? I think so.
A failure? Only in your fevered dreams.
For starters, it’s as hard for me to plug my phone in on multiple computers without licensing alerts going nuts/blocking certain songs despite the fact the music was bought through them. That is baffling to me given how synchronized Apple ID usually is.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MQ052LL/A/magic-keyboard-...
The Mac desktop works extremely well when used more or less as intended for the vast majority of Mac users (ie, on a laptop): with a multi-touch trackpad, flicking rapidly between virtual desktops, and flicking up to see everything at once.
Honestly, that's a terrible workflow for me. Due to the nature of my work, many times I need to tile 2, 3 or 4 windows on the same screen so I can view them all at once. Flicking quickly between them instead of having them all static in front of me is a UX nightmare that gives me eye strain just thinking about it.
I have no idea how people mange to multi task efficiently by flicking and not get headaches, or on desktop with a mouse and keyboard, but maybe Apple thinks most of its customers are content creators who should just be focusing on one app at a time and never need to tile several. I guess I just wasn't meant to be an Apple customer.
For my type of work, I much prefer the Windows/Linux way of having the flicking option for laptops but also great out of the box tiling built in.
If you want a full screen app that you flick through like an iPad you can. If you want a mess of windows on one desktop you can use App Exposé to see only the ones from a particular app. If you want a tiling manager you can install one.
If you want to turn off all the gestures you can.
It’s a mature desktop OS that has many ways of doing things.
I just want my OS to give me the option, out of the box, to quickly tile on demand 2 to 4 windows on the same screen in a sane layout that I can choose that's easily resizable to my current needs. That's it.
Kind of like this:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/modern...
Apple Music still won't sync all of my wife's MP3 songs to her iPhone 13 Pro, even though she pays for the subscription. Some stuff goes through. Some doesn't. It's very random.
My iPhone X syncs fine, even wirelessly, with the same library, though.
I'm just glad (OK, amazed) that Apple Music still syncs songs with my 17-year-old first-generation iPod Shuffle. I used it just yesterday. My only complaint is that the icon displayed in the Finder sidebar for the second-generation Shuffles has the wrong aspect ratio. Still the best music player on the planet.
People really underestimate the contagiousness of Apple brand names.
Earlier this week I was listening to several non-technical people in the real world talking about their "AirTags." Eventually one of them took hers out, and it turned out they were talking about their Tile trackers. Nobody says "Tile," but everyone says "AirTags" now.
And in my company, everyone says "FaceTime," but nobody means FaceTime because it's a Windows-only organization. They mean Teams, or Zoom, or even BlueJeans, but they never actually mean FaceTime.
In Windows you search for Disk Management and you not only have to type the entire name but the result you get is not the program you’re looking for but some long winded description that makes you stop and have to decipher it. It adds friction and confusion.
At least since Windows 10 Start-X opens a useful list of utilities.
Legitimately asking this: how so? I don’t really have any issues with it and I’m formatting drives all the time off of it. Are there some other features that are janky?
The responsiveness and web experience of the first iPhone was just, a generational leap.
Same thing with Universal Control. I've used Synergy, ShareMouse and basically every clone, and I've never seen close to this same precision as Universal Control which Just Works out of the box.
I'm actually upgrading to a new Mac right now, and Universal Control is an absolute game changer for that workflow.
"But Apple has to lock it down, otherwise it would be a shitty ecosystem, just look at Windows lol" is a lame defense (IMO). There are countless ways to design open APIs, open data standards, etc while still having sane defaults for the non-pro users.
Pity that MG Siegler did not realise the opportunity to report more than what goes beyond an off-puttingly biased and superficial analysis. I recall his TechCrunch times more favourably; this article in contrast seems to not only have been written in haste, but written poorly at that.
Apple epitomises the power of compounding. The level of deep integration they have built across and within devices (their own CPU, OS, and app etc.,) is impressive to say the least.
To pick another example; I just can't use any web browser other than Safari because of things like touch-ID enabled password store; privacy relay, hide my email and they keep piling on such thoughtful features once or twice a year. To an extent I'm now contemplating migrating from Fastmail (have my own domain) to Apple Mail.
I'm also a Fastmail user, but I (a long time Apple product user) don't have the impression of their services being quite as solid as some of the others, so I wouldn't switch my mail over yet. Plus, Fastmail has some other features I like (easy to set up aliases, including their new "masked email" feature, which integrates with 1Password).
All of that said, I've been all-in on Apple stuff for a number of years for exactly the reason you cite. There's a lot of good stuff that works well together. Like getting a security code via SMS and having Safari (on the iPhone) offer that as an autofill option.
BTW, this works with native apps too — just did it 30m ago with the Dave & Busters app. (My guess is that this works via the iOS keyboard.)
Did I set something custom up and forget about it, or is this standard?
That good, huh? Better than Fastmail?
I'm asking because I'm now prioritizing digital subscriptions. It's just such good ROI, it's a unique kind of product that goes for subscriptions. Not so much into products as services. The really good services all require subscriptions, and can justify their cost easily.
Apparently subscriptions transform businesses at an "technology of business" to say it one way, at that level. Like it looks much better on their balance sheet to have subscriptions, and for good reason. But it's deeper than that.
I suppose feature wise Fastmail is slightly better. Just that I need to pay about 8$/e-mail/month and it's free part of iCloud subscription. Plus, more convenient to manage from one place. But on the downside; it leads to single point of failure so I'm still weighing that decision.
But it does not "just work" by any stretch. I ran into the same typical crap that I see with Handoff and Airdrop. It "just works" until it inexplicably stops working, for no apparent reason, and nothing but a reboot fixes it. Even getting my two Macs to see each other was a PITA (a 16" M1 Max, and a 14" M1 Pro). I thought at first it was because one was hardwired (but also on the local wifi), but no. Disabling ethernet made no difference. Multiple reboots, no dice. Later on, 10 minutes after deciding to give up, it just decided to start working, a fact which I only discovered because I lost control of my mouse on one machine, not realizing I had moved it to the other.
Now that they "know" one another, we'll see if it works more consistently now.
For me that has been when SSIDs foo and foo-5 are both available (home, vacation house, work), so I’d tell my Mac (which tells my other devices) to try both.
Once I stopped doing this these features became rock solid. Note that editing your WiFi list (removing obsolete ones and ordering the search list) will speed up connecting to WiFi on all your devices.
PS: typing w, i, f, and i on my ipad resulted in the two different expansions above!
Driving me fucking insane. I've gone back to just having two keyboards and trackpads on my desk.
It is cute (I’m typing this on my iPad controlled by my MacBook Pro), but just doesn’t seem very reliable at the moment (and does not work at all from an older MacBook Air). There’s a bucketload of polish in the experience, but I would refrain from calling it groundbreaking or liberating… Just a little better (UI-wise) and a little worse (no PC support).
Synergy left the impression as something opposite of "it just works".
To be honest I'm not sure if Barrier developers could actually mimic that without resorting to some sort of undocumented APIs and/or obscure techniques.
My only M1 mac is a company machine and I don’t like the idea of disabling SIP on it, even temporarily.
Any software that has a native iOS version, but only has an Electron version on the Mac comes instantly to mind.
The Electron version of Slack's resource usage can be insane.
See, that's the thing. My guess is you had to configure Synergy, and as a techie you're blind to this effort. But it is still effort, hence a time sink and a cognitive burden. The Apple version is none of these and a joy to use because Apple puts the emphasis on making it Just Work with zero configuration if possible.
Hundreds of millions more people will experience multi-device control for the first time with Apple Universal Control, than will have ever heard of Synergy.
They really, really don't. I have constant Bluetooth issues with all of my Apple devices, and since all of their flashy stuff relies on Bluetooth most of it breaks every couple of days.
Universal clipboard failures, AirDrop failures, AirPod pairing issues when trying to switch between devices, and total Bluetooth stack crashes.
They get things working to 80% and then just stop maintaining them.
I don't own any apple products so correct me if I'm wrong, but if there was a way to make a program to "just work" will Apple allow it? From what I've heard devs complain apple's walled garden is pretty restrictive when it comes to things you can and cannot do especially when mobile devices are involved.
Apple gear and software always has a low-level advantage, as they own the SDK, but I haven’t seen them actually use this to deliberately disadvantage competitors (unlike some other companies that I won’t mention).
That said, I have seen them “Sherlock” developers, though; where they implement integrated versions of products made by independent devs. This has been fairly controversial, as they have not always paid/given credit to the developers they plowed under. That sucks, because it would, literally, cost them nothing to simply mention the product that inspired their work. I suspect that’s because lawyers.
I tend to like Apple for the same reason that other developers hate them. That “walled garden” is a big fat PItA, but it is also the reason for an enormous, lucrative, market. We need to learn to take the bad with the good, if we want to be happy.
Try to write code for macOS that can stream data from disk as fast as Logic Pro. Maybe there's really no magic, and I'm just an idiot, but I certainly couldn't do it.
As an independent developer, I can certainly understand why I would not be allowed to access some of these private APIs, and I don't feel that it is because Apple is afraid of any competition from li'l ol' me. I have always assumed that it's because access at that level may bypass some security methods.
Listen, I'm not gonna play this game. I said my piece, you said yours, we're done.
This walled garden is 100% a feature.
It's a pretty niche feature. I have used both Barrier and Synergy in the past but as a workflow, visually manipulating multiple computers like this sucks. Few people need to do it and life is better if you can avoid needing to do it at all. Multiplatform development is the greatest win but still, the more you can minimise on-target testing, the better. A fast test harness on your dev machine is much nicer.
IMHO remoting into a machine is much less hassle than having a dedicated screen. Most use cases typically involve poking it now and again and having an occasional window on your main display is nicer than giving up desk space and properly aligning another display. If it's not part of your permanent setup then this extra display is often an ergonomic pest. You may be able to share peripherals but if you have to contort your neck to see it then ugh, it's not fun. It can be ergonomically nicer to use their own dedicated peripherals on a side table rather than sharing them.
If it's about sharing data then obviously network accessible storage (cloud, NAS or mount a remote machine's drive) is better.
On Windows if you accidentally move your mouse off of the login screen you are _completely_ unable to user your client computer. You literally need to use the power button to recover your machine. This issue persisted for years before I gave up on Synergy and all of its suckiness.
Your comment makes it sound like not needing to setup apps, not having limitations and having all complexity abstracted away on an OS level are “polishing” or nice to have.
For most people, those thing are the feature.
Chance my mom will use Synergy? 0%. Chance she’ll use Universal Control at some point? I’d say pretty high.
Modular as in buy-one-of-our-displays-and-connect-to-it modular. Not replace-or-upgrade-a-part-in-it, modular.
TBF at least it’s not another iMac. I see so many of them stacked up for recycling where the logic board or power supply is duff. They still have perfectly good 5k 27” screens attached which are not duff.
I bought a studio display yesterday because I suspect it’ll outlast the iMac it’s no longer attached to.
I have used Synergy, Mouse Without Border, Multiplicity, and more. They all suck. They. ALL. Suck.
Every single one of them needs to be reconnected multiple times a day. I fix this by using a schedule task that restarts them. lol
They ALL have clipboard issues where the clipboard stops working at some random point in the day.
Some of them have system breaking issues like the Synergy login screen issue. Where if you are at the lock screen (as happens throughout the day) and you move your mouse to another screen, your mouse is 100% stuck on the other screen. The only way to recover your client computer is via the power button. So take all that work you left when you got up to go to the bathroom, take it all and flush it down the toilet. Thanks Synergy. Fuck you Synergy.
They all have issues with more than two machines. Sometimes you can only access the left 100 pixels of a certain machine. Who knows!? It's fun isn't it!? Sometimes a specific screen will just... stop working. Who knows!? You were just sitting there. And now your workday has stopped.
Fuck you Synergy. Fuck you Mouse Without Borders. Fuck you Multiplicity. You all suck. You are all half-ass attempts at something that very much needs to "just work".
Why is it so popular among hackers then?
What are some potential things that this can unlock? I might well try it but just can't think of a practical use case for me.
Being able to treat my iPad and MacBook as one seamless device for art work sounds great.
3D artists, for example, pretty much have to do their 3D modeling work on a desktop. But the iPad is a better device for drawing 2d textures. If I could drag and drop textures onto 3D projects, that’d be nice. Or even just drawing layers on my iPad and dragging them into a desktop photoshop project or something.
Outside of art, it seems much less useful though.
Also it’s really useful when you’re writing up documentation. I draw up draft diagrams in GoodNotes with Apple Pencil and you can just drag them straight across the screens into the target document!
It’s pretty remarkable. I think people will find use cases for it as time goes on because it’s so new it’s not well understood yet.
I like it though. A lot.
Edit: also experimenting with sharing two screens at once on zoom. One with presentation (iPad) and one with code/IDE on it (mac)
You can code on your mac, while reading documentation / keeping an eye on your email on the iPad propped up next to you from any café in the world.
Universal Control means I can now control my mic and hang up using my mouse, instead of having to awkwardly reach to the screen. It's a stupid and basic use case, but hey, it works!
There's no need to have this enable complex new workflows. Sometimes it's about those simple things.
This just removes some of that friction.
How do you do the annotation? The markup tool or something else?
But there shouldn’t be any restrictions for apps to run on only one device in the first place.
Getting the details right is <i>really</i> hard and takes a lot of work. The last 10% takes as much work as the first 90%. Then the next 10% also takes 90%. Repeat a few more times and somehow it ends up being 1000% more difficult than you expected at the start. Often it requires merging multiple major ideas to create something that is more than the sum of its parts (then you get to watch fools who only got 1 of 50 parts correct claim they invented the whole thing).
Be assured that if you are successful a lot of people will rush to make sure you don't get any credit. I recommend you ignore them... their opinions don't matter and listening to them won't help you make better products or delight more customers.
Stay focused on what matters. Even if Slashdot calls your product "lame" it can still make a few billion. Even if HN says your idea can be done already trivially by "any linux user with curlftpfs" you can still create a startup, IPO, and become very rich. Even if someone says "we have had Mouse without Borders [...] for over a decade" you can still deliver a better experience that people will pay money for.
Just because there are existing "solutions" out there doesn't mean they are a) good or b) doing the job customers actually want them to do.
Of course if Apple senses there is something cool out there that looks like it has only had e.g. $200k spent on it they could decide to put a bunch of devs on the same issue, spend much more money/time, and get a better product out. IMO that doesn't automatically mean they should go around calling it revolutionary if it does similar things but better or whatever.
It's revolutionary in that it introduces a new capability to the average user (ignoring either tails), changing the way they interact with their computing devices. The mouse was revolutionary, for example. It existed, but the way it was integrated and became the focal point of UI interactions -- revolutionary. Will this be that? Most likely not, but we'll see.
The touchpad on Mac laptops is a better analogy here. Apple got the touchpad right a decade before Windows based machines. It was smooth, responsive, and gestures just worked. This is now an industry standard, but even 10 years ago wasn't a given that you'd have a Windows laptop with the right hardware and drivers. It feels like what they're doing here is very similar.
You seem to think all these problems are solved by throwing money at them, they're so easy. Apple knew the touchpad would be important and invested and vertically integrated. It took laptop manufacturers and Microsoft a decade to coordinate and catch up. I don't even like Apple as a company, but give credit where it's due.
And maybe just as important, the "feel" of touchpads on non-Apple laptops is still generally "meh" to outright bad. People choose Apple products because it's clear that Apple prioritizes the UX.
Their genius isn't necessarily in being first or even inventing something (touch screen phone), it's tweaking the edges and getting it "just right".
I don’t want to be experimented on like the bleeding edge companies are doing constantly. I want something solid that works.
Of course it’s not perfect but the whole ecosystem integration and solidness is far far far above anything else out there.
For example I have a few iPad apps installed on my Mac, the reason being that I wanted keyboard/mouse and easier copying of content into and out of the iPad app while I was working on my desktop machine. With universal control I don't need to have the dual installs anymore, nor have to deal with the problems that would come with that (e.g. having to duplicate content across both installs).
There's also plenty of apps which the developer has barred from installing on macOS where this is the only real solution.
You can bypass that with iMazing. It’ll export the raw iPad app, which you can then install on your Mac, and it’ll probably run fine.
In AR it will allow you to control devices you physically pickup.
In VR it will create a fake-device and the real screen will be translated and superimposed.
With that in mind what uses would AR/VR offer that go beyond the usual gimmicks? Full floating 2D displays doesn’t seem like something Apple would do. They already do really well with placing 3D models in a space and their LiDAR scanner is impressive. I’d imagine they’re going to do something that makes you need several Apple products with any AR/VR head set.
Like the Apple Watch it’ll require an iPhone to work. It will extend the display of iPads and Macs. Stuff like the Touch Bar does will be shoved off to the side so you can use your fancy display entirely for viewing your content but UI elements will be pushed to the side off screen and you can push your mouse out of the screen to interact with it.
And some Lego AR game or something.
Yes, some bits "just work", and yes I wish that parts of the Linux and Windows ecosystems "just worked" too.
But....
There are aspects that not only don't "just work", they are aggressively terrible. For example, I still get wildly infuriated every time I try to share my partner's MacBook screen to my Linux laptop so I can build iOS apps, while my partner is logged into the MacBook. It's staggeringly bad. If I had a few spare thousand currency, sure, I'd buy a separate MacBook and a new iPhone, but that's not an option. Remote X windowing has worked for literally decades; Android remote screen access is trivial. Apple is waaaaaay behind the curve here, and it seems deliberately so, in order to encourage sales of multiple devices.
Small organisations and individual developers make their livings from addressing these issues. Then Apple re-implements the missing functionality, sometimes aggressively shutting out the third party provider; for example, remember f.lux's experience?
https://justgetflux.com/news/2016/01/14/apple.html
But when the missing functionality is added by Apple, the fan-boiz go wild:
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-night-shift-rev...
...including articles in the mainstream press
https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2016/apr/...
I'm sure similar happens in other ecosystems, but the level of hyperbole among Apple fans and degree of seemingly-deliberate brokenness and profiteering makes Apple utterly unappealing to me.
IMO it's just as interesting as the people who hate Apple as if they are some kind of devil incarnate. And then talk down to Apple users like they're dumb, or cult members, etc. The vitriol is fascinating.
I can't decide if the haters are a reaction to the fans, or the fans a reaction to the haters. Probably both at this stage.
In the end wound up buying Jump Desktop which works well.
Also note: reliably. As in repeatably. As in, it "just works". Ha.
I gratefully await your advice.
Meanwhile, I'll refrain from tales of doing this 25 **ing years ago without breaking a sweat.
Sigh.
(Edit: s/view/interact/)
Wouldn’t Screen Sharing work here ? I have to test when I get home today but I’m sure this is possible.
Two macs, extending screen from A to B terminates universal control from B to A.
If this is beta, then why was it announced as soon to be released last year?
Just ignore the Apple hypesphere and go about your life.
Apple's implementation requires you to have all the devices signed into the same iCloud account…well, guess which two computers on my desk I would like to share my input devices across? Yeah, my personal and work laptops, but I'm definitely not going to sign into iCloud on one of them, so the feature is useless for that right out of the gate. (And this is why I made my own thing, to be clear.) Putting that usecase aside, there's a Mac mini under the desk that I use for kernel debugging sometimes, and an iPad next to the monitor. Does it work with those?
For the iPad, if it's on, then sure, it works most of the time. Helpful when I am working on Swift Playgrounds I guess, since the Mac app doesn't have any of the app-making features I want to play with. If I didn't have the iOS Slack and Discord apps running on my Mac, I can see it being useful for that too. But otherwise, I don't really have a need to actually do anything on my iPad if I'm at my Mac, although I would be super interested to hear what people are using this for.
For the Mac mini, things are substantially worse. It's sleeping most of the time, because I'm not using it, and that just means Universal Control doesn't work. It's kind of hilarious because often I will poke it with my software, which uses functionality that Apple already ships (try screensharing into a sleeping Mac!) to wake up the computer, but Universal Control doesn't seem to use it. Even when the computer is on getting it to recognize the device is hit-or-miss, even though they're on the same home network and feet from each other. It seems worse at discovering the device than AirDrop is, which is saying something.
Speaking of which, even when you've got all your devices all linked up, the display configuration part is super janky, for reasons I think are extremely Apple. It looks super cool to do a keynote demo where the mouse approaches the screen edge and jumps over to the device on that side, but in the real world, people have computer layouts that don't match that. My monitors don't always match where devices are in the real world, so I frequently have the cursor appear on the wrong side of the display, and then I need to go into System Preferences anyways to fix the thing, so the magic is completely gone at that point. Plus, the configuration doesn't save and the preference pane to rearrange displays clearly didn't get the necessary love to do screen layout correctly (it's non-trivial, but not actually that hard…a fun exercise in geometric algorithms to make sure all the displays are contiguous and things like snapping work). So things will just jump around, and you'll find that certain displays can't be placed in certain positions. If you get things wrong you might lose your cursor in the "abyss", although I think it tries really hard to keep the cursor on a screen visible.
Honestly, I don't get why the feature is like this. Apple spent months working on this past the initial ship date, and it's still in "beta", and it still seems really finicky. I get the whole "things are hard actually and it's not always obvious why" but I made this thing (and I'd really love to share it, but I just can't yet) and I am not seeing why what Apple did is significantly harder than forming a secure network connection and forwarding Quartz events over it, which is what I'm doing, and seemingly works far better than their implementation does for the purposes of controlling another Mac. What am I missing?
All I need now is a small extension to Universal Control that would let some direct control be delegated to my AppleID and one of my devices, to temporarily control, for setup and short show+teach sessions, family iPhone and iPad devices in remote locations.
It seems like one of those things that is interesting in concept, but I can't say I'm seeing the need/use case for it outside of that...
But it's not as if I'm going to type it, especially into an iPhone, and not all apps support icloud keychain.
CoreUSB? XCode? A working Terminal? AppleScript? Logic? Any update at all to GarageBand?
It has literally the same logic inside it. Why do they hobble it like this?
Turn on wifi to see if there's some retard dependency on the physical layer and nada.. Still not working. Ach, whatever...
Then throughout the day, it just randomly works and doesn't on ethernet.
Da fuq. Ship working code or don't. What is this nonsense? It's, I imagine, a fucking service running on the iPad that receives a stream of events from my Mac like (moved a bit forward on the trackpad). How hard is it?
Just keep both network interfaces fired up, and sort them by priority in Network preferences panel (I assume ethernet, then wifi for you use case). Then you can forget about everything and do work, tethered or not.
Turn the bluetooth on as well while you're at it.
This is the way.
You can screen share to an Apple TV however.
Do they ignore the home network and communicate directly WiFi card to WiFi card?
It fails all the time for inexplicable reasons. Eg. one computer has two users signed in -- doesn't work, silent failure, no error message.
Computer not yet booted -- does not work, no way to type in the login password. (Granted this is hard to solve, but would be what I need to get away without a KVM switch)
One computer crashes -- your second Mac is now mouseless for 5 minutes until some time out occurs.
Multiple monitors stacked vertically: You can only move the cursor across one of the borders, the other one doesn't work.
Using a 3rd party mouse with extra functions: can't use them or scrolling won't work anymore.
The problem is that when something fails, there is no error message, no log message, no indication what you need to do to make it work.
As with all Apple solutions, it's a seamless experience if it happens to work, but if it doesn't work you'll be pulling your hairs.
In addition, going from my Mac to an iPad is laggy and it had the caps lock flipped between each machine!
What is really fun though is Synergy, which a few years ago was running a Mac, a Linux box, and an O2 all from the same keyboard and mouse.
> As with all Apple solutions, it's a seamless experience if it happens to work, but if it doesn't work you'll be pulling your hairs.
This is probably the thing that annoys me the most about Apple stuff, particularly over the last 5 years or so. I know they're never gonna give us knobs and dials to fiddle with this stuff when it goes wrong, but for christ's sake at least tell me what's wrong, or even that something is wrong. Prodding at the controls on my phone trying to work out why the hell it won't connect to the AirPods that are right there is not a good experience for anyone.
Until it doesn't. A few files in iCloud drive just stopped syncing a handful of times. Is it a network issue? A temporary glitch? Should I restart the computer? Or just wait a little? Nobody knows!
I switched to Syncthing for syncing files. It also fails sometimes. But it shows a clear, actionable error message when it fails (eg: file name contains characters not supported on target device). And there's a button to manually trigger a sync in case the file system observation didn't work.
With iCloud it's always a surprise. Is it going to sync? Probably. When? In the next minute probably. It's been 5 minutes, is there a way to sync right now? Try restarting the computer, maybe that'll fix it.
The unspoken truth. Yes, you may get more debug output in other ecosystems but there are going to be mountains of bugs and a kludge of workarounds to get “seamless” integration.
Can this particular problem be solved better now? Yes. Can every other cross device integration be solved as well? No way!
The pain stretches across software and hardware.
> Multiple monitors stacked vertically: You can only move the cursor across one of the borders, the other one doesn't work.
Once two devices are connected, you can rearrange them in Display preferences just like any other monitors. I found this to work as expected. By default, the connected devices have their monitors aligned such that the corner of one monitor touches the corner of another, but you’re free to change that.
On the other hand, I’ve encountered additional issues. Even with a Magic Mouse or built-in trackpad, there are odd lag spikes.
Scrolling will randomly stop working.
Some first-party iPadOS apps will randomly freeze, including Settings. They’ll stop responding to touch input as well. Other apps will continue to work.
Overall, though, it works well enough that I’ve been using it to run Slack on my iPad while working on my MacBook.
Here's my setup (I hope ASCII art works here):
┌─────┐ ┌───┐
│ A1 │ │ │
├─────┤ │ B │
│ A2 │ │ │
└─────┘ └───┘
Mac B has a portrait monitor.
I can move between A2 and B. I can't move between A1 and B.
┌─────┐
│ A1 │
├─────┤ ┌─┐
│ A2 │ │B│
└─────┘ └─┘
┌─────┐
│ A1 │ ┌─┐
├─────┤ │B│
│ A2 │ └─┘
└─────┘
That being said, it’s been far from reliable, and Universal Control is both very late and very much unfinished. I’ve been experiencing different issues from the ones you mentioned, but they’ve been issues nonetheless.
Well, it has not been working for me. And I've tried rearranging the displays. I'm not stupid. I had a similar setup with a single Mac before, and it worked fine. The layout looks correct in System preferences.
When moving the mouse between A2 and B, the cursor comes out in the right position. I just can't move from B to A1. (A detail I omitted for brevity: I can move the mouse from A1 to B, but then the cursor jumps down as if it was coming from A2.)
It's definitely a bug, it's not intentional.
Surely that is an extremely rare scenario. Personally, I've never seen it in real life.
This is just more evidence of the systemic issues Apple has with maintaining software. Forgetting to test new features work with Fast User Switching is a failure to maintain the fast user switching feature of your operating system!
It does seems to be a feature that gets very little testing or quality control. I'm not surprised at all if it causes issues with Universal Control.
I enjoy the hard separation. separate desktops. seperate windows. seperate instances of apps. seperate download folder. etc etc.
Edit: I'm not complaining that there are bugs or corner cases. Every software has that. My complaint is mainly that when something goes wrong, there are no error messages, no diagnostic tools, and the documentation is severely lacking. You have to randomly try things. How do you figure out that fast user switching breaks universal control? I just figured that out by accident. Your only hope is googling the issue and hope that someone figured it out and wrote a blog post about it.
Let's not even talk about the issues osx-arm64 architecture brings for DevOps.
Bluetooth: devices do not disconnect when the device ID put to sleep. If I don't disconnect my headphones before leaving my laptop, I can't connect to my phone. My guess this is done for some Apple Bluetooth features, anyone using not-Apple is SooL.
HiDPI: Not using an Apple monitor? Too bad no hdpi scaling for you.
Yeah the hardware quality and design is nice, software and OS is hot garbage. My Linux Mint ThinkPad had higher UX polish than Macos Monterey.
Apple definitely does not "just work" in this case. They really "think different" as in different standards to ensure consumer lock-in in their walled garden.
I've tried Linux a few times in the past and it's been a mess - particularly in a mixed DPI environment. It also seems to come down to individual apps rather than the desktop manager. Not long ago I really wanted to make linux worked and so was asking questions on forums on how to make HiDPI work well, and a common response was 'no one needs HiDPI'...got it.
I'd love to hear what your DevOps issues are. I got an M1 laptop a few months ago and at that point everything just worked out-of-the-box. Ansible, Terraform, Docker.. no issues so far.
My Thinkpad Nano has a screen resolution that works best with its UI scaled to 150% or 175%. Windows does this pretty well, with mainly a tiny handful of old stuff where the dev flung a binary over the wall many moons ago and forgot about it not working right. macOS handles this scenario decently too, though at a slight performance hit since it renders at a higher resolution and then scales down.
Linux on the other hand has been a mess. I’ve tried GNOME, KDE, and Cinnamon on the latest Fedora both with X11 and Wayland (except for cinnamon, which is X11 only), and none of them get non-integer scaling 100% right across both the DE and all apps. This is the exacerbated by different UI toolkits having minds of their own and needing independent configuration, where on macOS and Windows they obey the system.
In fact, in my experience Linux works best if you have a boring ultra common setup — Intel iGPU with Intel networking with a single normal DPI monitor. As soon as you start deviating from that, expect things to start getting quirky.
Same. I've been using m1's since they came out and early on Terraform didn't work (had to wait on Go to support apple silicon), but that was over a year ago at this point. Now, everything works great...
Maybe the OP relies on Docker?
Still having OOM 'Killed' errors in builds that I should investigate. Don't know for sure if there are memory limits in default Docker settings on Macos, could be it. In any case, I should respec cleaner builds anyway because right now it's a mess.
Make sure you are using a good cable. Nothing made me hate cables like USB-C
I did turn off the auto-switching for AirPods as that caused some unintended switching and offered too little benefit.
The only thing I can think of in context of the current world situation is these are "Apple Assets" that are posting on this thread. Or maybe Apple bots. Or just deluded Apple fan boys?
This technology pre-dates Apple and it is not just magic. There is in fact a program running somewhere. But the idea is cool.
HN needs a way to denote bots though or people who think like bots at least.
I digress. Haters don't spam HN with useless Apple related astroturfing.
The case with this, though, is - as the article says - it just works. That's not the case with a single OSS KVM solution I know of. You'll always have to do some amount of configuration apart from installation that prevents widespread adoption.
Instead of what I consider spam and then all the bots/fanboys. It would be great to hear about how they implemented it. Or how they made it seamless. Much more interesting than an apple circle jerk.