Apple iPad Gets Split-Screen Multitasking in iOS 9
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I will say I haven't seen too much "innovation" from Apple in recent years. Progression, yes, but innovation no. Apple used to lead the field, and now they're just another "me too" device seller. The Apple Watch in particular is highly disappointing compared to what existed before it (e.g. Moto 360), but for what they lack in innovation they have more than made up for with advertising dollars and celebrity endorsements.
In the past, however, they've focused on differentiating themselves while also poo-poohing any features their competition has but they don't, saying you don't need that feature anyway.
I'm glad Apple's gotten away from the sour grapes mentality, but I hope this puts an end to the false claim that Android owes its success to copying Apple's innovations.
Isn't this a good thing? If Android has a good feature, I am happy if it comes to iOS, just as I am happy when good iOS features (e.g., ask for permission on first use, rather than on install) come to Android. I would be significantly less satisfied with an NIH mentality on either system.
I'm just pointing out that it's a huge change in Apple's product planning from what came before, and I think it should be noted.
(and by "before", I pretty much mean "under Jobs")
The company line is that they don't release features like this (or iOS notifications, or intra-app services, or even copy/paste) until the technology is mature and they feel ready. Thus far each of these features has worked perfectly at launch. I see no reason to doubt their explanation.
Apple always takes it's time to do things because it does them in a way that people can actually use, rather than rushing to be 'first'.
Android does rush features out, often getting them into a few devices ahead of Apple, but because of the failure of distribution of updates for Android, Apple actually gets to deliver features to consumers well ahead of Android.
Also, Android does often end up having to copy the iOS way of doing things when it proves to have been well thought out - e.g. The new permissions model.
And I would say that for most people, this strategy has been very successful, even though e.g. jailbreakers might get a more advanced version of something that eventually gets integrated many months in advance. It's basically free R&D and proving out concepts for Apple.
I wonder sometimes if they actually know about other channels for jailbreaks, but don't close them all at once due to the value this provides. Of course, they could never admit to this / have a paper trail for it, software is hard / complex, and jailbreakers are amazingly talented, so maybe I'm crazy, but that's what I would do in their position.
Agreed. The iPhone was groundbreaking. The iPad somewhat. Since then they've done some great work on their laptop line, but that's about it. They were even late to the game with smartwatches.
Of course, the problem with complaining about things like this is that I have no idea what I actually want Apple to do, except surprise me.
They were late to the game with smartphones (Palm, BlackBerry), tablets (Gates was pushing them in the 1990s), and MP3 players ('No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.'), too. Seems to be their MO.
The iPhone was a triumph in proving that smartphone software can make a very real, very huge difference to a device, and that hardware does not rule all.
That's precisely my point, though. They came late to the game, but they did it right. Apple's rarely the first to market.
That's because almost no one is first to the market. There is only ever one first MP3 player, radio or TV.
iPod, iPhone, and iPad all followed the same basic template. Lots of companies built products in some product category (MP3 players, smartphones, tablets). The technology got to the point where they were decent, and people recognized them as something desirable albeit niche, but nothing really appealed to the masses. Then Apple took what was out there, refined the crap out of it with an eye to making it useful for regular people, and sold boatloads.
Smartwatches, in contrast, are still very much in the early days. Apple is the first big company to really push smartwatches. This is really unusual for them, and makes me wonder if they aren't seriously jumping the gun.
That's completely inaccurate.
Samsung has released tons of smartwatches, as has Sony, Acer, LG, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and Toshiba. All before the Apple Watch was even announced, so unless you expect us to believe that none of these are "big companies" your point is provably and factually wrong.
This is yet another example of "Apple invented it" from Apple fans well after the industry had been well established and Apple jumped in late (see e-payments for another great example).
I mean for crying out loud the Samsung Gear 2 and Moto 360 have been out almost a year ahead of Apple's watch and one has a camera and the other actually has the same physical dimensions and shape of a traditional mechanical watch. It is absurd to ignore how far this sector has come.
> Apple is the first big company to really push smartwatches.
You're trying to redirect discussion away from what they actually said (in so many words) to some other point that has nothing to do with anything (invent Vs reinvent).
Are you telling me that Apple Watch was Apple reinventing the smartwatch?
What Apple did truly do first in the space, however, is make a smartwatch that's as much a watch as it is a mobile device. The Gear does not compete in the watch space from a fashion perspective, whereas the Apple Watch clearly does.
Complaining that Apple doesn't invent things is a red herring. They didn't make the first MP3 player or digital music store, but for practical purposes they created the market for them, along with the market for per-track/album digital downloads. They didn't make the first smartphone, but nearly every smartphone that came after the iPhone looks way more like an iPhone than like anything else. They didn't make the first tablet computer but they made the first tablet computer that had mass-market success, and again, it's impossible to look at Android tablets and the Surface and deny the iPad influence. They've been doing this for going on three decades now -- as much as the Mac was a relative failure in pure commercial terms, it set a template for How User Interfaces Work that we're still largely following today.
Last but least: yes, the Moto 360 is circular. Yes, that makes it look more like a watch. We get it. :) But it's not a watch. It's a smartwatch. You know what kind of thing smartwatches have to display an awful lot? Lists. You know what kind of shape is better for displaying lists than a circle? A rectangle.
It's amusing to be called an "Apple fan" though.
Remember, Apple was incredibly late to market with the product that saved them from eventual bankruptcy: the iPod. There was no shortage of MP3 players when the iPod launched.
And there was Blackberry and Palm long before the iPhone.
So, yeah, Apple is early here even if a year late. And they're taking their smart watch more seriously than any of their competitors.
I saw almost nothing of smartwatches before Apple's. I think I saw one two or three times in the world, and always at technical conferences. MP3 players and tablets, while far from ubiquitous before Apple's entry, were things I saw at least semi-occasionally out in the world. Smartphones were relatively common, although of course nothing like how they ended up being after Apple came in.
So I don't think Apple needs another iPad/iPhone to be called innovative, it can be new software features, or little hardware features. I just genuinely cannot remember the last time I've legitimately been jealous of an Apple exclusive feature. Maybe Lightning's reversible-ness in 2012? What since then? That was three years ago.
Siri still doesn't seem to be able to do that much of note (though I haven't read through today's announcements) and a straw poll of my iPhone using friends suggests that none of them really use it anyway. I'm the same with the voice functionality on Android, though I do use the cards provided by Google Now a lot.
It was sort of gimmicky (as were a lot of the features of the Atrix) but it existed on Android first.
Of course it never worked once I switched to cyanogen mod and I never used it even when it did work.
It's non-obvious on Android/pre-Android because software developers won't care much about an API for a fraction of an OS's market. Which is why I'd venture to guess most Android apps still don't take advantage of fingerprint sensors.
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l...
I'm not super familiar with TouchID and its capabilities, but is this true? According to Wikipedia, Apple announced its fingerprint reader in late 2013, not 2012, and this feature was available on a high-end Android phone (I forget which) a couple years before that (2011 if I recall correctly). I understand that "having a touch button" isn't quite a binary feature, and TouchID could have some novel elements as a product, but as I said I'm not super-familiar with TouchID. Is there something in particular about TouchID that was innovative/bleeding-edge?
That being said: I didn't have the Atrix et al (my first fingerprint reader is on my S6, and Samsung didn't even pretend they weren't borrowing heavily from Apple with this phone's design), but from what I had read, it performed pretty consistently as well. Looking up a random review of its performance:
"The Atrix prompts you to set up the fingerprint reader by swiping your left and right index fingers over it, and also asks you to provide a back-up password in case you go into the witness-protection scheme and have your fingerprints erased. In our tests, the biometric sensor responded to a quick swipe from either finger, so we found it fun and convenient to use. It seemed secure enough too, denying access to all of the interlopers we roped into our tests."
For example the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 launched with splitscreen multi-tasking in October 2012. All of the Sammy stuff since then has had it.
Damn it, the phone was basically impossible to use outside of the Californian weather.
Apple has never led in terms of raw innovation, but what they do is take cool shit and make it work together really solidly.
Sure it does 10,000 things. But the image of the watch face, that ubiquitous emblem of trudging monotony, is what people see first and what gives them an impression of the device.
Instead of a new concept for navigating your day you've got $350 worth of pixels doing mostly the same thing as your $40 swatch. Apple had the perfect opportunity to reinvent timekeeping and they missed it. Luckily for them it's a software problem only - perhaps they'll figure it out.
And it's not marketed only with an analog face. For example, on my phone, the first image I get when I go to http://www.apple.com/watch/ uses the Solar face, which shows the position of the sun as a point on a graph along with a printed time. Personally, since I have depression with some link to whether the sun is out, I find that quite a useful way to think about time, although of course mine is a relatively uncommon scenario.
In general, Apple likes to sit back, wait for somebody else to innovate and open up various market opportunities, pick one and then execute the hell out of it and push the envelope where other companies have execution weaknesses (and exploit those weaknesses). This has a side effect of "settling" a diverse market around pretty much whatever Apple has chosen.
It's beautiful strategy for the most part and it's too easy to look at an Apple announcement and say "welcome to 2-5 years ago Apple, thanks for finally catching up" without thinking about the context of their actions.
Of course, having multiple apps open on the earlier iPads would have been quite challenging anyway, so this was either a happy coincidence or an excuse/interpretation made after the fact. But the idea was cool none the less. It made me think about how distracting and unfocused work on a normal desktop can feel like compared to an iPad. The downside, of course, is that while this inability to have multiple things open side-by-side is fine for casual usage and entertainment, it makes a lot of tasks related to creation and work quite difficult.
So it will be a relief to finally have this feature on iOS. It certainly was a pain point. But that concept of focusing on a single task without distractions is still something worth remembering.
I can't see how this app (and other layout managers) would help this workflow. I don't move or resize windows. They are all where I want them to be, albeit stacked on top of each other. You click (or keypress) to pick the window you want to use, then use it. No window movement necessary.
I can't function that way. I'm currently typing this on a 2560x1440 monitor, in a maximized Firefox window. Occasionally I put two windows half-maximized side by side, but only if I'm actively looking at both simultaneously (for instance, presentation slides and notes I'm taking, or a document in LaTeX and the rendered PDF). Otherwise, I maximize everything, even if it "wastes" space or makes the window wider than the "natural" size of the content, just to avoid distractions
It used to. Now it makes the window fullscreen and it infuriates me.
Some of us like fullscreen windows...
To be honest, the most annoying thing isn't that it goes fullscreen, it's the mind-bendingly slow animation that accompanies it. Just make the damn thing fullscreen instantly so that I can reverse it instantly, rather than waiting on a cutesy shrinking animation too.
(edit: IM clients, too. Forgot about those. But, still, everything other than IM clients and quick accessories, I run full-screen.)
Each folder would be given its own window, and it would recall its location on screen for future uses.
Thus you could build up a special memory of what is where.
It works for shallow storage structures like what the early Mac had, but these days it gets swamped.
Sounds like you'd get a lot of benefit out of a tiling window manager. I've been a full-time Xmonad user for 4 years now and I don't know how I'd ever go back to arbitrary-sized, overlapping window managers such as OS X's.
For my two use cases (maximized or left/right half-maximized), GNOME 3 works perfectly for me. I've tried tiling window managers, but I don't necessarily want something that minimal.
(OSX, 1920x1200 monitor, Safari taking up the full screen height but only about half the width. Just my desktop beneath though it's not uncommon for me to have a couple other finder or IM windows sticking around.)
I mean whatever works for you but I'd go crazy doing that, just as you'd hate trying to use things the way I do. People are different.
Sort of like hanging a few pictures up on your office walls so there's something pretty in there.
And I can maximize windows, but I almost never do it unless I'm working on a really big piece in Illustrator and need every square inch I can get.
Does that not make some websites more or less unreadable?
However, I like multiple monitors, and I think the reason is that monitors are large enough that the one I'm not looking at sits far enough out on my peripheral that I simply don't pay much attention to it.
Apple has a habit of pooh-poohing any idea that they don't currently support right up until the moment that they do support that idea.
Although not sure if Jobs changed his mind, or if this was a "post-Jobs" decision. Apple's product development timeline would make that seem unreasonable.
But my last point, which you're replying to, is that regardless of whether this was part of their reality distortion field or not, I still think the idea has value. After a long slog of work, I'll often fullscreen a video/movie to force myself to relax and focus. It's like going out and taking a walk. It forces you to stop juggling your clutter of thoughts and tasks, and just focus on the simplicity of a single effort (in this case, walking).
The issue with this philosophy is that the one thing you need to do might not exist as a monolithic application. This is where the unix philosophy shines: lots of small, simple tools interacting over streams of text.
* Split Screen is obviously for things like taking Notes from a page in Safari. One input app, one output app. No more switching. (Interestingly, together with its enhancements, this makes Notes.app a real competitor to Evernote.)
* Side Frame is obviously for "watching" one app for (slow, asynchronous) updates you care about, while doing your regular stuff in the main pane. Like keeping an eye on a Slack conversation that you're not actively a part of, while working. Side Pane could also be for building "accessory" apps that give you extra controls for another app. I could imagine running your Unity game in the main pane with a Unity editor/debugger/inspector in the side pane, for instance. Instead of every Unity game having to ship those controls in a hidden way, they just run a socket server that the other app attaches to.
* Picture in Picture is just a combination of the above, specifically for video content. Listening to a presentation while taking notes on it or doing other things, looking down at it whenever it seems something interesting happened in your peripheral vision. Would be great for iTunes U, where a lecture can be in PiP and the course's iBook can be in the main view.
I will note that Side Frame greatly resembles a similar Windows 8 feature, which didn't turn out well, though. If Apple wants their version to live up to their expectations, they'll perhaps have to limit apps from having Side Frame view-controllers unless it actually makes sense to be using that app as part of a workflow. Otherwise, we'll get the W8 "Email inbox in the Side Frame" design that is just constantly distracting people, instead of encouraging them to set up filters and proper notifications.
If you want to focus on a single task without distractions, don't open Multitask.
At the moment, I only use software that is in the debian repos. At least I understand the security model of debian to some degree. And it is open and verifiable to everybody.
I wonder why the Linux distros are so slow to adapt to tablets.
Tight hardware integration. Most tablets have locked-down bootloaders that make it difficult to replace the default OS.
You've also pretty much got to start over when it comes to drivers. Linux used to have terrible driver support back in the day -- I remember carefully choosing motherboards and laptops because I wanted a Linux-compatible chipset -- those days are over on the desktop (except for a few esoteric peripherals), but it's going to hit hard on mobile. Imagine booting your tablet onto Linux but not being able to use the GPS or some other piece of connectivity.
And then, you've got to take all your established GUI code and throw it in the trash and start over. Nothing from the desktop world is going to be usable in a touch environment. The big desktop environments all have heritage going back to the late '90s. You can still see some KDE 1 and GNOME 1 layouts used in their modern KDE Applications and GNOME 3 descendants, and the stuff that was replaced was replaced one app at a time. Throwing everything out and starting over is harder than it looks.
But, still, we've got some attempts at this. Look at Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish, and Plasma Active, for example. In the past, we had Maemo 5, which was amazing, and it was everything I wanted in a touch-based Linux distro, but the only company that had pockets deep enough to fund its development turned away from the platform, and the closest thing it has to a successor (Sailfish) has been a disappointment. Also, even that required the distro developer be an established hardware manufacturer: Maemo 5 couldn't have worked if it was just an OS that could only be installed on third-party devices.
To quote "Reflections on Trusting Trust",
The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...
You have to ask the maker to open source his app and you have to check whether he built app from the same sources (probably with some repeatable build scheme). It's not something I ever saw, so you'll have some things to research, but it's not something impossible.
> Does apple check that? Is the process how apple prevents this documented somewhere?
They probably do have some kind of firewall monitoring network requests of the app when they check it. But of course they don't read sources, they don't reverse-engineer the app. So their abilities are pretty limited. You shouldn't trust that any app from the AppStore is guaranteed not to be harmful.
iOS has a sandbox model which should limit app abilities to read data from other apps. But you shouldn't trust this sandbox model too. Every iOS version was jailbroken which means that crackers can find vulnerabilities to elevate privileges.
Overall AppStore is safer than more liberal proprietary app sources. You are not likely to catch some wide-targeted malware there. But it's not a panacea.
Think they'll bring in a "charms" thing for quick actions, maybe from the left side?
So in answer to your question: If you're in tablet mode then it will still offer that in Windows 10.
If you hit home on iOS the app you are currently using is expected to pack up and be ready to get evicted from RAM.
If you do the same on Android the app will stay in RAM until there is a capacity crunch. Then the GC will go round waking up the oldest processes and ask them to free up pages. And if that is still not enough, start shutting them down.
This sadly result in slowdowns as the GC churns.
Someone(s) out there likes blue light :) They should read http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/12/no-ipads-i...
"When subjects read on the iPad as compared to the paper books ... people reported feeling less sleepy at night and less alert the following morning ... empirically, they also took longer to fall asleep on the iPad nights and spent less time in the REM phase of sleep. And the blood tests showed that on average, the brain's melatonin secretion on those nights was delayed by an hour and a half."
iOS 8 with the launch of iPhone 6 Plus promised to allow developers to make their portrait mode apps also run in landscape mode on the larger device.
No developers actually made use of this feature, so it's pointless.
It's also funny to note how tiling is the future, given that it was already the past. Tiling was how some of the earliest GUIs were done because it's the simplest compared to stacking and particularly compositing. Windows 1.0 was tiling, IIRC.
This is not a true tiling WM but I've personally found their use a bit limited as there are times when it makes sense to have multiple windows overlapping, at least in my own work.
I recently bought a keyboard cover for my iPad, which I don't often use, but an iPad Air with a keyboard cover overlaps some laptop use cases, and the split screen might be useful.
The second assertion is the easiest to prove. Setup a Mac to drive a wall of six or nine HD or better 65 inch monitors and see how quicly you end up at the doctor with carpal tunnel and intense shoulder and arm pain. Not so with most Linux platforms, Windows and even going back to Irix and Solaris.
On he iOS front, well, it's mostly good for games, browsing and very simple tasks (like credit card scanners). Anything beyond that where there's far more user involvement the whole touch thing falls apart very quickly. Try entering a few thousand transactions into an accounting program, maintaining a large codebase or working with a non-trivial Excel file. It's a great "fun and games" interface, but that's about it.
Apple Watch. Dead as a doornail.
I am getting the feeling that Apple is noe entering into the downward slope that ultimately happens once all the smoke and bullshit clears out.
Context: We develop for all platforms and have been using Macs since the Original 9 inch CRT models.
Let's see how this Apple thing plays out over the next few years. I run into more and more people every day that are sick and tired of their i-device and I have yet to hear anyone at all say they have any interest whatsoever on the Apple watch.
So, down-vote or not, whether you agree with me or not is immaterial at this stage. The only thing that matters is whether or not my opinion today will hold true a few years from now. I think it will. And, of course, I could be wrong. That's the way it goes.
"I have yet to hear anyone at all say they have any interest whatsoever on the Apple watch"
A million pre-orders on day one would suggest you might not be representitive here.
The watch definitely interests me - smart notifications on the Garmin 920XT have convinced me of the utility.
Now when Apple squeezed multitasking into a regular one, I am not so sure whether to expect the iPad Pro. Maybe in autumn, with/instead of the supposed iPad update? I wouldn't rule out the secret homebrew CPU that could replace the x86 Core M.
But using the term "multitasking" to mean two applications on screen at the same time goes back to the Amiga days, maybe even earlier. I've just accepted it at this point.
Sure, Android M is likely to get multi-windows as well when they announce the final version (maybe), but we've still moved from Android getting some features two or three years before iOS, to Android and iOS launching very similar features about the same time.
This is a big problem for Google because Apple can release the new OS with the new features to 50% of its users within a week and to 85% of its users within a year. It takes a certain version of Android to do that at least 3 years.
If Google can't release its major Android features years before iOS anymore, then it needs to make upgrading Android devices by itself an even bigger priority, rather than leaving it to others.
Because Telcos and/or device manufacturers hold the keys to updates - and don't bother to release them.
With iOS, Apple releases an update, and then everyone with an iOS device made in the past N years (where N is 4 or so at the moment) can download it more or less immediately.
With Android, Google releases an update. Then the OEMs slowly start working on updates for their various devices. If they feel like it. Often they just don't bother. Then if you're lucky your OEM finally gets their job done and you can update. And by the time that happens, you're lucky if it's only one or two point releases behind what's now the latest.
My Android tablet still doesn't officially have anything beyond Android version 2.3 and I had to root/jailbreak and install Cyanogen to upgrade to the 4.X releases.
Google migrates this by almost forcing updates over the Google play store framework. And one can decide to buy the device from another Android device manufacturer, ones that are known to support the device for several years.
So either Google should support old Linux kernels with new OS releases or Linux should provide stable kernel API (which is considered nonsense in Linux world) or some kind of compatibility layer.
Because a lot of phones are locked down by carriers that are slow to issue over-the-air updates. Even non-cellular tablets need manufacturers to issue updates before most users will apply them.
Another big reason is that you don't need to be on the latest core Android version to get a lot of the newer functionality. To get the latest iOS Mail app, you need to update your whole iOS. To get the latest Android Mail app, anyone with a reasonably modern Android version can download the latest app.
I/O literally feels limited to underlying platform performance improvement announcements.
i remember people saying the same thing last year during the L preview.
See: http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/05/29/android-m-feature-sp...