Building iPad Pro features in Swift
swiftbysundell.com
swiftbysundell.com
Until Apple puts its own pro applications (like final cut) on the iPad, it’s not a real pro machine in my view. If it’s so “pro” then make your own apps work on it!
You quickly realize just how crucial a mouse and it’s modifier keys are for efficient design work. It’s great for early stage thumbnailing. I’ve actually never been able to thumbnail as effectively as I can with the pro and it’s solely for the fact that I can use it as a sketchbook with integrated google images. Once a project gets rolling it’s mostly used so I can shuffle over to my comfy chair and do some detail work with the pencil.
That said, I wouldnt put it past a young person who hasn’t been molded by a desktop to blow me away with it. It’s not like my desktop workflows don’t have hacky and annoying steps along the way to a final.
I also don’t really use iCloud Drive, maybe that would make things easier as one of the biggest problems is simply getting the things you want on the iPad ON the iPad. Importing photos for example, you have to import into photos and then double import to Lightroom.
>the biggest change of all is a total rethinking of the classic .psd file for the cloud, which will turn using Photoshop into something much more like Google Docs.
“The beauty of it with Creative Cloud and the Cloud PSD and the innovations there is that you can just pick up where you left off, and you can be somewhat agnostic,” Belsky says. “You can always go back in history. You can share it and have other people be able to go back and undo things you did.”
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17969754/adobe-photoshop...
You haven’t touched a modern iPad, have you? Not only do they not ‘struggle’ to do one of those at a time, they’re butter smooth at it. The workflow/task juggling aspect is definitely an issue, but there is nothing preventing an A10x or A12x iPad from doing any of those things with all the performance you’d expect from a $3k+ MacBook Pro.
For example I could be editing a movie and waiting for it to export. Then I switch to a different app and start editing my photos. There is a Task Completion background API to allow the former to continue to run, but there is no guarantee nor any notification when iOS decides my new photo editing app is consuming too much resources and jettison or kill the movie app. It contributes to this nagging feeling of needing to switch back to the background app so that iOS would keep it alive.
It's just an app management model ill suited to professional work.
I also draw and edit photos on my laptop. The iPad handles that fine. I have a Cintiq Pro 13" and it's a piece of garbage that made me hate drawing. I am glad it's gone from my life. The Apple Pencil is way better. (I hate Lightroom/Photoshop on the desktop, so I am trying to deal with Affinity. We'll see how that goes after I go on a trip where I take some photos.)
All in all, there are many tasks that can't be done on any laptop. That is why you can buy desktops. If the primary goal for your mobile computer is to not have to spend 40 minutes disabling Cortana, the iPad is perfect, which is why I bought one.
My only complaint is that Safari requests mobile sites instead of desktop sites. That is super annoying. I have a desktop-sized screen and a keyboard. Give me the desktop version.
Hold the refresh button you can reload the page as the desktop version
The software industry is so crippled by finance thinking right now anyway, everything research-y moves extra slow anyway. We're in the second dark age of UI.
People are doing weird pointless stuff in VR UI right now, so I think that might be where the ideas get worked out. That's how it worked before, we got out of the WIMP stagnation because a whole new paradigm (hypertext) emerged.
Have you interacted with many professional UI designers? They almost universally have no time, they are forced to rush out mediocre work on a strict timetable.
That's not to say there aren't good undiscovered idioms for 2D UIs, but there's no shortage of designers trying to find them, especially outside of their dayjob. Designers love trying to invent new and novel ways to interact.
It is, however, actually an advantage for touch UIs that they aren't radically different from WIMP, because users don't have to learn a completely different UI, at least in terms of visual organization/affordance.
You can also bet the Apple designers/engineers who were prototyping iOS UI idioms before the iPhone was released explored a range of different idioms, and they continue to do so.
The solution is to use a UILongPressGestureRecognizer with minimumPressDuration set to 0. With this configuration, it will begin recognizing immediately on touch down, allowing you to take action even before the user has moved their finger (or pencil).
I don't have any linkable examples offhand, but at a previous company one of our standard interview questions was to implement custom drag & drop of a view using a gesture recognizer, and our reference app used UILongPressGestureRecognizer because it let us do such nice things as visually "lift up" the view (scale it up slightly and add a drop shadow) the moment your finger touched it.
What's more important is that it's fairly basic usage of UIGestureRecognizer (which is a common thing to need, at least if you're doing any kind of UI development) as well as some basic management of state involving 2 views (the view being dragged, and the destination view it's dropped into).
Interesting though, how do you transition from the instant LongPress into the "Pan" gesture? Or does the LongPress by itself also get the 'moved' events?
It’s just such a shame iOS isn’t quite ready yet to provide the kind of computing experience the hardware is clearly capable enough to deliver. If this is going to be priced like a macOS machine, it needs to offer a reasonable set of Mac style functionality - for me this means proper multi-user support so my family can all use the device with their own accounts and services and ideally some kind of windowing model for the OS to better handle multi-tasking.
iOS will need to answer a lot of questions in the next few years that it has so far steadfastly avoided. Apple bragged how these iPads can drive 5k monitors via an Xbox one S performance class GPU, but without indirect input methods (e.g. a mouse) this feature is really not much use for anything other than display mirroring. Today I only ever use video out on iOS devices for occasional video playback on TVs, I suspect I’m not alone in this.
iOS will likely either need to support a mouse or Apple will have to create some kind of standard for multi-touch external monitors that can allow iOS application input via touch on the external display if professional class workflows using multiple monitors on iOS is ever going to be a mainstream thing the way it is on the Mac.
I think iOS is mostly fine. I don't think it's supposed to be a macOS replacement. There are some things a Mac is better for and other things an iPad is better for. Apple wants you to have both.
Totally agree, and if they had XCode or a decent native C# IDE on there I'd be at an Apple store right now forking over fist fulls of cash.
What will these future processors do that's so earth-shattering that it can't be supported on today's iPad Pros, which will run new versions of iOS for many years?
Apple shipped a laptop with only 1 USB port. I'm not holding my breath.
I used to love Apple, I really did.
- Lack of mass storage support through USB-C and the Files app (this seems like a comically boneheaded omission that Apple is going to dig their heels in until iOS 13 a year from now).
- No XCode
- No Final Cut Pro
- No Logic Pro
- No pointing device especially when used with an external monitor (I don't think anyone should their breath on this one though).
Granted, the audience for XCode is small, the audience for Logic Pro is small, people wanting a pointing device is small, etc... but taken in aggregate you end up with a large group that still can't call this iPad a "computer" the same way they can their laptop/desktop.
Maybe one day the iPad Pro + stylus will do wonders for visual programming languages like VVVV (can't think of any others).
iPad Pro has a 13 inch screen; that’s the same size as my MacBook Pro’s display. With a good keyboard, such as the one Apple sells, I don’t see why it should be difficult to write code in an iPad.
13" is barely bigger than the 12" display on my Apple IIgs (late 1980's), or my first laptop (mid-1990's). That was a perfect size for a VT100 emulator (it's the same size as the original 1978 VT100!), but that's not how I write software any more.
The same size screen is actually relatively worse than 20 years ago, because these days all documentation is online, so it has to share my screen.
Honestly, I think this is a premature optimization. I don’t think it’s worth trying to prevent the allocation of a four element constant dictionary, especially one which requires awkward syntax (indirection through a computed value) to work because it must fulfill a protocol requirement.
MS Surface sales last quarter: 602,000. iPad sales last quarter: 9.6 million. Even the Mac shifted over 5 million machines, all the more impressive when one considers that for much of that quarter staple models such as the Air were long, long overdue a refresh. The Surface sales figure presumably includes models that aren’t even tablets - the “Surface Laptop” is likely one of their best sellers I’d assume, given the attractive combination of price, design, specs and generally positive reviews.
While I too would love to see the features you suggest in iOS, Apple’s success in the tablet space is largely unprecedented for a computer manufacturer.