It is nice to see Apple has finally started taking notice of the competition (larger phones, multi-tasking, alternative keyboards/swipe, etc). It seems like Apple stalled in terms of progression there for a few years, maybe after Jobs everyone was too scared to make any significant changes to the golden goose.
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.
I will say I haven't seen too much "innovation" from Apple in recent years. Progression, yes, but innovation no.
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.
I'd say that things like the integrated fingerprint reader (2012) on the home button was pretty innovative/bleeding edge. It was a bit of a gimmick, but ultimately they pushed the boundaries of what anyone else had done. Ditto with Siri (2011), while Windows Vista had basic speech recognition in 2006, Siri was able to merge the latest speech recognition with the user's data, to give the user compelling results.
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.
The Atrix had a fingerprint sensor, but it didn't really do anything other than unlock the phone. The sensor on iOS allowed for far deeper integration into the system. That was innovative.
It seems obvious to me. Perhaps it's hindsight, but Apple's full-stack control of hardware and software make it obvious.
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.
Siri was a big step forward when it was first released, but it has since been passed by both Google and Microsoft. It's not even close anymore. Like you said, it's been several years since I've been truly impressed with anything Apple has done. Maybe it's just unreasonable to expect that kind of thing so consistently.
I switched back to the iPhone for a bunch of reasons, but once I got used to TouchID, in hindsight, I would've switched just for that. Apple still seems to know how to add features that are surprisingly new and useful. I just wish they did more of that with their software too.
I sometimes feel Google really doesn't know how to market their stuff properly. I'd say their new Photos app is a computational wonder, but its jaw dropping features are not communicated well to common public.
Sure, but Apple has invented a way to drive theirs directly from a heavily modified Radeon GPU - for that Dell monitor you need to connect two DisplayPort cables at once to show 5K content. And like others have pointed out - that monitor costs as much as the 5K imac.
Actually I agree that the fingerprint sensor was innovative. I wish my Android phone had one. Siri, on the other hand... eh.
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.
On the other hand, Google Now on Android (voice commands/voice search) is extremely handy and useful for me and many of my friends here. They seem to do it all the time.
> I'd say that things like the integrated fingerprint reader (2012) on the home button was pretty innovative/bleeding edge. It was a bit of a gimmick, but ultimately they pushed the boundaries of what anyone else had done.
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?
TouchID is reliable in a way that previous fingerprint readers were not. I use it to unlock my phone and it just works. Every. Single. Time. Well, more like 95% of the time, but it is good enough. I used to not lock my phone because it was too annoying to unlock, so for me this relatively small improvement means that an important feature that wasn't available to me before suddenly is.
Ah, if the reader is truly better quality than earlier ones, then of course "first fingerprint reader that consistently works" would be a definite step forward.
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."
The fingerprint reader is something that's been in every ThinkPad laptop since time immemorial. Apple just wants you to think they invented it because they were the first to put it on a phone.
Fingerprint readers on laptops of old were the swipe type. These existed on smartphones before Apple added it to the iPhone. The trick of it was that the iPhone uses a touch sensor instead of a swipe, which works better. Of course, Apple didn't invent it. Another company did. Apple bought that company in an anticompetitive move so that no one else could use the tech. Interestingly enough, that's why the sensor didn't make it into the Nexus 6.
> 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.
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.
I'd disagree. I had a smartphone before I got an iPhone and the difference was astounding. Every phone I had before had a wealth of options (a SNES emulator was my favourite) but was an utter mess. I could never have given one to my parents to use.
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.
Because it was a featurephone with a fancy interface, not a smartphone. But media tried to claim that because you touched the screen to do stuff, it was a smartphone...
They're never the first but they've always been take huge leaps forward with their products. The iPod and iPhone were light-years ahead of the competition at release. The iPad was as well though to a lesser extent. The Apple Watch is the first big product they've announced that wasn't clearly better than the competition.
The weird thing with the Apple Watch is that they're pretty early to the game.
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.
> Apple is the first big company to really push smartwatches.
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.
I'll admit that this is vague, but I don't see those companies "pushing" smartwatches. They're making them, sure, but they're niche products out of the gate. None of them are trying to reach the masses the way Microsoft was trying to popularize tablets, Nokia was trying to popularize smartphones, or a number of companies were trying to popularize MP3 players.
Not really sure what you're looking for when it comes to "pushing", then. Beware the echochamber, maybe. All the android watches have been pushing out quite a few versions, ads on tv, I've even had one of the people at an AT&T store try to sell me on the samsung watch he happened to be wearing at the time and they conveniently had on sale.
I don't really know what I'm looking for either, I just know that these product categories looked like they had lots of companies that tried to make it big and failed (or somewhat succeeded in the case of companies like Blackberry, but not on an Apple scale), while watches look like they haven't really tried.
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.
Neither have I, but I haven't seen a single Apple watch commercial either. It is the media frenzy about anything Apple. Other OEMs cant compete with that even by making superior products. I guess this more than anything completely puts me off anything Apple.
I don't watch TV so I can't judge commercials, but I've seen friends I'd never peg as being Apple followers or hardcore techies ordering and wearing them.
I agree here. Apple is indeed early to the game with the Apple Watch, and they're putting more clout behind it than other OEMs.
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.
Samsung's watches reminded me of Steve Ballamer's conspicuous announcement of a Windows 7 HP tablet the week before the first iPad announcement: little more than a sad, technologically and culturally inept attempt to buy relevance. Sure, there was a ridiculously outsized ad campaign to tout their innovation, but everyone knew that the OS it ran (Tizen) was dead in the water. Did anyone really believe that Samsung was building a wearables platform that wouldn't be quickly usurped by Google and Apple?
Samsung was the only company that really made an attempt to push a smart watch -- i.e., they paid for a big ad campaign. The others are just also-ran nerd gear.
Huh? Sony back when it was still called SonyEricsson pushed at least two models of watches that look surprisingly similar to Android Watch in operation. Never mind that they also produced a number of analog watches with notification strips (the watch part ran on a separate battery).
You're setting up a straw man. Nobody is saying Apple invents these devices — instead, Apple typically reinvents them in ways that make them both more useful and more appealing to consumers.
I responded to a point they made verbatim. I even quoted that point from within their post. How is that "setting up a straw man?"
> 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).
I would argue Samsung copied the Apple Watch before it even existed, considering the Apple Watch is a tiny iPhone and Android is just an iPhone rip-off. So Samsung made an inelegant copy of a yet to exist Apple product that everyone knew was coming already.
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.
You're right, but you may also be missing the OP's point. Nearly all the reviews of the Apple Watch -- even the ones that are rather conflicted (which is also nearly all of them) -- suggest that it's the best smartwatch on the market, and I suspect watchOS 2.0 is going to increase that lead. I suspect there's a very good chance that by the end of 2015, more Apple Watches will have been sold than all other smartwatches put together.
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.
You can extend that template ("... and make it not suck") back to the original Macintosh, arguably even to the Apple I/II. In the case of the Watch they do seem to be pushing the pace, jumping in before the hardware allows them to combine obvious usefulness and that perception of a no-compromises experience. (To an extent that happened with the Macintosh, and they paid the price for it.) Part of the issue for Apple is that they're running out of gadgets to apply the template to: it seems the only things left are TV and radio, VR/AR and maybe one or two other non-watch wearable devices. Then all that's left are things like DSLR cameras or automobiles: things that tend to have nasty UIs but haven't reached the point where hardware specs are largely secondary to UI.
they were the first to capitalize on the pretentious side of smart watches. the other manufacturers were trying to sell function in the form where as Apple put the function well behind the form. I figure once they did the gold iPhone all bets were off on how far they would exploit this audience
The iPhone was not much of a smartphone at launch. Only with jailbreaking did we get the whole app thing going. At launch Jobs was all hot and bothered about "web apps" that was nothing more than fancy bookmarks.
Damn it, the phone was basically impossible to use outside of the Californian weather.
It really feels like, with both iOS 8 and iOS 9, that Apple is scrambling to play catch-up and focusing more on copying Android's killer features than on differentiating themselves.
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.
> It really feels like, with both iOS 8 and iOS 9, that Apple is scrambling to play catch-up and focusing more on copying Android's killer features than on differentiating themselves.
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.
Scrambling? I thought they were taking their sweet old time.
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.
IMO they've been doing this since the iPhone launched; their MO seems to be ~take what people hack into the software through Jailbreaks + what the competition is doing + apps we like, refine / distill that, and make it part of iOS.
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.
This comment gets made every new release and is just as false as ever.
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.
This topic came up today at my workplace while we were discussing WWDC. If you really look back at Apple's products, they really tend to be "fast followers".
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.
Seriously? Tell me any given example of an Apple product and I will show you something that came before it that had the same set of functional capabilities.
Apple has never led in terms of raw innovation, but what they do is take cool shit and make it work together really solidly.
The biggest innovation miss Apple's had recently (and it's pretty enormous) is the fact that the watch is marketed with an analog face.
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.
First of all, a lot of people really love the image of an analog watch - some of them pay a hell of a lot more than $40 to get mechanical watches that work worse than the $40 swatch. Nothing wrong with Apple embracing that aesthetic.
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.
It stalled because until recently Apple was making products for one guy, Jobs himself. The default iPod equalizer was supposedly set to the idiosyncrasies of Jobs ears.
I remember watching a video awhile back that noted how Steve Jobs, being keen on eastern religions, brought Zen principals into his surrounding environment. In that particular case, they showed how his home was very spartan, eliciting an expression of focus and elimination of distractions from the task at hand. The point they were making was that this showed through his products. On the iPad, you can only do one thing at a time. You have to focus on that one thing, and are not able to be bothered by distractions such as other windows/programs.
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.
Gonna have to side with this. The parent poster is effectively trying to rationalize what is a technical regression by most interpretations under a veil of woo and mysticism.
I'm not sure about this specific scenario (seems to me you're right, it's technical), but this principle has been actually used before and abandoned recently. The size of the iPhone 6 is a great example of something Jobs dismissed under usability notions, despite them certainly having the technical ability to do it. Now it's done.
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.
Apple Watch offers a new screen to work with. Single-hand operation is still possible. It does not match the experience before for the moment, but it will get better. Viewing it as user surrounded by devices, it will offer a clearer picture.
I think voice control (Siri here) will reduce the need for another hand to get involved in operation. Actually, we could categorize all the operations. I guess for most of those high frequency operations, voice control + wrist triggered display + customized settings would be fine for many users, if they are working well. I believe Apple has fact-based analysis on this and made their choice. How that would deliver is another story.
Certainly, and I tend to agree with your point. Which is why I said "so this was either a happy coincidence or an excuse/interpretation made after the fact". Apple is good at their marketing; pooh-poohing ideas they don't currently support is part of their reality distortion field.
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).
They also don't like putting resources towards a feature unless they feel they're able to implement it in the best way possible. They're not interested in throwing features in just to say they have them.
Indeed. It seems like the new features are all about focusing on single workflows that involve multiple apps, rather than being anything about "multi-tasking" (trying to get multiple orthogonal things done concurrently.)
* 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.
It's an interesting contrast to OSX, which most people I know use by keeping a stack of odd-sized windows on screen such that at least a bit of each is always visible.
That concept seems ingrained in OSX application window management as well. For instance, OSX's equivalent of "maximize" works more like "size window to content", and as a result I see many people on OS X with an active window they're paying attention to that takes up only half the width of the screen, with other windows or the desktop showing through on the sides.
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
God you must have so much blinding white space. And so many websites that give you long lines of text stretching all the way across to lose your place in the middle of.
(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.
I just wish they provided an option - it's not like the previous setup was broken.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
FWIW, I think it's a lot easier to work in non-maximized windows on OS X than Windows just because of the navigation. Windows are somewhat thrown around, but it feels very comfortable to bounce through them with cmd-tab and cmd-`. It feels much more natural than full-screen applications. But whenever I'm on Windows, everything's full-screened or, at the least, snapped. The only maximized window on my machine right now (2x27" 2560x1440 plus the rMBP panel) is Parallels, with a maximized Visual Studio inside of it.
GNOME 3 has the same application-switching/window-switching distinction, which I immediately disabled in favor of alt-tab doing window-switching. I rarely have more than one window open per application; the only common exception is Pidgin and its chat window, and I'd prefer if those two windows were docked together.
I can, but it doesn't feel as natural to use smaller windows there. For a very long time, OS X had no real concept of "fullscreen", and I think the predominant culture around application design still sticks by that. I've never willingly used a full-screen app on OS X for anything other than video or Parallels Desktop.
I started using Moom for this reason (there may be other similar utilities). It's still crazy to me that such simple window management is not present in the OS by default.
I can't do it either, the visual cacophony is too much. I just install better touch tool and bind some keys to properly maximize an app and barely mess with the broken window controls in OS X.
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.
I, too, prefer operating everything full-screen. The only time I'll run a window non-maximized is if I'm quickly throwing some accessory open that I'll use for less than a minute before I close it.
(edit: IM clients, too. Forgot about those. But, still, everything other than IM clients and quick accessories, I run full-screen.)
Yep. Notepads and calculators are what i most often run as floating windows. Mostly because i am referencing some other window for whatever i am working on.
That's my way too. A single click is always simpler than navigating a task switching interface, so I just have "big window" on left, "mid size window" peeking out at its right edge, and then "little window" - usually textedit - poking through in back. It's like a little sideways pyramid. I can also alt-tab through them super easy. Never found much use for Expose or Mission Control, i consider having to use them an organizational fail state for my process.
Do yourself a huge favor and check out SpectacleApp. It's Windows image resizing brought to Mac OSX and it's really neat. 100% free and open source too with sensible defaults unlikes it's competitors.
(I have the same 'windows everywhere, all just partially visible' approach that the parent commenters have).
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.
You have to focus on that one thing, and are not able to be bothered by distractions such as other windows/programs.
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.
But isn't it still about doing one task but using multiple apps? I guess there will always be people who, when given a gun(or any powerful tool), will always shoot themselves in the foot.
And that's why they added fullscreen mode to OS X. Both ways of working excel for different situations. It's great that they are now making the enhancements in sync on OS X and iOS.
One reason that I do not use my iPad as a productivity device is that I do not understand the security model. I would need a terminal app with ssh capabilies. But how do I know if the maker of the app is sending my SSH credentials to his server or something? Does apple check that? Is the process how apple prevents this documented somewhere?
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.
> 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.
I'm running Ubuntu on my Windows tablet (Acer Iconia W700) now, typing from it in fact. Interestingly enough, I had no driver issues (everything as far as I can tell worked perfectly with a fresh Ubuntu install), but I've had more software issues with touch support. I thought Ubuntu was supposed to be better with that, and while multitouch gestures seem to work with Unity, there are very few places where they are implemented.
> But how do I know if the maker of the app is sending my SSH credentials to his server or something?
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.
You'd have to read the entire stack down through the compiler, the libraries, the kernel, and eventually the (whatever is the equivalent of the BIOS these days).
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.
I use the Prompt app that provides a SSH enabled terminal. I don't lose any sleep worrying that the app might not be secure, but maybe it should. I also like Juice on my Android. Being able to SSH from my mobile devices is a useful feature.
There are open source ssh clients (I wrote one called hterm a while back). So you could compile it yourself. I agree that being able to check signatures would be nice though.
One of the few features from Windows 8 I was hoping Apple and others would adopt. 8 really did have some interesting innovations in the 'productive tablet' world, it was just... well, we all know what it was.
Think they'll bring in a "charms" thing for quick actions, maybe from the left side?
I've loved the snapping apps to sides of a screen on my Surface for the past few years, however does anyone know whether the full-screen snapping is still around in Windows 10? It seems like Microsoft may have removed it in favor of a simply snapping apps within the desktop.
Windows 10 has two "modes." Tablet mode, which is very similar to 8.1, and desktop mode which is a mash up between 8.1 bits and Windows 7 bits (e.g. apps in windows, no full screen Start Screen, etc).
So in answer to your question: If you're in tablet mode then it will still offer that in Windows 10.
I've been considering replacing my three year old iPad with a Surface 3. I like the idea of a tablet that can run Foobar2000, Mame, and Putty, and Vim. (The only thing I am concerned with is the tablet's ability to run Mame with that Atom processor.)
Only the iPad Air 2 has 2GB of RAM. Every other iOS device only has 1GB, which is a severe restriction to true multi-tasking. iPhones only have 1GB of RAM as well, so they couldn't do it even if they wanted to. It's a bit surprising as it limits future functionality. Comparably priced Android phones have 2GB to 4GB of RAM currently and comparably priced Android tablets have had 2GB of RAM for a couple years. Granted, Android OS seems a bit more hungry for tasty RAMs than iOS does.
Android is more ram hungry because it has a different policy on process lifecycle management.
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.
Afaik, all iOS devices except the Air2 have 1GB RAM (or less - e.g. iPad2 and iPadMini1 have 512MB). So only Air2 can run two full apps side by side, makes sense.
This seems like a bold claim to throw out without substantiation. It is undeniable that older devices are more resource-limited, and do run the latest OS faster. Sure, Apple probably is trying to push sales of new devices (which is their right—they have no obligation to retrofit the latest-and-greatest features to old devices); but to say that's the only reason seems rather strong.
If Apple introduces a larger iPad Pro with multitasking, this will shine more (blue) light on human eyes and create a need for platform-wide color temperature adjustment in iOS. At present, this is only available in a few apps. On desktops, it is available via fl.ux.
"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."
Why is this comment downvoted? Flux is the thing that I misses the most on my iPad. Moving from my Mac to my iPad at night is a painful experience due to the sudden influx of blue lights.
Anyone who uses iPad at night would benefit from blue light control in iOS. This is a larger group of people than those who are willing and able to jailbreak their iPad.
It seems developers still have to implement a specific controller/something for that. I thought you mean something different where it would all be somewhat automatic.
That's exactly my point. When it was announced it wasn't obvious that this didn't come for "free" and I am saying the new dual pane feature is likely to need the same such implementation which won't attract developers.
I've always thought tiling window managers were the future (as they're just flat out superior to windowing systems for many, many workflows). I just didn't know it would be Apple that would make it popular. But, maybe tiling will become the de facto UI for everything in the next few years. I'd like that.
A vague tiling like functionality has been available in Windows since 7. In 10 it looks they're finally expanding this to have more options then just halves, something I've been doing with a third party program for awhile now (it has halves, thirds, and quarters).
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.
A tiling WM still likely uses a "windowing system" (a display server like Quartz in this case, I think?) underneath, though some like rio do overlap.
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.
It is funny then that the original Xerox GUI would default to tiling, but allow the user to move the windows around as floating ones afterwards. Even Windows 1.0 was tiling. Floating only came with 2.0.
It makes sense especially in light of widescreen displays. We have much more horizontal space today than we did when modern windowing systems were innovated.
I will wait until this ships, but I don't think that I will like it more than quickly switching apps with a sideways swipe. For example: I write a lot on my iPad, keeping a text editor open to a markdown file and a PDF open in an adjacent app. I sometimes quickly swipe back and forth when making edits.
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.
Not going to make any difference. The plain fact is that iOS sucks for any real work and the OSX UI is a disaster that came out of not wanted to let go of an idea that worked OK on a little 9 inch Mac screen.
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.
The thing about down-votes is that they don't change reality one bit. They might provide the voter immediate satisfaction but the truth of the matter isn't modified in any way.
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.
Many years ago - 2010 to be precise - I installed Desktop for iPad by Aqua Eagle. I don't think it ever got updated. It is still installed, still works on iOS 7.1.2, but is no longer in the store nor, interestingly, does it show up in my list of installed Apps. It implements split screen multitasking, albeit with their own versions of each App. I never use it.
I was expecting an OS X-toting, keyboard-wielding Surface 3-like iPad Pro instead.
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.
All the features they announced (including force touch trackpad) seemed to indicate "iPad pro is coming". At this point, I'd say better-than-even money that they will announce it to coincide with the actual release of the OS.
I really hope not. I have a Thinkpad Tablet 2 with a wide screen and it's nice to watching movies or having apps running side by side but it's awful to try to hold one-handed. It's far too long.
BSD 4.4 was released 1994 it has multitasking which the Darwin kernel in OS X and also ios are based upon. Talking about 1994, NT also has had preemptive multi tasking since 1993. Multics the father of UNIX had multi tasking in 1965.
I know the headline is talking about something different, but I always think something along the same lines when someone talks about iOS multitasking. Does the kernel have a Process Control Block? Is there interrupt-driven preemption? Well, then it's a multitasking OS in the technical sense.
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.
Google's, but especially Sundar Pichai's, stubborness to make Android more PC-like to the detriment of Chrome OS meant that Apple gets to do multi-windows natively before Android - which should've had it at least two or three years ago.
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.
Most of Google's stuff seems to come across the year, not waiting for I/O with updates to core apps like Maps, Mail happening almost every Wed. For example apps like Keep, Spotlight Stories, Inbox, etc. A lot of the APIs come packaged as Play Service updates.
I/O literally feels limited to underlying platform performance improvement announcements.
Why do Android users update slowly? I have a few Android devices and I think they pop up with a message from time to time "new os version ready to install". But I am not sure. That shows how much I care :-) But I guess it is that way and then why would anybody not update?
Android users update slowly because Android updates depend on the OEMs, and the OEMs update slowly or not at all.
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.
And for phones distributed through carriers, once the OEM provides an update, it then (probably) gets tested by the carrier, and only then (eventually) pushed out. Sometimes the carriers don't even distribute updates the OEMs provide.
Most Android users can't update. Their device gets updates for maybe 12-18 months, then nothing. They have to replace the device to update it after that.
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.
Device manufacturer like Samsung release dozens of smartphones per year. The reality is beside their flagship devices the support is sub par, after a single digit months you won't receive any updates. If you use a leased smartphone from TelCos, you will have to wait for OTA updates which can take additional time.
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.
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.
I stopped updating my Xoom because I started to notice performance hits from updates. Hardware only lasts so long against modern software that is only or mostly tested on new hardware.
Because Google decided that the Android version must be coupled with the Linux version. And Linux is not able to run old drivers, so vendors must update drivers for old devices to new Linux version.
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.
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.