“The iPad — and tablets in general — are usurping the Mac/PC space,” Jean-Louis Gassée writes for MondayNote. “In the media consumption domain, the war is all but won. But when we take a closer look at the iPad ‘Pro.’ we see that Apple’s tablet is far from realizing its ‘professional’ potential.”
“For example, can I compose this Monday Note on an iPad? Answering in the affirmative would be to commit the Third Lie of Computing: You Can Do It. (The first two are Of Course It’s Compatible and Chief, We’ll be in Golden Master by Monday),” Gassée writes. “I do research on the Web and accumulate documents… On a PC or Mac, saving a Web page to Evernote for future reference takes a right click (or a two finger tap). On an iPad, things get complicated. The Share button in Safari gives me two clumsy choices: I can mail the page to my Evernote account, or I can Copy the URL, launch Evernote, paste the URL, compose a title for the note I just created, and perhaps add a few tags.”
Gassée writes, “For starters — and to belabor the obvious — I can’t open multiple windows. iOS uses the ‘one thing at a time’ model. I can’t select/drag/drop, I have to switch from Pages to Evernote or Safari, select and copy a quote, and then switch back to the document and paste… Things get worse for graphics. On the iPad, I can’t take a partial screenshot. I can take a full screenshot by simultaneously pressing the Home and Sleep buttons, or I can tap on a picture in Safari and select Save. In both cases, the screenshot ends up in the Photos app where I can perform some amount of cropping and enhancing, followed by a Copy, then switch back to Pages and Paste into my opus.”
“The best news is that Apple has, finally, some competition when it comes to User Experience. For example, tablets that run Microsoft or Google software let users slide the current window to show portions of another one below, making it easier to select parts of a document and drop them into another. (Come to think of it, the sliding Notifications ‘drawer’ on the iPad and iPhone isn’t too far off),” Gassée writes. “This competition might spur Apple to move the already very successful iPad into authentically ‘Pro’ territory.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: The problem is iOS, not the iPad, insofar as its progress has been retarded by, we surmise, Scott Forstall’s little exercise in fiefdom building or maybe just complacency in the face of inept competition. If the former, that’s been dealt with; if the latter, that should have evaporated by now.
We sincerely hope to see iOS progress much faster going forward. Push the envelope, Apple! The leap from iOS 6 to iOS 7 should be closer to the leap from iPhone OS 1.0 to iOS 4 than it was from iOS 5 to iOS 6 or we will – as most competent iOS users should – be displeased.
If the OS can multitask (it can), how about letting us really multitask, Apple? Four-finger swiping between open apps is cute and all, but the fact that we still reflexively turn to our Macs just to do mundane things like compose blog posts that contain anything more than simple text with one or two hyperlinks is a neon sign that basic iOS functionality needs work. Yes, as Gassée says, You Can Do It, but until Apple makes us Want To Do It, iOS won’t have realized its full potential.
Currently, as Steve said they would be, iOS/iPad is the car and OS X/Mac is the truck. iOS/iPad needs to become more of an SUV, so that we don’t want to park it and jump in our trucks just to accomplish some rather simple work.
