s09e19: The Device Becomes The App?
0.0 Context setting
Friday April 23, 2021 and it’s 3:20pm in the afternoon. I started the morning by going along to the Near Future Laboratory’s office hours after having been away for what might have been a whole year now that I’m between projects and it was Very Brain Popping, but also slightly nerve-wracking in that I’m worried I might have derailed things. But also maybe not?
Only one thing today. I thought of doing more, but let’s just go with this one.
1.0 Some things that caught my attention
The Device Becomes The App?
I’ve written here before about doing more of my writing outside on the deck. It works like this: I grab my 2018 12.9in iPad Pro, magnetically stick it to the Magic Keyboard, make sure I leave the Pencil on my desk, and carry the whole thing outside, sit myself down and start writing.
In general, the whole thing works out well. The keyboard works — I used to use a Logitech Folio keyboard or whatever, but it’s heavier and doesn’t have this touchpad doodad. So new keyboard it is. Oh, and I didn’t bother buying one of these Magic Keyboards until they were on sale: they normally cost $350, which is EXPENSIVE, and suddenly they were available for $250, which is still EXPENSIVE but feels less EXTORTIONATE. (Also, haha, that kind of sale normally implies that a New Exciting And Somewhat Incompatible iPad Is Coming Soon and boy was that true).
Anyway. The setup works well. (I’m well aware it’s an Expensive Setup — one way it gets marginally cheaper is by selling my Even Older iPad Pro instead of trading it in, and also buying refurbished from Apple).
But it only works well, I realized, with some kinds of writing. Where it’s been working best is where I’m only writing in the app I’m using for writing, which at the moment is iA Writer. It doesn’t matter which app I’m using for writing, to be honest, just that it gets out of the way.
When I say “only writing in the app I’m using for writing”, what I actually mean is that I’m spending the majority of my time creating brand-new-text that doesn’t exist. Like, I’m not going back and forth and referring to sources or looking things up. The most recent example is something like the Snow Crashing recaps, where I have the Kindle app open in one side of the screen, and my writing app open on the other side. That works quite well. It works well if I’m working on the on-again-off-again novel, and am not looking anything up.
And then it all falls apart when I’m trying to do the other kind of writing.
The other kind of writing looks like this: it’s at least six browser windows all full of tabs (some of the windows even have the same document open in them in different tabs multiple times), and I’m looking from one thing to another to another.
I see — and Apple likes to show this — that the iPad Pro is good for Pro Apps and Pro Users and sometimes it can feel like: hang on, am I doing something wrong? I would like to use the iPad Pro, but there’s this perennial feeling of iPadOS just getting in the way and making things that would be easy on a Mac just hard on an iPad. The shorthand of this is to say that the iPad is Bad At Multitasking, but after thinking about this the other day, I had a realization that this isn’t strictly true, and the issue is perhaps more nuanced than that.
In other words, the examples that I see the iPad Pro And It’s Pro Because Pros Use It For Pro Things excel at are things like Artists Using Procreate or This Amazing Native iOS Video Editing App, or photographers using a new, non-Adobe native iOS photo editing app. \ And then it strikes me: those are singular, focussed tasks. I’d call them examples of The Device Becomes The App, the sort of argument Steve Jobs made when the iPhone was introduced and it was this slab of glass with no keyboard and it had this amazing multi-touch interface (of which more later), which meant that the device or the phone became the instrument. Fully configurable interface. Works great with fingers. Actually play drums on it, that kind of thing. I think there were probably some Garageband demos in there.
So, okay, this makes sense, right? It’s a good argument against the iPad being a content consumption device only, and one where there are clearer and clearer real-world examples of it being a content creation device, but only in certain classes of content. From what I can tell, it’s great as the This Is My Illustrating And Drawing Device when it takes on that app/task personality.
Because there’s a way to look at this and say hey, this whole deal with an iPad Pro that even has a keyboard and a touchpad now and it’s still incredibly frustrating to do what I want to do, why is that? Why is it hard to do that, but by all accounts it’s working pretty well in all those YouTube and TikTok videos of people doing amazing graphical work on an iPad?
And I think part of the reason is because of the kind of work. There’s this whole “knowledge worker” kind of work which I’d handwave as having lots of spreadsheets open, or having email open and a gazillion browser tabs open. You aren’t coding, you aren’t necessarily doing a workflow, but you are reading things, responding to things and, crucially, synthesizing things from multiple sources and (sigh, ok, depressingly sometimes) creating a Word Doc or a Google Doc or a PowerPoint or Keynote based on all of those things. The way I do this is by metaphorically spreading out and throwing a shit ton of stuff on my desk and move it around and then figure out what I want to keep and what I want to throw away and then whittling it down and down and down, the sort of idealized Design Is A Squiggly Messy Line That Actually Becomes A Line.
So I can see the iPad working when the squiggly mess happens inside one app. But the frustration I’ve been having is the kind where I need to quickly look at multiple things, because I’m not keeping them in my head. I need to copy and paste the text from this reference. I need to look up the name of whatever bill or rule or legislation. I want to find a quick stat of whatever industry group is saying about large software projects that fail. I need to get the direct quote instead of the vague gist that I remember so I can include it. I want to look at that diagram.
And yeah, fine, I get it, some of this is a bit ADHD and a bit messy, but hey, that’s how I work and I’m good at it and this is my process, plus I’m fast at it.
And man, does iPadOS get in the way of that. The closest it gets is by having a split screen plus slide-over effect, which is a grand total of three viewable windows of content, one of which is actually obscuring one of the others. So, you know, 2.5 out of 3 viewports are visible.
But I said above that this isn’t about multitasking, because I realize it’s not about multitasking. At least, not multitasking in the sense of “running multiple processes and doing multiple things” sense. I am not doing three things at once. I am writing a thing, or synthesizing a thing, for which I am going out and gathering some information and bringing it back. I am not even necessarily looking at all 3 things at once, but I do need to flip between them quickly. I don’t care about background processes.
So it’s actually about spatial information management and windowing. This is a little (ha) disappointing in that the original Mac kind of went all in on the spatial, windowed metaphor and that was good! And it only added pre-emptive multitasking later on, but before then, you could totally look at more than one thing at a time.
In other words, there’s no good affordance/metaphor on iPadOS for spreading your papers out and bouncing from one to the other.
An argument could be made that it’s gestures and they’re just not fast enough, and sure, I get that. The point of SlideOver is that it’s supposed to be fast, you just drag your finger in from the frame of the device on to the screen and bring the pane over and yeah, that works with your finger, but the model with the cursor/pointer interface in iPadOS understandably has to be different. What you need to do is throw your pointer to the edge, of the screen (Fitt’s law, yay!) and then stop and then throw it further past the edge of the screen, which means… it’s not a quick, seamless peeking-style gesture. It’s not, oh, this is under my papers, let me quickly move the thing on top to see the thing underneath and then put it back. It’s just slower.
Now, you might say something like “well, this is a screen resolution problem” to which my response is: aha, no! And I have evidence!
I just so happen to have a 1993-4 era Macintosh LC III here on my desk and its 14 inch monitor running System 7.5.5 and it’s displaying three Word documents at the same time! But for the fact that it’s running a 25 Motorola 68030 which means repainting the entire screen or windows is Very Very Slow. But I can see them!
So it’s not a screen size issue. These screens are practically the same size. My iPad’s screen is actually bigger, I think? And my iPad can totally drive a 2440x1440 pixel display that my 2016 MacBook Pro is plugged into.
This is what my iPad looks like if I try to do the same thing with three documents:
So what’s going on?
Now, this isn’t an entirely fair point. Those are static resources, and my example with “looking stuff up” involves things like cmd-tabbing over to Safari/Chrome, cmd-tabbing a new tab and then searching for whatever I’m searching for and then looking at that, then flipping back to the document. The LC III isn’t great at that, but my point remains, I think: the capacity to even see these things at the same time exists.
The comparison I made in the rough Twitter thread about this was “hey, the iPad seems to be pretty good for applications where there are dedicated keycaps”, for which: hey, what’s the application and dedicated keycaps for “doing something that requires lots of back-and-forth research”. There… isn’t?
One thought I had was, well, what does writing a novel look like? Because there’s a vision of the iPad where it replaces the typewriter you take to the hotel you’re caretaking during the winter season and sit down to write your novel and you just take your iPad and have your Moleskine or whatever notebook next to you. So, you know, a bit like Scrivener, the Thing For Writing Things. So what does an iPad become when it becomes the Scrivener Thing?
Well, for one, everything has to happen Inside Scrivener even more. I took Scrivener as an example because it’s got the whole “get all your notes together and see them on a corkboard” UI metaphor, and, well, it’s there on the iPad version but you can’t move anything around. But that’s not even the way Scrivener works on a computer, because Scrivener on a computer has other applications you can use to look up information. Sure, you put it in Scrivener afterwards, and then you organize it inside.
Part of this is funny to me because I’m thinking about visions of how this generative/research-type work might work and the one that comes up is the (sorry) Minority Report example, precisely because it’s something that I think iPadOS doesn’t do well, but that is most closely associated with iOS because of the whole multitouch thing. Minority Report gets the association because Law Enforcement Officer We’re Forced To Empathize With Tom Cruise uses more than one finger to manipulate the data he’s working with while listening to Schubert. But what he’s actually doing in that scene is referencing a whole bunch of data and looking at lots of different things. The other thing that’s going in that scene is the Giant Display With All The Video Thumbnails, he’s grabbing one thumbnail and then the other and switching between them quickly.
Look, I get that there’s a strong chance this might just be me, a 41 year old, doing the equivalent of “in my day, we all had to use the command line and I don’t get why people use mice”, so I’m genuinely interested to see the (sorry) Knowledge Worker equivalent of someone being a complete whiz with an iPad. Am I doing it wrong? Is it actually super fast to have three different apps or windows and continually look things up in Safari? Should I actually be working a different way and Focusing and doing Research In One Stage and collecting it in OneNote or Roam or whatever the kids are using these days and then taking all those references and putting them into the synthesized work? Is the way I’m working actually maladaptive? (It’s not? It works for me?)
I don’t think this is as simple as “let me run Mac Apps” on the new M1-powered iPad Pro. Because it feels like something like the whole metaphor is wrong. I mean, it’s not a reason, but, you know, it feels hard to copy text from one place to another in iPadOS and here’s me remembering that the damn thing didn’t even have a clipboard or copy/paste for however long when it launched and hey, we all were kind of okay about that because the rest of the magic iPhone was still pretty magic.
So in the other respect, I’m genuinely curious: is there supposed to be an App For Synthesis? An app that has, I don’t know, a text editor and supports you having a bunch of webviews inside that app as a container and only really works as a full-screen app?
But Dan, I hear you say, don’t iOS/iPadOS apps need to do the whole thing where they can be squished into different sizes but It’s Not Really Windowing Honest, It’s A Super Interesting Hack Around taking iOS-viewport style apps and having them work on iPads by using designs that are, I don’t know, more declarative and springy/flexible?
Well, I say, they don’t have to be! It’s totally okay to have a fullscreen single-task app like Garageband or Procreate, so I ask you again: Google Docs and Microsoft Word and iA Writer are writing apps that presuppose that the thing that you’re in them is writing which makes total sense but they still come from the paradigm of “you can have this writing app alongside some other things if you need them”. iPadOS is kinda terrible at that, and I say this fully expecting for like a 50% chance of being Sherlocked, but hey: a fullscreen app for “creating a thing but also having a bunch of little web browsers in them, or, god forbid, some sort of horrific skeuomorphic “desk” with the doc you’re writing and “the other things” arrayed around it”, I mean gosh, what a weird turnabout if that ever happened on an iOS-based device.
So, you know. Make that. I’ll pay money for it. Man, I’d probably even pay $100 for it. Maybe more? It’s kind of important to how I work.
OK, that’s it! About 30 minutes of writing, about 2,600 words and about the end of the week. I hope your weekend brings you ease, happiness and freedom from pain.
How are you?
Best,
Dan