Secret iPad

https://thinkfractional.blog/secret-ipad/

by fraXis • 6 years ago

537 82 6 years ago

dhosek• 6 years ago

I love these behind the scenes accounts of stuff.

li4ick• 6 years ago

If you like this kind of behind the scenes, i highly recommend Ken Kocienda's book "Creative Selection" about the development of some parts of the first iPhone.

lathiat• 6 years ago

It was a great read!

i_am_ralpht• 6 years ago

Totally agree; it's really fun to hear how things like autocorrect evolved over the development of the iPhone, and really how the designers and engineers thought about their work at the time. It's also nuts to think that so much of the iPhone software and experience was done inside of 18 months.

NietTim• 6 years ago

Thanks for reminding me, this is the perfect time to finally read that book.

snazz• 6 years ago

I’m surprised they weren’t told about it at all in advance. Is that standard for Apple nowadays?

_bxg12• 6 years ago

Even now, hearing about this app I think "Wow! That's so novel and cool! (magical, even)". I've said it before, but I dearly miss the creativity people had in the first few years of iOS. We have much better devices now; we should have better apps! I should be so desensitized by how interesting the new apps are that a skeuomorphic guitar tuner sounds banal and obvious! Instead today's apps are boring. They've been reduced to nothing but feeds to scroll through, clients for online services, and crappy games.

What in the world happened?

Edit: Some people are mentioning the quality productivity apps available, particularly on the iPad Pro. I didn't mean to suggest there aren't quality apps, I meant to suggest there aren't interesting apps that turn these devices into wondrous multi-tools. Apps that use the sensors in novel ways to interface with the real world; that make your phone or tablet more of a device and less of a screen.

I also want to say I didn't mean to imply that there are no quality games on mobile; it's just hard for them to survive (Apple Arcade is an interesting workaround for this), and also games in general just usually don't have the kind of novelty I'm talking about here.

xxpor2• 6 years ago

There's no money to be made in the app store, for the most part. OTOH, there's plenty to be made in monthly service revenue (and 30% of it isn't taken by apple in most cases).

alasdair_2• 6 years ago

The money thing is more a power law thing. There is DEFINITELY money to be made in the app store (I worked on an app that made a billion in revenue in seven months from a product with only twelve engineers directly working on it) but it’s almost all going to the winners in a specific category.

sneak• 6 years ago

It turns out you can make more money repeatedly selling $0.99 token packs for simple dot puzzle game powerups than one-time $1.99 or even $2.99 whole-app purchases. There are also more people who play silly puzzle games in waiting rooms around the world than people who play guitar.

There is still tons of innovation in the App Store. It’s just on Skinner Box mechanics now.

_bxg12• 6 years ago

Yes, I think you've hit on the crux of it. Content streams, accessory apps to larger services, and games with micro-transactions all have one thing in common: they make way more money than you can typically hope to make off of a standalone, novel app that costs $1-$3.

astronautjones• 6 years ago

it's also a completely hostile and unnavigable app store. the search is bad, the charts are bad, the recommendations are bad, it's obscured on purpose.

freehunter5• 6 years ago

There really is no excuse for the lack of "real" software on the iPad (using "real" as in desktop quality). Only a small amount can be blamed on the system itself, appealing to a very niche audience (like XCode).

Arbitrary Javascript code written on the iPad can run, as evidenced by Play.js. Arbitrary Python code written on the iPad can run as evidenced by Pythonista. Arbitrary Swift code can run as evidenced by Swift Playgrounds. There's a Github app, there's a file explorer app, you can connect USB drives and keyboard and as of very recently, a mouse.

So where is VS Code for the iPad? Where is desktop-class software for the iPad? Why is this [1] article from 8 years ago still the best-in-class way to write code on an iPad? Is there still some kind of missing support I'm not seeing?

[1] https://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook...

saagarjha• 6 years ago

Arbitrary Swift code can run as evidenced by Swift Playgrounds.

Arbitrary Swift code which can only run because Apple grants themselves private entitlements that let it work.

rhinoceraptor• 6 years ago

There are a ton of great desktop quality apps on the iPad, I think the thing is that prosumer users don't know about them, and also people have been conditioned to think that any iOS app over $5 is expensive.

As one example, the music ecosystem is really good. There's Garageband and several great 3rd party DAWs, and a ton of apps which provide audio units that you can plug into, such as Model D for synths, or Stark for guitar amp modeling.

For photo/video, there are a few really great options: Affinity Photo is comparable to Photoshop, and LumaFusion is comparable to Final Cut or Premiere.

fxtentacle• 6 years ago

I believe this is simply because people doing serious coding work always want to have a proper permanently attached keyboard. So they would use a MacBook Air with ARM CPU, but not a tablet.

scarface747• 6 years ago

So “real software” is just development software?

_ph_2• 6 years ago

There is a multitude of reasons for this. Beyond some limitations which still limit the ipad, it is the chick and an egg problem. You won't have real software on the iPad until there are users (buyers) for it and you won't have users until the software exists. This is especially important for corporate usage - at my work place I haven't heard of any iPads being provided to the employees, which means, no one can use an iPad and buy/develop software for one.

There are and were limitations preventing desktop class software on the iPad, some have lifted but it also takes quite a long time to take up on that, see also above.

- Keyboard support. For a lot of tasks, you need a keyboard. It took a long time until Apple sold keyboards for the iPad, and it still was quirky. There is a row of keys missing and even when coupling bluetooth keyboards, the extra keys didn't work. What Apple didn't really get was: a lot of people need an Esc key for their work, many would like funktion keys. It is still a struggle to run as simple as an ssh session on the iPad. Also, so far I haven't found a truely good SSH client on the iPad.

- Mouse support - really has been added only with 13.4, we will see how this develops.

Restrictions by Apple:

- For a long time, there was no real file exchange between apps, no joint file spaces. This has been partially fixed, still feels cumbersome and very much depends on the apps to get right.

- There is a ton of stuff that could be done on the iPad, but is banned outright. Termux is great on Android, not allowed on the iPad. The iPad would be great for development, if not mostly disallowed.

- And yes, for a lot of things, the screen is just too small :).

- The app store. Great and bad at the same time. The issues are probably best seen on macOS, because on macOS the app store is not mandatory. A lost of applications only exists outside the app store. While I liked the convenience of the app store and the fact that I don't have to deal with license keys and was free to use the app I bought across all my devices, the perpetual updates for free are condemning most longterm development. Paid upgrades were the life blood of the software industry for decades. They mean a regular revenue stream from power users like subscriptions, but didn't force the casual user to constantly pay, only when that user wanted the features of the newer versions. Subscriptions currently seem to be the only way, how a actively developed application can survive in that universe, but limits the user base.

- In app purchases. In principle a good idea, it lead to a reality where apps are flooding the app store which constantly try to extort money from the user. That games are allowed to charge in total more than lets say 2x what an AAA title would cost, is scandaleous. A model where an app could offer a free trial and then is purchased normally would be much more supportive of quality app development.

Many of this can be worked around, but unfortunately that is rather the exception. There are still great apps around which are a joy to use, but the whole ecosystem is drowned by all the bad stuff.

robenkleene• 6 years ago

VS Code on desktop can run arbitrary processes, that’s how it can, say, have in integrated terminal. You cannot even remotely do that on iPad. Executing Python and JavaScript in a pre-compiled runtime environment[0], like Pythonista and Play.js do, is an entirely different approach and results in completely different products, ones like... Play.js and Pythonista.

The reason that VS Code is not on iPad is 100%, top to bottom that the framework and App Store restrictions prevent running arbitrary processes.

[0]: VS Code can run any binary on your system, iPad apps can only run binaries that they are compiled with. This distinction is why almost no existing development tools can be ported to iPad, almost all development tools are built on interacting with many binaries that the tool was not necessarily compiled with.

DevKoala• 6 years ago

I would guess that there are more great apps published daily than ever before. The issue is probably discovery. Even if you build something great, you are competing for attention, and people who can pay for ads get the most attention.

freehunter5• 6 years ago

Honestly, yes. I go through the App Store nearly every single day looking for something interesting and every single day it’s “have you tried Bear yet?” Or Day One, or Calm or Clash of Clans or some cookie cutter “Crossy Road” style nonsense.

Judging by what’s promoted on the App Store, there hasn’t been any new software written for iOS in years. They’ve just been republishing the same iOS Essentials article twice a day since 2015.

criddell• 6 years ago

There are some fantastic iPad apps. Procreate and GoodNotes are two of my favorites. They are also insanely inexpensive.

I can't imagine making something as good as Procreate and then only charging $10 for it. If I had an idea for something complex on the iPad I would have serious reservations about developing it. You can't charge reasonable prices for software unless you do it in $0.99 chunks.

chronogram• 6 years ago

Procreate is the killer app of the Apple pencil and maybe even the iPad Pro. The pricing is indeed strange. There are people paying $999 for a tablet, $129 for the pencil, just to run a $10 app.

flycaliguy• 6 years ago

I swear procreate was much more expensive than $10 when I bought it. I can’t find evidence of it being reduced, maybe my memory is faulty.

rchaud5• 6 years ago

What in the world happened?

Business incentives changed.

The early iPhone/iPad app ecosystem focused on showcasing creativity. The UI was new and unique, and apps were created to take advantage of the gyroscope for games, or the audio input for apps like the guitar tuner thing in this article.

But that doesn't put food on the table, especially if the land baron is taking a 30% cut for every sale.

Why bother creating complex apps that push device capabilities to their limits, when what the majority of the market wants to do with their phones is tap away at a Candy Crush/Clash of Clans clone, or scroll mindlessly through one of 3 social media apps?

It simply became more lucrative to create clones of products where market demand had been validated, and stuff it full of ads and in-app purchases.

kick• 6 years ago

A lack of constraints mixed with a lack of real benefits.

Late-stage iPhoneOS was magical because of the constraints people were working with.

If you tell a developer, "Hey! Here's hardware with effectively no possible limits," they'll never write anything of value for it. A text editor and a way to do something you're already doing 5% faster.

If you tell a developer, "Hey! Here's hardware that's extremely slow and limited by today's standards, make something magical," they'll move the sun and stars to get you something that'll wow you.

Early-stage iOS was magical because of the new frontier offered; the constraints had mostly disappeared by then, but the ground was new and it presented what was effectively a new way to interface with the machine.

hyperpallium• 6 years ago

True, constraints promote creativity, the form of a sonnet or the rules of a fictional world or 8 bit graphics.

But in this particular case, they used the new strengths of the device that enabled things not possible before (removing constraints), yet thought their idea might be too much for it (hence the prototype), and their later idea was too much for it (needed a bigger screen). So their ideas didn't benefit from the constraints.

An upcoming test of your hypothesis is the PS5 100x SSD. Will it promote or stifle creativity?

The sense of the "magical" is the newness. Miracles, when commonplace, become commonplace. (Though I am still in awe at billion/sec pocket electro-computers... OTOH no one else is, it's just a cheap phone).

sixQuarks• 6 years ago

You may be looking at things with rose colored glasses. The #1 app in the early days was something called Fart App.

BenGosub• 6 years ago

Music production software is currently booming in the IOS world, there are professional producers using the iPad to make music e.g. Madlib announced that he made all beats for the album Bandana on his iPad

jedberg• 6 years ago

I wasn't there but I heard from the folks at Netflix who were there that they had a very similar experience getting Netflix to work on a pre-release iPad. Secret dark rooms, bulky cases so you couldn't tell the exact dimensions, cagey Apple reps with NDAs, very little time with the device, etc.

XCSme• 6 years ago

Nice read, interesting how you can have apps already be successful before you even release them.

connordg• 6 years ago

Here’s another post about a similar situation with an app which was on the first iPad’s sent to reporters:

    https://home.theodoregray.com/blog/2014/7/31/how-the-elements-came-to-be

    Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22775624

jbverschoor• 6 years ago

So I guess the term on the NDA is 10 years?

nmstoker• 6 years ago

The author writes well. Slightly off-topic compared to the iPad piece but the story about his time in a glider in the Yorkshire dales is a cracking read:

https://thinkfractional.blog/a-day-to-remember/

snake42• 6 years ago

Thanks for mentioning this. What a fantastic read.

jes5199• 6 years ago

I still use GuitarTookit! Skeuomorphic design has fallen out of favor but I’m glad they haven’t changed it

lynguist• 6 years ago

Thank you for sharing it. It made for a captivating read.

rekabis• 6 years ago

Now _that_ was a fun read. Very well written!

Secret iPad

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