jawaddeo

With hindsight it's almost funny how the author has managed to write this nonsense with such self-assured tone, but at the time this view was quite prevalent. Working at the time for Symbian, I remember meetings where Apple were openly mocked by senior managers and technical leaders. The only competition that mattered was from Microsoft and Android. The iPhone it was believed, would never be sold beyond the niche high-end market. The most silly, almost insincere, part of these beliefs was the fact that one could walk down the street from our offices and pick up an iPhone at a price fractionally higher than an average Symbian phone (with a contract of course). There were many other reasons for the demise of Symbian as a platform (the leadership was naïve, but had the most inflated egos in the whole of industry due to their earlier success in 'scoring' Nokia), but the bottom line was that they had no idea what consumers wanted. Boring old men still nostalgically carrying their Psion 5s, whom I respected then and respect now for their technical expertise, but not for their business or even technological vision.

A small minority that I was part of tried quite hard to convince our peers that Apple were a serious threat. Everyone laughed at us, we were called Apple fanboys and were never taken seriously. I left soon after in a state of disillusion, but had to watch from the sidelines one of the most promising British 'startups' disintegrate into absolute irrelevance. The managers who ran this company into ground when it was the only one in leadership of that industry should hang their heads in shame. Nothing to take away from great designers at Apple and from the leadership of Steve Jobs, Apple owe a lot to the incompetence of Symbian leadership.

Please don't monopolise language! If you tell me I cannot use the word Paper any longer, I resent that deeply, even if Apple and others have done that. Paper is not distinctive enough, not even very imaginative, 'creative' dare I say, of an app that claims to be all about creativity.

(Disclaimer: I'm part of the Texpad team.)

I agree that a lot more needs to be understood and imagined about how we may use the touch devices, but radical changes don't have to be radical on day one. Indeed, from experience radical changes fail precisely because users can only absorb so much change in one go.

As it turns out when you take the touch interface into account as our iOS 7 app does, you can do some sweet things. My personal take is that you experiment with the interface _while_ making sure you don't break the existing ways of inputting (= generating content). If you shove a lot of change down people's throats in one big spoonful, you alienate them. Evolving the UI means you can take user feedback and adjust the course on the way. Radical changes mean you assume you know exactly what they want and need (and you don't mind breaking their workflow to impose the new way). That's a big assumption and may appear a little presumptuous to users who've developed a workflow around your app.

We may not get it right completely in one go, but we can assure our users that the app is the product of their feedback and will continue to be.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the people behind Texpad.)

Keyboard is designed to address precisely these kind of issues. I'd recommend watching the video.

I seriously doubt any such attempts to sidestep will succeed in a world where the problems is not just technical (you may be able to fool the sandbox enforcing system), but a matter of getting your app approved, not just once but with every update, small or large.

The added complication is that in this case LaTeX itself decides to spawn a few calls to various utilities it uses under the hood. Those attempts will simply be blocked by the OS inside the sandbox. So you won't be able to typeset successfully.

At last someone mentioned the error reporting - the cause of so much joy during my grad student days!

Thanks for contributing nothing but personal insults to a very serious argument. LaTeX is extremely useful, while the computing is going more and more mobile. How do we reconcile the situation and enable people to use LaTeX going forward on devices they like is I believe I an important issue.

On the go doesn't always mean on the go with a reasonable internet connection. The underground trains are a good example where in a big city like London, a journey may last an hour. A flight is another.

The restrictions are what they are, but TeX doesn't help at all by being large with an internal (circular!) dependency tree that would (should) get you fired in a flash from a commercial software house.