Sunday, November 15, 2015

Saving the iPad

Jared Sinclair:

The App Store is designed, from what it features to what it permits, to promote cheap, shallow, candy apps. It discourages developers from ever starting ambitious apps, both passively and actively.

[…]

The iPad was marketed as a third category of device, neither a phone nor a PC, but Apple has never managed to articulate what that third category really is.

[…]

iOS user interface paradigms are not suited to using more than one app at a time. iOS was designed almost a decade ago for a phone whose screen is smaller than the gap between the iPad Pro’s app icons.

He suggests bringing Gatekeeper to iOS to address the business issues, positioning it as a Mac replacement to address the category confusion, and making a separate “padOS”:

The iPad is walking backwards into all the use-cases for which the Mac was designed with deliberate intention from the Mac’s earliest days. But because of Apples bolted-on approach, tacking features onto a decade-old smartphone OS, the result is far removed from Apple’s best work. The design principles of an iPhone simply don’t scale up to an iPad, in the same way that the design principles of an iMac don’t scale up to an Apple TV.

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