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Posts tagged with "iPad"

What I Wish the iPad Would Gain from the Mac

The iPad is finally starting to grow up.

Despite the device becoming an instant sales phenomenon upon launch, iPad in its earlier years of life was never a legitimate PC replacement – nor was it meant to be. From birth the iPad existed not to cannibalize the Mac, but to supplement it. Steve Jobs called it a “third category” of device, fitting snugly in the space between a laptop and smartphone.

In recent years, however, the iPad has gone through a stark transition. If you want an iPad to supplement your iPhone and Mac, you can still get one in the $329 “just call me iPad” model introduced last spring. But the bulk of Apple’s iPad efforts of late have centered on making the device a capable replacement for the traditional computer. The iPad Pro and iOS 11 represent a new vision for the iPad. This vision puts the iPad not next to the Mac, but instead squarely in its place. It’s a vision embodied by the question, “What’s a computer?”

I made the iPad Pro my primary computer when it first launched in late 2015. The transition pains from Mac to iPad were minimal, and the device has grown even more capable since that time thanks to improvements in iOS. My need for a Mac is now extremely rare.

My desire for a Mac, however, still exists in a few specific use cases. There are things the Mac has to offer that I wish my iPad could replicate.

Now that the modern iPad has many basics of computing covered, here are the things I think it needs to take iPad-as-PC to the next level.

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iPad Diaries: Transmit Replacements and FTP Clients

iPad Diaries is a regular series about using the iPad as a primary computer. You can find more installments here and subscribe to the dedicated RSS feed.

You can download my wallpaper here.

Even though I never depended on Transmit for my daily iPad file management needs, I was sad to read that Panic couldn’t find a market for it on the App Store. Thousands of iPad owners use Panic’s app to manage their FTP servers and Amazon S3 buckets; integration with the latter is particularly important as it’s hard to find apps that combine FTP access with S3 support and aren’t hindered by questionable interface choices or a lack of updates.

Transmit for iOS was (and, until it is removed from the App Store, still is) one of a kind. Its excellent Mac foundation was adapted to iOS with taste and elegance, leveraging a split-pane UI long before iPad users were comfortable with Apple’s native Split View; thanks to Panic’s penchant for beautiful and intuitive design married to power-user functionalities, the Mac-like approach worked surprisingly well on iPad too.

It’s difficult to pin down what, exactly, made Transmit for iOS unprofitable. The iOS counterpart always lagged behind the cloud integrations from the Mac app (Backblaze B2 and Rackspace Cloud Files, for instance, never made it to iOS); Panic didn’t update Transmit to take advantage of major additions to iOS 11 such as Files and drag and drop; perhaps more importantly, Transmit for iOS is a product of the pre-iOS 11 era, back when the concepts of desktop-like file management and drag and drop were alien to the platform. Ultimately, I think Transmit for iOS lived and (slowly) died because we had it too soon.

But this isn’t a post-mortem for Transmit on iOS, which, according to Panic, may even relaunch as a new app on the Store someday. Instead, I’d like to take a quick tour of some of the alternatives for Transmit available on iPad today. In case Panic decides to pull Transmit from the App Store, or if the app stops working in a future release of iOS, these FTP clients and file managers should compensate for the features of Panic’s app. Most of them don’t offer the same sophisticated and polished UI design, but some of them may even turn out to be more flexible and better integrated with iOS than Transmit.

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Pixure 3.0 with PanelKit 2.0→

I first linked to Louis D’hauwe’s pixel art editor for iOS, Pixure, in March, when he introduced PanelKit in the iPad version of the app. If you’ve never played around with Pixure and PanelKit, imagine the ability to grab iPad popovers or sidebar panels and detach them so they’re floating onscreen like tool palettes would on macOS. I was skeptical of this idea initially – I feared it would overcomplicate the iPad’s UI – but it works surprisingly well on the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. I know that after using PanelKit months ago, I tried a few times to grab popovers in iPad apps like Omni’s, realizing that they didn’t support PanelKit.

D’hauwe is back today with Pixure 3.0, another excellent update that, among various enhancements, brings a version browser (a feature more apps should offer on iOS), drag and drop, and advanced export options. With today’s release, Pixure also includes PanelKit 2.0, a major update of the framework that now supports pinning multiple panels to the side of the screen as well as resizing them. Plus, your custom panel configuration is now saved across multiple app launches, so once you set up your workspace in Pixure, the app always remembers it.

Even if you’re not interested in editing pixel art graphics, I recommend checking out Pixure 3.0 just to play around with PanelKit 2.0. Support for multiple panels on the side is particularly impressive – try, for instance, to resize and stack the Color Picker and Layers panels on top of each other. It’s fun and intuitive, and I bet you’re going to wish more pro iPad apps offered this kind of flexible, customizable UI. You can find Pixure 3.0 on the App Store and read more about PanelKit 2.0 here.

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The iPad Pro as Main Computer for Programming→

Jannis Hermanns:

In the summer of 2017, I wanted to know what it would be like to use an iPad Pro as my main computer. I found out that it can actually work, thanks to an iOS app called Blink, an SSH replacement called Mosh, iOS 11 and running stuff on a server.

As is tradition, I will first explain myself and tell you about the why.

This is a technical, fascinating look at turning the iPad Pro into the primary computer for a web backend engineer. It’s always interesting to read how other people with different needs are taking advantage of iOS and the iPad’s app ecosystem.

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Workshelf 1.1→

As we’ve seen with the release of iOS 11, the emerging market of shelf apps for iPad has proven to be a fun playground for developers to figure out how to enhance the system’s drag and drop experience. We’ve published two stories on our favorite shelf apps released so far (here and here), and I’m keeping an eye on new developments every week. One of the most recent updates is Workshelf 1.1, which has gained a new icon and refreshed interface (thankfully, the original blue background is gone) as well as welcome tweaks to in-app previews and shelf management.

Workshelf, developed by Ross Kimes, is one of the more power user-oriented shelf apps thanks to its support for multiple shelves and raw file representations. In version 1.1, Workshelf can import documents from the Files app, it comes with new sorting options, and it lets you open URLs from an item’s detail page. This feature remains one of my favorite touches of Workshelf: in addition to viewing all the “flavors” of an item dropped in the app (such as a link and an image for a JPEG dragged from Safari), you can also tap & hold a specific file representation to drag it out of Workshelf.

I’ve been using Gladys on my iPad for the past few weeks (another shelf app that offers a variety of advanced features, plus a Files provider extension), but I’m going to give Workshelf another try.

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Luna Display Turns an iPad into a Second Screen for Your Mac

In June, I sat in the crowded lobby of the San Jose Marriott hotel just across from the convention center where WWDC was being held. The lobby was crammed full of developers and other people tapping away on Macs and iOS devices connected to the hotel’s WiFi. I sat down with the Astro HQ team for a demonstration of an upcoming hardware product called the Luna Display, a tiny dongle that turns an iPad into a wireless second display for a Mac.

Hotel WiFi is notoriously bad and the Marriott’s, which was ambushed by thousands of WWDC attendees, was holding up, but spotty. The Astro HQ team pulled out a tiny nubbin and connected it to a MacBook Pro’s USB-C port. After starting the Luna Display software on the Mac and an iPad, they were up and running with the iPad acting as a second display. Despite the shaky connection, the iPad performed admirably. It felt like magic.

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Apple Releases iOS 11 and iPad How-To Videos

Apple has published a series of six short videos to YouTube highlighting the marquee features of iOS 11 on the iPad. Each of the how-to videos is about one minute long and shows how to use a new feature:

  • ‘How to harness the power of the amazing new dock’ demonstrates how to add items to the dock, access recent files, and drag files into apps like Messages.
  • ‘How to mark stuff up with Apple Pencil’ shows how to mark up notes from the lock screen, Mail attachments, photos, and screenshots.
  • ‘How to manage and fly through your files with iOS 11’ is a quick tour of the new Files app, including how to use recents, favorites, and various cloud services.
  • ‘How to effortlessly scan, sign, and send a document with iOS 11’ shows someone scanning, signing, and sending a lease using the the Notes app.
  • ‘How to get more things done more quickly with multitasking with iOS 11’ explains how to share images in a Keynote presentation in Messages using Slide Over.
  • ‘How to get the most out of your hands with iOS 11’ demonstrates how to use two hands to drag and drop multiple images.

The videos do an excellent job of describing and demonstrating each new feature quickly and simply. With iOS 11 just weeks away, a little pre-launch education about its new capabilities on the iPad is a smart move by Apple.

You can view each of the videos after the break.

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The 10.5” iPad Pro: Future-Proof

There’s something about the screen of the new 10.5” iPad Pro that feels immediately novel but quickly becomes normal, and something that seems obvious at first but reveals itself as a deeper change after a few days. As a heavy user of the 12.9” iPad Pro, I’ve been pleasantly deceived by this new iPad, and the more I think about it, the more I keep coming back to the display and the story behind its new form factor.

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PiPifier for iPad Expands Picture in Picture Support to More Safari Videos

An excellent new utility called PiPifier was just launched by developer Arno Appenzeller. PiPifier may sound familiar, as it was originally released as a macOS app on the Mac App Store. But now the app had made its way to the iPad.

PiPifier is a tool that enables viewing any HTML5 video using the iPad’s Picture in Picture feature. It works as an action extension from the share sheet that you run within Safari. Simply load a site containing a video, then run the PiPifier action extension, and the video will instantly enter Picture in Picture mode. This is tremendously useful on sites like YouTube that do not support Picture in Picture by default, and in my testing has worked perfectly.

PiPifier is a free download on the App Store.