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The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It
- waterlesscloud 17y agoIs it really single tab browsing? Ugh.
- lmohdlp 17y agobased off of screenshots, seems so.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tdmackey 17y agoIt allows for multiple windows, which is somewhat similar.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- dschobel 17y agoI didn't understand his objection here. Is it the inconvenience of hitting the "windows" button? With the iphone's touch interface this is painless and I can't imagine it'll be any worse for the ipad.
- dbz 17y agoWell, for starters, any inconvenience sucks. Glad I got that out of the way =] His example of having (AT LEAST) 8 tabs open is not the same as eight windows. Searching through all of them can be quite the inconvenience. I, for example, currently have 14 tabs open, and six applications running. I do not want to search through all of those to get to what should be "another tab." I understand what he's talking about...
- jstevens85 17y agoWell, I don't think we've seen yet how the iPad will manage browser windows. Perhaps when you click on windows, it will be be able to display all of the open windows at the same time in a grid view.
- GHFigs 17y agoThere’s also a thumbnail view that shows all your open pages in a grid, to let you quickly move from one page to the next. -- http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/ http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/
- drcode 17y agohmmm... didn't think of that either- That would be pretty painful if I buy one...
- martythemaniak 17y agoYou can't convince fanboys that lack of features will eventually lead to pain for the users.
- pyre 17y agoTo be fair, Apple might buckle on some of these issues in the future, but you're still making a gamble on that if you get the iPad thinking that those features will come later.
- mechanical_fish 17y agoYou also can't convince nerds that excessive degrees of freedom are a serious usability problem. After all, doing six things at once while remembering the state of a bunch of invisible stateful objects -- tabs, background apps, file hierarchies -- is the nerd core skill. Meanwhile, I would note that Apple has apparently sold about 35 million iPod Touches: http://theappleblog.com/2010/01/28/ipod-touch-now-outselling-iphone/ http://theappleblog.com/2010/01/28/ipod-touch-now-outselling... ... which exhibit the exact same set of "missing features" as the iPad.
- jacquesm 17y agoBut they exhibit at least two features the ipad lacks: - sub $300 pricing - fit in pockets
- mechanical_fish 17y agoPricing is a question of time. The iPod Touch launched at $300 and $400 price points. Now it starts at $199. You're right about the pocket factor: The iPad is a gamble, of course, which is what makes it interesting. It's hard to know, without trying, how many people will trade the inconvenience of a larger device for much more screen real estate, higher performance, and optional 3G networking. All we know is that there's a market for netbooks, a market for Kindles, and a market for iPod Touches, which seems to suggest that the potential market for the iPad -- which is both like and not like each of these things -- is worth sampling.
- Herring 17y ago>The Daily Show, Castle, The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother: Annoying workaround, but Air Video can stream from your desktop.
- chrischen 17y agoI've always envisioned watching TV on a TV while I have the iPad on the couch doing other stuff.
- pyre 17y agoThat may be, but in the Keynote they did push the 'you can watch 10 hours of video on a single charge' so they are pushing this as a device to watch video on. If it fails at video, then it's a failure of the device if that is one of its goals.
- chrischen 17y agoThey also pushed YouTube on the iPhone and video on the iPhone. Both features have been unpractical for me (converting videos, tiny screen, battery drain with 3G video) and the Youtube feature just seems to have been a selling point tacked on.
- Lazlo_Nibble 17y agoThe Youtube feature was Apple laying the groundwork for H.264 displacing FLV on the web as a whole.
- bombs 17y ago"Even past the fact that the iPad does not have a camera, it cannot run two applications at the same time. Meaning: talking to my girlfriend, I could not look up a train time while we talked. Result: have to use my iPhone while we video chat. All that in a device that commands a price premium." How do you video chat using an iPhone, which has a camera on the back? "Again, we run into a software problem. From what I have seen in images surrounding the iPad, you can only have one tab open at a time. Excellent, if this was 1996. Hell, even Internet Explorer 7 had multitab browsing. Oh, and if that Apple sourced processor is so fast, why the hell can I not use it? Single tabbed browsing is just a plain deal killer for content consumption, period." The button to switch windows or tabs is located between the forward and bookmarks button. It is located in the bottom right on the iPhone. "Apple almost got there with this one, copying someone else’s interface for iBooks. But then it hit me again, only one app at a time! I listen to music while I read. And Gmail is never closed. Blast, there goes that." If you're using the iPod and Mail applications, this isn't an issue, as both of these applications can run in the background. "Again, when are we going to see HTML5 casual gaming? I love the game “desktop tower defense,” which is flash based. iPad? No." There are many casual games in the App Store, including many tower defence games (my favourite is Star Defence, but there are plenty of good free ones, if 99c is too dear). This is only going to increase with Flash CS5.
- pyre 17y ago> How do you video chat using an iPhone, which has a camera on the back? He's saying that even if it (the iPad) had a camera for video chat, he would have to use his iPhone to look up the train times because there is no multi-tasking on the iPad.
- chrischen 17y ago> There are many casual games in the App Store, including many tower defence games (my favourite is Star Defence, but there are plenty of good free ones, if 99c is too dear). This is only going to increase with Flash CS5. Why make people pay when there's FREE games out there online if only flash were supported. Flash support means opening up to a whole world of preexisting games, rich internet applications, and porn sites. But not allowing flash creates an artificial monopoly that is the app store.
- alextgordon 17y agoNo tabbed browsing in Safari. I'm guessing dozens of tabbed browsers will pop up in the App store almost immediately. Unless Apple rejects them of course.
- Zak 17y agoLast I checked, Apple rejects anything that duplicates the core functions included on the device. Those include web browsing, media playing and email.
- matasar 17y agoThere are many web browsers and email clients available in the app store today, so I'm not sure where you got the idea that Apple blocks them. This doesn't solve the background apps problem, but there are also many apps that play media.
- jstevens85 17y agohttp://www.macworld.com/appguide/article.html?article=138409 http://www.macworld.com/appguide/article.html?article=138409 Apple doesn't have a problem with third-party web browsers as long as they use the WebKit engine. Otherwise, the app would be implementing its own language interpreter and therefore be against the developer agreement.
- spot 17y agowait did i hear you right -- apple prohibits interpreters?? that would be truly sad. i was thinking of making a graphical programming language for kids.
- akamaka 17y agoThis guy is a complete idiot, and has obviously never even used and iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple almost got there with this one, copying someone else’s interface for iBooks. But then it hit me again, only one app at a time! I listen to music while I read.
- jkincaid 17y agoI don't really get why everyone is talking about Flash and its relation to porn. If the the number of non-Flash playing devices grows, couldn't these porn sites just go to HTML5?(this applies to all other video sites, actually)
- pyre 17y agoWell, he could also be talking about no flash memory card slot. If you were to watch non-streaming porn on the device, I doubt that you would want it to be in the same place on the device as your regular movies (lest you hand the iPad to someone else that stumbles across them). You would probably want to have your porn on a memory card that you could remove when you are no longer using it.
- Lazlo_Nibble 17y agoOr in a locked "porn vault" on the device. Which there are already apps for.
- catch23 17y agoI'm pretty sure porn sites will adapt pretty fast. Nobody wants to be the last porn site not supported on the iPad.
- chrischen 17y agoiPad is really good at doing what it's designed to do, and really bad otherwise. It's not a satisfy all device, as we've seen in the response to it so far.
- dbz 17y agoReally? What the fuck was it supposed to be really good at doing? Running the iphone OS?
- chrischen 17y agoI'm sure Steve wasn't an idiot. He definitely designed this product for a specific type of user and it's probably really good at doing that. I just don't know what that is. But I'm certain he didn't slap on a bunch of random features that didn't go well together.
- dbz 17y agoI've seen plenty of smart people make dumb decisions. It's about time he made a dumb one. Kind of like the phrase "We're due for another volcano eruption," I'm not trying to say it's about time we see him as an idiot
- chrischen 17y agoIf a smart person makes a dumb decision it was probably an impulsive one. If Steve Jobs is smart, the chances of him making a decision on something this big, this monumental would be unlikely. Plus, look at his track record. Even less likely now.
- mechanical_fish 17y agoAt the risk of repeating myself: Apple has apparently sold 35 million iPod Touches in a little over two years: http://theappleblog.com/2010/01/28/ipod-touch-now-outselling.. http://theappleblog.com/2010/01/28/ipod-touch-now-outselling.... Sales are apparently up 55% year-over-year. These devices do exactly what the iPad does, only with a much smaller screen, far fewer networking options, and (if rumors are to be believed) slower performance. These numbers are trying to tell us something. Perhaps we should listen?
- jwecker 17y agoI was looking forward to a humorous example of even a single use case being literally broken, since I don't know how to literally break a use case. Alas, it's just a list of use cases the iPad doesn't meet.
- Lazlo_Nibble 17y ago...and use cases the iPad DOES meet, but which the poster doesn't realize it meets. Like "tabbed" browsing, listening to music while running another app, and playing free casual games.
- dghughes 17y agoThe Axitron looks pretty sweet, it's a Macbook modded by Axiotron to become a real Mac tablet computer, the Modbook. Woz is on the board of advisors. http://www.axiotron.com http://www.axiotron.com
- jaxn 17y agoI read the article and it seems like flamebait to me. The iPhone has what is essentially 8 tabs for browsing. Music is able to be played in the background. Gmail will have push email so how is that different than running in the background from a use-case perspective? This post does not deserve to make it such a high spot on HN. Not even on the weekend.
- archgrove 17y agoWell, the browser has tabs (at least, the iPhone Mobile Safari does, so it's no stretch to think this does as well). The lack of a camera is, I agree, silly. Rather than rebut the rest of his "points" directly, I'll focus on "multitasking". Frankly, the iPhone and iPad do multitask, in the ways that are important to (most) people. Multitasking in an end user product really means "I can do more than one thing at once", not "The computer runs many processes". The iPhone OS currently accomplishes exactly this, via saved state. In any well behaved iPhone app, if you quit, the state of the UI and your data is persisted, so that when you return, it's like you never left. The UI for this multitasking is a bit clunky - hit "Home" then pick the app - but for most people, this works fine. There are only two situations when this doesn't - when the app does something interesting in the background, and when the "stack" of application interactions collapses - if I click a mailto: link to open Mail, quitting that doesn't return me to Safari - I have to go there again manually. The two cases of "Does something interesting in the background" that really people want are audio streaming and notification of some event, and they're real problems. However, Apple's persistently said they're trying to protect the user experience (stability, battery life etc) by denying background apps. I've no reason to believe this isn't the case (I'm mean really, what are they gaining except geek ire by restricting this?). The audio case is annoying and needs a solution - the notification case is slightly better since push was rolled out. Outside of these cases, the iPhone multitasks well enough for 99% of the world. His reading case, catching up on the news etc all are handled - you just have a slightly painful app switch process (i.e. you press two buttons rather than just one). The only case that isn't is background movies/music from 3rd party apps - and really, the only sensible case out of that is music (Do you really watch a movie and browse at the same time on a 10" screen?). Regardless, I suspect the point will be moot soon enough - OS 4.0 seems very likely to bring some notion of background processes. The geek anti-iPad ire really confuses me. What did we expect, other than what we got? It was never going to run OS X - the user experience would have been awful without major changes that broke all 3rd party OS X apps (and then, what's the point?). The hardware, modulo camera, seems entirely reasonable at a price that's damn good - who realistically expected anything more from an affordable tablet machine at this point in technology? The "walled garden" is a real issue, but I think we have, as a group, gained far more than we've lost with the App store. All these people saying "I could never have been a tinkerer with an iPad" - poppycock. Download the SDK for free, develop all you want. Pay a nominal fee to deploy to 100 other devices without ever giving Apple a look at your app. Or hell, just jailbreak it if the limits of the SDK are so onerous. Alternatively, just don't buy it. Having chosen this please, stop filling up HN/Reddit/The Internet with "The iPad doesn't raise the dead, make me a billionaire and cure cancer, so all my dreams are shattered and Apple is awful".
- jsz0 17y agoI don't understand why this individual is so angry. If it doesn't meet your needs don't buy it. What's the problem? I always feel like people who write this type of stuff just have a really bad attitude because they get so upset over something so unimportant. It's like they're just trying to find things to be upset about.
- dschobel 17y agoIt's the flip side of the Apple adoration. If Apple releases something which doesn't suit people it's as upsetting as if their favorite band had released a clunker of an album because you know it'll be a long time until they have a chance to redeem themselves and in the mean time you'll worry that they've lost their touch.
- jeffcoat 17y agoNo one complains about something that they have no interest at all in -- it's not a rant about how IBM's newest z/OS mainframe has poor support for browsing websites that use Flash. Much more frustrating is something that looks like it could be just exactly perfect for you, but is for some reason fatally flawed, or just out of reach.
- Lazlo_Nibble 17y agoz/OS doesn't ship with Flash because Adobe's runtime burns MIPs like nobody's business. Data Center Operations does NOT like having to bring additional capacity online because the Southeastern Division discovered Farmville in the middle of year-end batch.