Yeah, I was thinking more for general productivity. Office remains the gold standard, still, for something general users use a lot. The iPad versions are only good for editing and light documents. Excel needs to do pivot tables. Word needs a lot more of the reference and style editing features.
Also, the iPad and most programs (again like Word) need to get it that the iPads are used without network connections. Not being able to fully keep folders set to “always on iPad” and the Office apps I have had poor luck with getting access to stuff when not on the internet.
We are getting closer though. But my iPad still is a long way from being an only device. I wrote about this a few years ago and a lot of the points still stand.
Gruber points it out: iPadOS multitasking remains a goddam nightmare.
On the iPhone you can only have one app on screen at a time. The screen is the app; the app is the screen. This is limiting but trivial to understand. On the Mac you can have as many apps on screen at the same time as you want, and you launch the second, third, or twentieth app exactly the same way that you launch the first. That is consistency. On iPad you can only have two apps on screen at the same time, and you must launch them in entirely different ways — one of them intuitive (tap any app icon), one of them inscrutable (drag one of the handful of apps you’ve placed in your Dock). And if you don’t quite drag the app from the Dock far enough to the side of the screen, it launches in “Slide Over”, an entirely different shared -screen rather than split-screen mode. The whole concept is not merely inconsistent, it’s incoherent.
How would anyone ever figure out how to split-screen multitask on the iPad if they didn’t already know how to do it?
On the iPhone, you always launch apps the same way: tapping their icons. On the Mac, it’s slightly more complex. In most contexts — the Dock, LaunchPad, Spotlight results — you launch apps by single-clicking them; in the Finder, however, you must double-click them. There’s a method to that seeming madness — you must double-click to open something on the Mac in any context where single-clicking will merely select that item. But the Mac’s “ When do I click, when do I double-click? ” issue has confused untold millions of non-expert users for decades. How many people have you seen who double-click links in a web browser? The iPhone’s simplicity eliminated this sort of confusion. No one needlessly double-taps tappable items on iPhone. The iPad, originally, shared this simplicity and clarity. When the iPad debuted it was, from top to bottom, easier to understand than the Mac, and you could learn everything there was to learn about it just by tapping and sliding to explore. It was impossible to get lost or confused.
As things stand today, I get a phone call from my mom once a month or so because she’s accidentally gotten Safari into split-screen mode when tapping links in Mail or Messages and can’t get out.
I’m a pretty advanced Apple user and I’ve never figured it out reliably. That said, I don’t have any real need. My dad had some need (I can’t remember what) and I told him it was possible, so he went to the internet and figured out how to do it. Without me to tell him it was possible, it never would have happened.
Excel on the Mac absolutely sucks. I usually load a Windows VM and use it in the VM if I need to do anything serious.
Office on Mac is bad. Excel on Mac is a fucking nightmare.
Luckily I don’t have a Microsoft Office kinda job any more ;) Though I did recently have to go three rounds with some account folks about the limitations of .csv formatting and the many stupidities in the ways Excel imports them by default.
One thing Gruber noted yesterday: mouse support is coming, and the iPadOS implementation is different and good.
This mouse pointer support is rich and deep — it is far more than a simplistic virtual finger tip, and far more thoughtful and graceful and direct than a port to iOS of Mac-style mouse cursors.
First, when just mousing around, the main cursor is a circle instead of an arrow. A circle feels right; an arrow would definitely feel wrong. Similarly, it would feel all wrong for the Mac to change its primary cursor from the arrow to a circle. For me it boils down to the je ne sais quoi of the fundamental differences between iPad and Mac.
When you hover over a tappable button, the pointer disappears and instead you get a hover-state highlight around the button. Hover over an app icon in the Dock or on your homescreen, and instead of seeing the mouse pointer on top of the icon, you see a highlight around the icon, much like the way icons are popped on tvOS. When text editing, the cursor changes to an I-beam, of course, but it’s an all-new I-beam cursor, not the one you get in iOS while using the on-screen keyboard as a virtual trackpad (after a tap-and-hold on the spacebar or two-finger tap-and-drag on the key area). This new I-beam cursor is smart. It adjusts to the size of the text you’re editing — if you’re editing 16-point text you’ll get a smaller cursor; if you’re editing 48-point text you’ll get a larger cursor. (Lo these 35+ years after the original Macintosh, it suddenly strikes me as a bit silly that the I-beam cursor stays small even when editing very large text.) The new iPadOS I-beam cursor also is aware of where lines are in text fields, and “snaps” to the line.
I’d love to see Apple make a cool thin and light keyboard for the iPad Mini. Obviously the experience wouldn’t be perfect but it would make a great portable device.
Every thing I have heard from people who have tried the trackpad/mouse say it’s pretty slick, but has some issues (like the cursor can be hard to see when its morphing around things). When I think about it, I just can’t see that much of a use for it. I think the Pencil works great for text selection already. Maybe it will be nice in Excel? I don’t make spreadsheets on my iPad, but I do data entry on it, and that could be handy.
You can turn off the pointer morphing stuff. It’s useful for normal laptop work, so you don’t have to lift your hands up off the keyboard all the time.
Hooked up a Magic Mouse to my iPad. It worked ok. Scrolling is the opposite of how I like and I could not find an option to reverse it (I didn’t look that hard). It’s not always clear on how to do things, so you really do need the gestures you can do using a Magic Mouse.
It’s about how you would expect it to be using a mouse with a UI not designed for it. I kept wanting to click in the upper corners to close an app, but you have to go down to the bottom bar to close it for instance.
I fired up Excel and between it and the keyboard, data entry was easier, but I still wouldn’t want to use it for much more. All Excel’s menu items have not been updated to work with it either, so you still need to use touch to access the ribbon stuff.
So I tried it, and can’t think of a reason I would ever want to do it again. The trackpad that came with a keyboard sure, but not a separate mouse.
Yes, it’s going to take a while to get used to this. App support is definitely lacking so far, too.
First annoyance. It wasn’t obvious how to add a mouse. The Trackpad and Mouse settings don’t appear until you actually pair it with a Trackpad and Mouse. I had to add the mouse in Bluetooth settings, and then they appeared.
