AppleInsider: I replaced my Mac with my iPad Pro for a week — here’s how it went.
Kudos for not publicly blaming the app developer when you’re test driving a beta version of the operating system and relatively young features.
The concept that things aren’t difficult but more time consuming, and the feeling of jumping between apps is typical of pushing modern mobile-centric operating systems harder than most. Or at least that’s my opinion having been a tablet but since Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb.
What I think people should really ask themselves are three things:
- Do I really do that often?
- Is what I do most, smooth?
- Can I do this here?
When you do something very often it becomes more important how smooth the process is.
If you spend a lot of time shuffling data between applications, paradigms like: Android intents (sharing), drag & drop, and the almighty Unix pipe become more important IMHO. Spending time juggling file open and save as dialogs; etc can become a drag pretty rapidly when what you’re really trying to do is manipulate and share data instead of leaving a trail of temporary files. I get happier when I can quickly move my data between applications without having to go out of my way to make the transfer happen.
Just because a method of operation or workflow is different doesn’t mean it sucks or that it is great.
What’s the quality difference between one tap and two menus deep? How often you do it! We find ourselves doing certain tasks more frequently than others. You will evaluate a function in a spreadsheet cell far more often than you will lookup what function performs any given task. As a side effect it’s effective to be able to smoothly insert common functions with a little typing; a menu to find a specific type of function instead of Googling it is a plus. Having to walk through several menus and a multi page wizard as the only way to input data would just be deranged and painful for an application like a spreadsheet. Software for getting real work done will care more about the tasks you do all the damn time than software just trying to do the task once in a blue moon.
But here’s the one that tends to be most cut and dry: can you really do this? Yes, odds are you can or you will give up pretty quickly. Just because you can run a word processor on your phone doesn’t mean you should write that five hundred page novel on your phone. Just because it’s backed up to the cloud doesn’t mean you won’t cry when you drop your phone in the toilet either 😜.
Software takes time to mature and different people (and problem domains) have different ways of working. There is a big gap between what you do constantly and what you do occasionally, and that tends to be where it goes south.
Ahh, now I’m rambling 😂.