On Mac vs. iOS Metaphors
Why is it so difficult for me to bounce my information from one app to another on my iPad?
One of the most frustrating aspects of using an iPhone or iPad are the limitations that are metaphorically projected on you by Apple and their environment.
When you’re using your Mac, you get used to opening your file in any number of apps. You simply have to right click on it, and you’re (usually) offered a number of options. A typical image on my system, for example, can be opened by well over a dozen apps.
But on my Phone, asking that very question doesn’t really make sense. You can’t open an arbitrary piece of content in an arbitrary app, save for taking some odd steps like creating a document and pasting the content in or such.
Images on the camera roll get some special treatment here, but a text file, for example, does not. In some ways I suspect Apple is willing to treat the photos as a special case because they’re so popular on the iPhone, and they work so well. Surely it’s a common format.
But I often work in content that has other needs. PDFs are common in my work, and there are plenty of apps that deal with them, but there’s no place for me to store a PDF that can then be opened by any app on my device.
In a way this is a perfect example of Apple drawing a line in the sand that most other companies would be unwilling to draw. Once you add a mechanism to share files arbitrarily between applications, it opens up a whole new dimension of expected “side-effects” on the part of customers. At what point are things getting too complex for the mass market?
I don’t feel “traditional” computers are no longer compelling, first-class devices because I think it will be such a long time before I can be as productive on an iOS device. They’re just not built that way. The priorities there are tackling simple tasks quickly, keeping interfaces simple, limited feature scopes.
Another thing that won’t happen for a long time is being able to use apps that run in the background and interact with you in a sophisticated way, such as typing completion utilities like TextExpander. I love that my Mac (and iPad) has built-in completion of arbitrary strings, but as is so often the case, I have one extremely useful use-case that simply won’t work with the built-in functionality.
These “missing pieces” are often far more critical than you would expect, but I don’t think Apple expects someone who spends eight hours a day in front of a device to choose for that device to be on the iOS platform. That’s what a Mac is for. That’s what you really want to be building websites with, cranking out designs, getting into the flow, and quickly getting the level of control you need to make a professional product.
I can see a place in my life for both operating systems for a very long time to come.
