(2021-04-23) Hon S09e19 The Device Becomes The App

Dan Hon: s09e19 : The Device Becomes The App? I grab my 2018 12.9in iPad Pro, magnetically stick it to the Magic Keyboard, make sure I leave the Pencil on my desk, and carry the whole thing outside, sit myself down and start writing.

But it only works well, I realized, with some kinds of writing. Where it’s been working best is where I’m only writing in the app I’m using for writing, which at the moment is iA Writer. It doesn’t matter which app I’m using for writing, to be honest, just that it gets out of the way.

I’m spending the majority of my time creating brand-new-text that doesn’t exist. Like, I’m not going back and forth and referring to sources or looking things up

And then it all falls apart when I’m trying to do the other kind of writing. The other kind of writing looks like this: it’s at least six browser windows all full of tabs (some of the windows even have the same document open in them in different tabs multiple times), and I’m looking from one thing to another to another.

The shorthand of this is to say that the iPad is Bad At Multitasking, but after thinking about this the other day, I had a realization that this isn’t strictly true, and the issue is perhaps more nuanced than that.

the examples that I see

are singular, focussed tasks. I’d call them examples of The Device Becomes The App

There’s this whole “knowledge worker” kind of work which I’d handwave as having lots of spreadsheets open, or having email open and a gazillion browser tabs open. You aren’t coding, you aren’t necessarily doing a workflow, but you are reading things, responding to things and, crucially, synthesizing things from multiple sources and (sigh, ok, depressingly sometimes) creating a Word Doc or a Google Doc or a PowerPoint or Keynote based on all of those things.

the sort of idealized Design Is A Squiggly Messy Line That Actually Becomes A Line.

So I can see the iPad working when the squiggly mess happens inside one app.

man, does iPadOS get in the way of that. The closest it gets is by having a split screen plus slide-over effect, which is a grand total of three viewable windows of content, one of which is actually obscuring one of the others. So, you know, 2.5 out of 3 viewports are visible

I am not even necessarily looking at all 3 things at once, but I do need to flip between them quickly. I don’t care about background processes

So it’s actually about spatial information management and windowing. This is a little (ha) disappointing in that the original Mac kind of went all in on the spatial, windowed metaphor and that was good! And it only added pre-emptive multitasking later on, but before then, you could totally look at more than one thing at a time.

what’s the application and dedicated keycaps for “doing something that requires lots of back-and-forth research”. There… isn’t?

well, what does writing a novel look like?

a bit like Scrivener, the Thing For Writing Things. So what does an iPad become when it becomes the Scrivener Thing?

I took Scrivener as an example because it’s got the whole “get all your notes together and see them on a corkboard” UI metaphor, and, well, it’s there on the iPad version but you can’t move anything around

Part of this is funny to me because I’m thinking about visions of how this generative/research-type work might work and the one that comes up is the (sorry) Minority Report example, precisely because it’s something that I think iPadOS doesn’t do well, but that is most closely associated with iOS because of the whole multitouch thing

it feels hard to copy text from one place to another in iPadOS and here’s me remembering that the damn thing didn’t even have a clipboard or copy/paste for however long when it launched and hey, we all were kind of okay about that because the rest of the magic iPhone was still pretty magic.

but hey: a fullscreen app for “creating a thing but also having a bunch of little web browsers in them, or, god forbid, some sort of horrific skeuomorphic “desk” with the doc you’re writing and “the other things” arrayed around it”, I mean gosh, what a weird turnabout if that ever happened on an iOS-based device. So, you know. Make that. I’ll pay money for it. Man, I’d probably even pay $100 for it. Maybe more? It’s kind of important to how I work