Though the iPad was a huge hit from the beginning, it was starting to feel a bit tired for those who wanted more depth. The lag between what kind of work it was capable of and what kind of work it actually welcomed had been growing for a long time.
Over the last couple of years, Apple has focused on dragging the device out of a long period and into a universe that offered more linguistic similarity with the Mac. We received a preview of iPadOS 16 this week. Enhancements to Continuity, Stage Manager, and Desktop Class Apps are some of the features that aim to continue iPadOS 15's work in this area.
I had a chance to chat with Craig Federighi about the new iPadOS features, which aim to enhance multitasking and multi app work on the device. We talked about the reactions to the announcements.
Enhancements to multitasking on iPad include Stage Manager. There are set of up to 4 apps per group. You can quickly tap between the groups by grouping them to the left. It is a more visible and persistent version of Spaces, the Mac feature that allows for multiple desktops to hover off the sides of your screen. If you didn't know that Spaces existed, you'd be forgiven, because it's fairly obscure and doesn't have a lot of visual clues to anyone who has never visited the Mission Control screen.
"iPad has a unique proposition, a unique set of expectations around interaction and we wanted to build from that place, not just drag things over from, you know, decades past or another system that was built on a different set of foundations." Federighi thinks Stage Manager is an important step in the evolution of the human race.
Federighi said that the idea of allowing a single window to take focus on the screen has roots at Apple. The single application mode was the first one to be used in Mac OS X. An internal prototype of an experience felt similar to Stage Manager.
There are many ways to work on the Macintosh computer. People are in and out of Mission Control. Some people like to make a mess, some people clean up their messes, and some people use minimization. There are a lot of valid ways to work on the mac.
The approach to workspace management seems to focus on the iPad. Federighi says that two teams at Apple, one working from the iPad side and the other from the macOS side, came up with the same idea and met in the middle. He says that both viewpoints are represented in this approach.
Many people who use the Mac every day want that focused experience that gives them balance. We picked this idea up and said we want to make this happen. We were considering it on the iPad side. Two independent teams are working on the same idea.
There will be a group of people that have 40 years of Mac history behind them. There will be people who expect the feature to act in a certain way. Many Mac loyalists won't use this tool immediately.
It takes some time for people to get used to their new tools and adjust their expectations. This is for people who use the iPad. It is for a small group of users who want to work that way.
Federighi believes that if 20% of the users on the Mac end up saying that this is another great tool in the quiver for them, that is fantastic.
The image was created by Apple.
Why now, and why M 1?
Every Apple product introduces a desire for it to have appeared earlier. The word has become a joke among Apple watchers. Most launches are far more complex than they appear. Billions of users will be satisfied by the level of quality and ease of use. The edge cases and rough ends of the software have increased as they have grown to serve more and more uses. The consistency of its software teams is still considered a benchmark.
The timing question is worth asking. There were a lot of things Apple had to do in order to get Stage Manager and the other recent enhancements to multitasking for iPad out to users, according to Federighi. Even though it was obvious that people were ready for more, there was still some groundwork to be done.
Apple requires developers to support full app resizing in their own frameworks. Infrastructure support was needed to allow multiple apps to run at the same time. There were hardware needs as well.
Federighi says that building to M1 was important. The iPad has always maintained a high standard for responsiveness. Every app can respond to every touch instantly, as if you are touching the real thing. It's difficult for people to appreciate the technical constraints involved in achieving that.
You have to make sure that any one of those apps can respond to touch in a way that you don't have that expectation with a desktop app. It's a different set of constraints because of indirect manipulation.
Stage Manager is able to take advantage of the more powerful graphics card, faster I/O in virtual memory, faster storage and more RAM that the M1 chips brought to the table. Federighi says that this year they did a good job of keeping the experience fluid.
Some people have said that Stage Manager requires Apple's M1 processor to function. I wanted to know which components needed the new hardware and which ones were a matter of choice.
The core of the issue was Apple's high bar for interactive responsiveness. There is a high bar for interactive responsiveness and the experience where every app needs to be able to respond quickly. Any app that was immediately accessible to the user had to be in the RAM. Heavy use of virtual memory is something that hasn't been seen in apps on macOS.
Several factors need to collide in order to reach that level. A lot of RAM and fast IO virtual memory were needed to host multiple apps in the active bucket.
Federighi says that the virtual memory swap is super fast because of the M1 iPad. We don't have that ability on the other systems now that we're allowing you to have up to four apps on a panel plus another four to be instantly responsive and have plenty of memory.
Stage Manager was limited to M1 iPad because of the availability of memory.
Stage manager is seen as a total experience that involves external displays. The IO on the M1 is able to drive 4k, 5k, 6k displays and can drive them at scaled resolutions. We can't do that on other iPad's.
The graphics performance was a problem.
Stage Manager was designed to take advantage of the M. You can see how the apps tilt and shadow. The peak of graphics performance that no one else can deliver is what it takes to do that at high frame rates.
Federighi says that the full stage manager experience can't be delivered on any lesser system. We want to make it available everywhere. This is what needs to be done. We will carry this experience into the future. We set the benchmark for the future because we didn't want to limit our design to something less.
What is the reason this way?
Stage Manager is an example of an Apple way of design. The focus of the main tenets is to give the user a way to navigate through presence. The iPad should embody the task at hand and be distraction free. When the rule is broken, the supporting pillars of the philosophy step in to make sure the user doesn't get lost.
The approach here is not for everyone. In order to keep things actionable, Apple has made some very specific choices. You can't hide one app by putting another over it.
You just do what you want to do as a user, you don't need to clean up or manage. It's there. Federighi says that Stage Manager's design is managed for you. It's clean and focused, that's what I think. The traditional windowing environments are different. Everything you open contributes tocluttering. You have to sort of manage where things are and how they can be covered up. It is your responsibility to clean up after yourself the whole time.
We make sure that the windows are not covering each other and that they are accessible. You don't have to deal with it. You're back to a single window experience when you move on to the next app. Everything remains accessible to you. You have your recent apps and they are there for rapid multitasking. They aren't in the way andcluttering things up.
The essence of what we love about iPad was preserved in this design, while giving you that flexibility and fluidity of the multitasking experience that some people who were wanting to stretch iPad further were really looking for.
This approach is handled well. The ability to allow one window to obscure another and the freedom to be as messy as possible is not something that should be included in the iPad base.
I think Stage Manager could replace the multi-app views on iPad if it continued to get better. It would be great if there were improvements in how you get one app to snap to full screen. I think it needs to be a single tap or pinch gesture. To allow the iPad to be the app and then back to facilitate inter-app communication should be part of the main flow.
The feature has an elastic framework that allows it to take on beefier tasks and hold more apps in memory. It has been a nice surprise for someone who has used to swim against the single-app approach when it comes to multi-app workflows on iPad.
A building from the beginning.
Federighi says that Apple will be working on Stage Manager during the summer. The primary job of Apple is still to get developers to adopt their new software development kit and ready their applications.
They want to make sure that the feedback they get is useful. Federighi says that they have a few things that they can add to the feature in the future.
Federighi says that they already had a number of them planned. Some of the feedback we have received is that it is coming in the second or third seed. We already have those things identified, either that or a bug.
"There hasn't been anything we've seen, that has us wondering, what is that?" Many of them are reactions we expect from people who aren't used to the system or areas where we have improvements in flight. We are definitely going to do that.
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