After months of fantastic interation with the new iPad Pro 12.7” i’ve reached a conclusion: it’s a marvelous piece of hardware: powerful, efficient, able to inspire and transform your best creative instincts into projects also thanks to the Apple Pencil but, i need… iOS mouse support!
Apple says that an iPad Pro could be your “next computer” and this is true for most professional users: from photographers that need a fast and responsive retouching systems, to illustrators, lawyers, sellers on the field.. but for me… I’m stil using MacBook Pro for CAD designs and Videomaking and there is still the lack of a functionality: to select, move, and position an object on the screen with accuracy and without my hand obscuring any part of the screen or the total vision of the project.
Apple Pencil is partially able to do it thanks to its great precision but it’s still masking a little the design behind my wrist and I’m missing a button to make some selections and, worst of all, it’s almost impossibile to do a convenient “click and drag” for users like me that are “mouse natives”.
The same happens with powerful software for education software like Scratch… we have Scratch Junior on iPad but it’s a cut down version that hasn’t the power of the full software and the promise of porting it to iPad is 3 years old now with no clues about an imminent release.
So why Apple shouldn’t add a mouse support on iOS? The Power of iPad Pro processors has reached great results thanks to Apple’s in-house processor design and it’s catching up the one from basic MacBooks, the GPUs are crazy fast, iOS users are also getting used to a closed and secure file system with some Dropbox and iCloud tricks.
iOS is getting Ten or… X?
It’s not a question of porting OS X to iOS devices but only the ability of iOS 10 to support an external pointer (mouse or trackpad whatever) inside the current CAD/Design, Video software Apps like Graphic from Indeeo / Autodesk.
It may sound like an heresy since iOS is built from the ground with a touch interaction but didn’t Apple partially overcome this with the dual mode onscreen keyboard of iPhone 6S/Plus that becomes a sort of wirtual trackpad for moving the cursor inside a text? Didn’t Apple add also a sort of contextual click with 3D touch on objects and lists on the screen?
We need only a little step: iOS mouse support for selecting, dragging an dropping object on the screen to use Design and Video Apps like we are used to do it since the Mac was invented with a complete view of the screen.
We could loose some of our absolute mobile production capabilities on train or plane small tables but we’ll enlarge the use of iPad pro to a larger platform of Pro users.
The use of trackpad and mouse could obviously reduce the strain and stress for pointing on the screen: this is the real reason why touch interfaces don’t work well on a desktop computer. We know many people use iPad almost vertical on the desk and Apple itself sells a Keyboard for using it as a laptop: why don’t we mix the best ways to ergonomically use all the interfaces on the market?
In a world that goes toward virtual interfaces and the capability of interacting with objects in a olographic 3D space it would seem crazy but if want to have, use and work with a device with absolute versatility and accuracy we could use the iPad as a computer also with traditional computer tools like the mouse or the trackpad.
L’articolo originale in Italiano è su questa pagina.
