Less convenient, but more productive

Okay, and now for the more introspective bits, as promised above.

Reflecting on this experience, I realized that I don’t bother automating much on my Mac, because I know I can brute-force most activities without encountering too much pain. If I can accomplish a task in 5 seconds by mashing ⌘-C ⌘-Tab ⌘-L ⌘-V to copy a URL and open it in my browser, I’ll (apparently) gladly repeat it dozens of times per day for 14 years without thinking to stop and find a way to reduce that friction further.

My experience trying to do work on iPad has been much different. If I’m trying to do something ordinary (like opening a URL), iOS tends to be even lower-friction than macOS out-of-the-box, which I appreciate. But where working on the iPad really shines, ironically, is in how terrifically painful it is to perform out-of-the-ordinary actions.

For example, let’s say I need something a bit unusual, like saving web sites as PDFs into a specific folder and annotating them in a Markdown file. The dozens of taps demanded by such a task introduce so much friction that I was compelled to automate it. It rarely occurs to me to automate anything in macOS, both because AppleScript/Automator pale in comparison to Workflow, but also because the macOS interface is just good enough that no one instance of that action warrants investing the time into automating the whole process.

The aforementioned web-to-PDF action, implemented in Workflow

I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on why this is. Regardless of whether this phenomenon is by design, it certainly comports with Apple’s marketing ethos that the answer to every problem is “more apps”. If you’re trying to do something, and the only options available to you are high-friction, it’s as if iOS is screaming at you, “go find or create an app that does what you want!”

Trouble is, the locked-down, sandboxed nature of the first seven years of iOS releases put a bad taste in the mouths of most developers. For all the hype around apps from 2008 to 2013, a lot of what power users needed to be productive wasn’t possible within the constraints imposed by the operating system. In iOS, when some activity can’t be done elegantly, Apple has demonstrated a preference to ignore it completely than to risk half-assing it. This has served the majority of users far better than traditional desktop computers ever did, but they excluded people whose needs couldn’t yet be met under said constraints.

Apple’s willingness to say “no”, even when it pushes power users away, couldn’t be more different than Microsoft’s post-iPhone-era strategy for Windows, which — at least since they killed off the similarly-useless-at-first-but-nonetheless-courageous Windows RT — has been to tell users they can have their cake and eat it too. But my experience of spending a month trying to love the Surface Pro 4 showed me that Windows has ended up with countless points of friction, occupying a sort of uncanny valley between traditional desktops and modern user interfaces.

To this day, most developers still believe the iPad to be a toy computer. The prevailing notion remains that the only sort of people who “work” on an iPad are business folks who while away their days in e-mail and spreadsheets. Apple spent eight years iterating on iOS before shipping the extension points necessary to accomplish the sort of actions demanded by its power users. Heck, it took nine major versions for real hardware keyboard support to materialize. The iPad may be old news, but its usefulness as a computer is still a recent development.

Starting with iOS 8, the number of well-considered and secure inter-application extension points in iOS has created a largely-yet-untapped opportunity for custom-tailored, friction-reducing integration and automation. In case you haven’t been keeping score, there is scant little that can’t be accomplished with a combination of Actions, custom URL schemes, document providers, and (coming in iOS 11) drag-and-drop.

We think of these features as mundane examples of how Apple is playing catch-up in iOS, since “real computers have always had them”, but the comparisons are only skin deep. For instance, consider desktop browser extensions: the browser gives developers some privileged utility methods, but otherwise the deal is, “write whatever JavaScript you want and screw around with the DOM however you like and please don’t scrape people’s passwords.” Compare that to the thought that Apple must have put into rigorously specifying the data & behavior contracts between apps found in Action extensions.

This effort was foundational, because when extensions and apps are forced to produce metadata like what inputs and outputs they support, the operating system can later influence how users interact with them more intelligently. The reason that I find this exciting is because the constraints imposed by things like data type contracts — which some reasonably view as onerous — can facilitate creative automation elsewhere. It’s analogous to a dichotomy familiar to macOS apps, wherein a developer can use native UI controls (which benefit from greater OS-integration like VoiceOver and keyboard shortcuts) or can opt to build with web-based tools like Electron, which are relatively unconstrained but — at least from the operating system’s perspective — impenetrable black boxes.

iOS 11 represents the culmination of years of essential groundwork and a gradual approach to reaching functional parity with the desktop in a formal, thoroughly reasoned-out way. And while I personally don’t care much about the new iPad “dock”, I definitely hope the excitement it’s generated will goose sales and make developers give the platform a second look. It’d be a shame for all those well-considered extension points to go unused, after all.

One more thing

Aside from decreased productivity and increased distraction, another thing has changed about me since the iPhone released in 2007. I’m less kind and patient to others than I used to be. I’m generally more negative and cynical, too. I tend to be so drained at the end of each workday that it takes me a couple of hours just to unclench. I did not anticipate that switching from a Mac to an iPad would lead to marked improvement on those fronts.

But it sure seems to have helped.

I’ve been kinder, happier, and lower stress this month than I can recall in recent memory. Of course, I’ll need more data before I can reward a silly computer with that kind of testament. Test Double also happens to be doing great recently, and I’m still feeling relief over having just given the best presentation of my professional life, so perhaps I’m just riding that wave.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but think there’s something deeper going on here. It’s clear that Apple has spent years laying the groundwork for iPad to finally be a competent replacement to a desktop OS, even for a developer like me. What wasn’t clear until now was that the iPad might suddenly leapfrog beyond “just good enough” and start radically improve the lives experience of work itself.

Not bad for an oversized iPod Touch.