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Craig Federighi Says iPad's Cursor Experience Inspired by Apple TV
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- With animations turned off I find it’s exactly what a cursor should be, does what you’d expect almost all of the time. There’s nothing special about it, good or bad. Honestly being a circle rather than an makes no difference at all for me.
- With animations turned on (as they are by default and the setting is hidden) it’s a slightly subpar experience in my opinion.
- Not getting tooltips on mouse-over in Safari is unintuitive.
- The trackpad in the Magic Keyboard feels lovely, really smooth.
- Pushing to edges for notifications, control centre, dock and slide over is a bad experience for me. I find I have to be sooooo careful sliding right to bring in slide over otherwise the cursor just goes up or down and doesn’t trigger. Even if it was reliable it’s unintuitive.
Leave it to Apple to over complicate things. Should have just added the arrow cursor and called it a day.
I tried the mouse support on my iPad Pro with a Logitech Bluetooth mouse. I also have the Smart Keyboard so I figured they’d go well together.
I used it for a few minutes and said: “Meh”.
I don’t really like the cursor being a circle.
I used it for a few minutes and said: “Meh”.
I don’t really like the cursor being a circle.
PowerMac G3 Puck Mouse ... dear lord I forgotten about that. That thing was hideous (!) and I believe in Jobs got a moment of frustration on stage at Macworld if I recall. That aside at least even with its ugliness, the excuse could be made ... 1 button on Mac but keyboard shortcuts remained king.
I feel sorry for anyone that went out to purchase that puck moue.
I like how elegant that little dot cursor looks. Would be nice to see it come to OS X as an option.
Wow, so they purposefully made the cursor less precise. Lame.
the iPadOS cursor is barely any different than a Mac cursor, they just added animations and a snapping feature to it. If anything, it’s more lacking than a Mac cursor because it doesn’t show you the precise point of a pointer.
People like to regurgitate whatever. Apple feeds them by saying the cursor is supposed to represent a finger to keep it touch-based. Lame. Not a good excuse to make the cursor less precise, who cares what it looks like. Show the point, a cursor is supposed to be precise. A circle doesn’t suddenly make the cursor touch friendly.
it’s barely influenced by Apple TV, as that effect is only on the home screen and mostly used in the menu bar of apps
the iPadOS cursor is barely any different than a Mac cursor, they just added animations and a snapping feature to it. If anything, it’s more lacking than a Mac cursor because it doesn’t show you the precise point of a pointer.
People like to regurgitate whatever. Apple feeds them by saying the cursor is supposed to represent a finger to keep it touch-based. Lame. Not a good excuse to make the cursor less precise, who cares what it looks like. Show the point, a cursor is supposed to be precise. A circle doesn’t suddenly make the cursor touch friendly.
it’s barely influenced by Apple TV, as that effect is only on the home screen and mostly used in the menu bar of apps
it’s not how the iPad should be IMO.
trackpad tries too hard to be like a MacBook but it’ll never be better at anything than a MacBook. so why does it exist?
trackpad tries too hard to be like a MacBook but it’ll never be better at anything than a MacBook. so why does it exist?
I can't wait for this old guard of Apple execs to step down and let some new minds and fresh air into the company, than have them geek out about a cursor on an otherwise unchanging (and buggy af) OS and experience.
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and the butterfly keyboard
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and the butterfly keyboard
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I'm guessing most of these execs have quite a bit of life left as far as retirement goes. However, there is no guarantee that new minds bring fresh air. The air could be as stale as the San Fernando Valley on a hot summers' day.
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Here is where the mouse support in iPad OS fails me... it doesn’t track it like a mouse cursor.
So if you visit a website that you need to click in to and control, like a FPS game or something, it won’t move the screen unless you click the button and hold it down like you were touching the screen.
Change that and then we’ll talk about it’s design language...
So if you visit a website that you need to click in to and control, like a FPS game or something, it won’t move the screen unless you click the button and hold it down like you were touching the screen.
Change that and then we’ll talk about it’s design language...
Does macOS have any click targets that are 1 pixel wide? I mean, what’s the value of being precise when you’re always hitting an object several pixels wide? Just allowing for buttons larger than 1 pixel assumes that level of precision doesn’t provide a large amount of value.
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Which FPS game? I tried one at random and it tracked the cursor fine. My iPad is set to treat a touch as a click, though, so that may be a difference?
I don't use an iPad, but this looks really nice. iPads and iPadOS is heading in a great direction.
So one of the most aggravating (for me) aspects of using Apple TV is on purpose??
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We all better get used to things like this. Apple needs to show continued growth to shareholders. On bigger and bigger piles of money each year.
Yeah so they added a standard cursor to the iPad. which is great btw. but should have been there from the beginning....
and now talk about it, like they
the cursor has had the ability to change (or be invisible) since eons - you know that spinning rainbow wheel? yeah...
likewise the ui has always been able to react to the cursor, basically every button & link on the web is a testament to that... hell even animations aren't new, it's just that until very recently most ui designers opted not to use them...
so what's novel about the ipad's cursor? at best it's how all these things work together in 'novel' way...
omg i love apple products but leave it to them to make it out like adding a cursor is some Davinci moment. You added mouse/trackpad functionality and need there to be a visual onscreen cue--big deal. Like every computer in the known universe hasn't had a cursor since the 90s. Please.
The remote is a design for trying to barely meet a solution for multiple scenarios and trying to hodgepodge it into one device, while not being able to do any one particular solution really well.
It’s was like the product owner had a bullet list of ideas, probably from various sources, and said DO IT ALL! The design team was like hmm this looks nice. QA decided hey it works, I have a hundred other scenarios to validate, push to production. Then finally product owner was like Oh hey its agile, here’s a new bullet point, lets add game support, and I played a Nintendo Wii once, so lets make it do that.
Design was like “wait we need to rethink this out”
Product owner goes back to boss
“They want to go back to formula, but I know the deadline is this, they really don’t understand that“
“Ugh, well Tim won’t be happy if this deadline is missed, so just add the buttons, and make it a trackpad, we have tons of that stuff unused from iPods. Lets discuss this in our lessons learned.”
Product owner back to design team
“Hey we though of this, just add more buttons, we already have the foxcon guys building assembly, so we just add more!”
“But...ugh fine”
Product owner back to dev team
“hey guys, and girl, we have a requirement change, so just need to add gaming support, just a bullet point, so got UX team on board, and we’re just adding more buttons and oh yeah a trackpad”
“Umm sir the designs don’t have a trackpad”
“Oh those damn UX guys“
“Actually we’re on the call, no you didn’t mention it”
“My keynote did! Remember the meeting we had on it?! Lets get another meeting for putting together a lessons learned from this”
”So we’re going to program this when?”
”Oh we’ll just need to work a little overtime, Tim really needs this. We have to show value.”
Dev team alone
”So copy and paste the code, cut the tests, we have no time, and we can make it to our kids birthday parties, and we’ll inflate the hours a little so we can have lunch”
“Hey look, she sent the UX team this at 1 AM”
As I've enjoyed hearing myself say a thousand times, this is the result of two things:
1) Designers designing for themselves and for their "art" or "inner challenge," and not designing with a bigger-picture view and/or the ultimate user in mind, trying to fix something not really needing major fixing. This is what happens when something has evolved to be so darn good, all that's really left is to tinker and pick apart.
2) Designers leaning hard on what brought them to the dance (minimalism, for Apple), but forgetting that you can reach a point where you've outworked that particular tool (to where there's not much more left to minimalize). So your laptops need to be thinner each year and your controls/interfaces need to be simpler each year (while the things they do get more and more complex, ironically). After some point where so much as been reduced, then what?
This might be an insight as to understanding the meaning (and value) of aging. If we as human beings stayed at our "ideal form" (which I've always thought was age 26 plus or minus a few years), human nature would unavoidably drive most (or all, eventually) of us to tinker with ourselves mentally or physically to the point of eventual self-ruination. At least with aging, the "hardware" changes constantly we are each given real personal challenges and "things to fix" as time goes on. Things like an AppleTV remote or certain iOS/OSX/website cues reaching near-perfect (in practical terms) functional implementation are always in danger of being "improved" by eager designers or minimalist design "geniuses" wanting to push the envelope but who are too far removed from being a "real user." They are too blinded to laboratory conditions (where slippery iPhones dropped on the hard floors of development labs can be replaced by a new one not paid for out of their own pocket) where they fully understand how to navigate their delicate ever-minimalized hardware or systems because...they invented it; they grow blind to experiencing the value of intuitive design in items they're unfamiliar with upon first use.
Though it would never fly, I can't help but feel just like how I feel about career senators and congressmen, I'd like to see what would happen if Apple rotated their design & product manager geniuses after no more than 8 years, to avoid the blindness that develops, prioritizing their fulfillment to where they forget about prioritizing their ultimate customers...
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