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All iPads Only One Wish for iPad's

preyan

preyan

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 31, 2007
311
11
South Africa
I would seriously love only one additional function for an iPad and that would be the ability to watch videos whilst working on other things (sending mails, web surfing, etc). I really think many would make good use out of it. I'm not an avid movie watcher where it's all about deep concentration and no disturbances.
 
First thing that came to my mind as well. I'd love to be able to watch videos/Youtube, NFL Gamepass etc while surfing the Internet. There
should be an option to run apps like this in the top right corner of the
screen taking up like 15-20% of screen real estate.
 
The main use for my iPad is to surf the internet from the couch while the TV is on. I don't know how useful it would be to have a movie playing in a corner of the screen.
 
PIP would be awesome

a picture in a picture type feature would be nice for me as well. Even though i would still watch most video full screen, it would be nice to push it to the corner and check my email, facebook, or something else, without having to stop the video.
 
Anytime I play a casual game or work, I have netflix/hulu/etc going in the background. I like the background noise most of all, so PIP would be perfect for me, even if the picture is tiny.
 
They should defenitely copy Android in this. I bet you saw this feature in a Samsung tablet or phone.
 
Youtube did it.

This is something I've wanted for a long time...and I KNOW the ipad can handle it. Youtube already implemented a version of it in the newest update. You simply swipe the video down and it stays in the corner while you browse.

This could be a simple, system wide short cut for any video playing in any app. Just hold your finger on the video for a couple seconds, it will "wobble" and you simply swipe the video into the corner you want it. It will continue to play on top of any app you use until you touch and hold or double tap the video to restore full size.

Apple, make it happen. For those of you that don't want it...why? You don't have to use it. Hell, I would even pay apple another fifty bucks for this feature.
 
I wish iPad would have Kincet camera to understand American Sign Language for the deaf people. Much like Siri for hearing people. :apple:
 
I'd double the ram. Every time I turn around, safari is dumping content that has to be reloaded when I come back. Sometimes just switching between two websites. Drives me nuts.
 
ElectronGuru said:
I'd double the ram. Every time I turn around, safari is dumping content that has to be reloaded when I come back. Sometimes just switching between two websites. Drives me nuts.
Click to expand...



^ THAT

my iPad 3, despite 1GB of RAM, is always re-loading tabs. it's really annoying
 
My one wish is that they drop the 16Gb even for the mini. With the size of apps now 32Gb as a base model makes sense.
 
Well what you are requesting goes a lot deeper... Apple still limits the APIs for developers to do things system-wide/outside the native apps. It's a strategic decision from the early days of iOS devices to not allow apps to hog up resources and thereby compromise Apple's intended experience. Android and it's hardware was continually bashed in the early days because of unresponsiveness/lag due to the platform being more open and not quite as optimized.

Now that processors/hardware/more ram etc are improving in the mobile device world Android is looking better and better and providing devs with a lot bigger of a sandbox to do things system-wide. I have a ton of "floating" apps on my Nexus with negligible compromise on my system performance... It makes my tablet feel as though I am in a real multi-tasking environment not like iOS with saved states and push.

Back to Apple.. When you look at iOS devices vs Android on paper; Android blows them away in almost every aspect of hardware. Yet real world performance to the user it appears to be the same. And that is the way the Apple wants to keep it. They can do more with less and keep costs lower and competitive by having tight reins on the OS and what devs can do.
 
I wish some of you would understand what whilst you are a movie junkie wanting full deep concentration whilst watching a movie, others are casual watchers where we watch movies but not like others where we "sit still and don't make a sound...and don't blink" :D

I am not looking to take over the world with my ipad so from a hardware perspective, I'm fine. Though I know a lot of people like gaming and would like hardware upgrades.
 
preyan said:
I wish some of you would understand what whilst you are a movie junkie wanting full deep concentration whilst watching a movie, others are casual watchers where we watch movies but not like others where we "sit still and don't make a sound...and don't blink" :D

I am not looking to take over the world with my ipad so from a hardware perspective, I'm fine. Though I know a lot of people like gaming and would like hardware upgrades.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately I don't see Apple allowing any sort of APIs that would give you what you're asking in the near future.

You may want to expand a bit and look at other platforms that may fit your needs better.
 
DGPMaluco said:
I wish wifi version had GPS
Click to expand...

I think the reason why it doesn't is that Apple use a combined GPS/cellular baseband chip.

Tzuten said:
Well what you are requesting goes a lot deeper... Apple still limits the APIs for developers to do things system-wide/outside the native apps. It's a strategic decision from the early days of iOS devices to not allow apps to hog up resources and thereby compromise Apple's intended experience. Android and it's hardware was continually bashed in the early days because of unresponsiveness/lag due to the platform being more open and not quite as optimized.
Click to expand...

It has little to do with resources; and more to do with the fact that system-wide overlays provide a poor user experience.

Now that processors/hardware/more ram etc are improving in the mobile device world Android is looking better and better and providing devs with a lot bigger of a sandbox to do things system-wide. I have a ton of "floating" apps on my Nexus with negligible compromise on my system performance... It makes my tablet feel as though I am in a real multi-tasking environment not like iOS with saved states and push.
Click to expand...

That's one of the things I hate about Android. I'd rather have everything go through a single push service than to have each app install their own background message services (like they do on Android; even if you're not using WhatsApp it's still running a daemon to listen for new messages). Google's APN clone (C2DM) doesn't seem to have caught on, based on the number of 3rd party polling services I have on my Nexus.

Also, apps only save their state when there's not enough room for them to live in memory. People who don't understand it make too much of big deal out of it.

Back to Apple.. When you look at iOS devices vs Android on paper; Android blows them away in almost every aspect of hardware. Yet real world performance to the user it appears to be the same. And that is the way the Apple wants to keep it. They can do more with less and keep costs lower and competitive by having tight reins on the OS and what devs can do.
Click to expand...

That's because Android uses a fundamentally inefficient system. Android uses Garbage Collection, which has been studied and shown to require at least double the memory that's actually needed while also gobbling up lots more CPU time. The less memory you have available, the more CPU time it takes up.

With ARC, you should be able to get pretty close to the minimum required amount of memory and CPU cycles.

Read this. You can skip down to the section titled "all about garbage collectors". When it comes to technical decisions, whether it's the 32/64-bit transition or GC vs ARC, Apple get it right.
 
springsup said:
I think the reason why it doesn't is that Apple use a combined GPS/cellular baseband chip.
Click to expand...

It does. The GPS is not real, but a kind of proxyGPS like cell phones use. It's more power efficient, but will only work when a tower is close enough.

The good news is that you can buy a cell ready iPad, not sign up for service, and use the GPS functionality for free.
 
Samsung already has this working beautifully on the Note 2, which is one of the reasons I got one of those instead of an iPhone 5, and will be getting a Note 10.1 instead of a new iPad.

You can keep a chat/messaging window open on one part of the screen and a web browser on the other, and pull pictures or text clips, links or whatever from the browser to the chat. Or listen to music, or watch a video of course, on YouTube while writing an e-mail in the other. And the list of useful combos just goes on and on - I use this on a daily basis.

beautifulcoder said:
I do find comfort in the fact Apple would most likely never allow this.
Click to expand...

Tzuten said:
Unfortunately I don't see Apple allowing any sort of APIs that would give you what you're asking in the near future.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Which is a very sad state of affairs indeed. Many of Samsung's new TouchWiz features are little but useless bling, but split screen multitasking is a basic, unequivocally useful tool that we've had for ages on our regular computers. As of now, when the hardware can undoubtedly handle it, there's no excuse for not including splitscreen multitasking on a new tablet or phone (unless the screen is just too small to warrant it).
 
ElectronGuru said:
It does. The GPS is not real, but a kind of proxyGPS like cell phones use. It's more power efficient, but will only work when a tower is close enough.

The good news is that you can buy a cell ready iPad, not sign up for service, and use the GPS functionality for free.
Click to expand...

I think you misunderstand: GPS and cellular are handled by the same chip, but the GPS is "real" GPS from satellites in space. You can get a fix with an iPad in the middle of the desert, no problem (a friend of mine lives in the desert).

Locations from cellular towers aren't very precise, but they're faster to get. So the phone first reports the location using the towers (so you're not waiting for a satellite lock), and then it refines it using GPS once it's found enough good quality satellite signals to give you something better.

You're not getting GPS service "for free"; if you don't have service, the cellular carriers aren't involved. The location fix will take longer, but it'll snap to the precise position right away once it's got one.
 
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