The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
As someone who uses his iPad Pro regularly, I love all the multi tasking of the iPad.<p>I know many have written that they have issues with multiple windows on the iPad, but for me it&#x27;s never been better or easier. My main gripe is keyboard behavior which is very buggy, but not related to how easy&#x2F;hard it is to make and move apps around the screen.<p>The fact is that the iPad is only useful because of its software. In my case it&#x27;d be useless without Files, Working Copy, Blink, Wireguard, and Screens. Only 1 of those is built-in and still it&#x27;s a fairly recent addition. And it&#x27;s the latest version on iOS 13 which is really the version which turbo-charged using many apps together easily. I use these apps to pretty much avoid directly using my &quot;real computers&quot; as much as possible via VMs or remote access via Wireguard.<p>But, I think we&#x27;re only seeing the beginning of the iPad. I can relate to the feeling that <i>&quot;we should have more of what we expected by now&quot;</i>, but the fact is that designing these power user interfaces, actually redesigning them for touch while making them compatible with existing ones, is very difficult.<p>A great example for HN is how we develop like we&#x27;re in the 70s with text terminals and executing commands. Where on the iPad it might make more sense for the terminal to be rich like a REPL where commands&#x2F;expressions act more like the results of a Shortcut (rich data, not just text) or code might be edited as an AST instead of the text which allows the concept of a &quot;source file&quot; to go away and instead there be a source database. Instead of trying to rebuild the editors we had we build something else designed for testing, iterating, and managing the AST. Dark[1] is a good example of this, but currently focused on the web.<p>This is all <i>way out there</i> right now, but it makes me think that the iPad is still <i>just getting started</i>.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darklang.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;darklang.com&#x2F;</a>