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The state of development of iPadOS version of Accordance


danielamari

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Greetings,

 

I would classify my post with the following categories: Speculation, educated guess and personal opinion. I urge my fellow friends not be worked out from this post. 

 

First, I use Accordance for the ipad extensively. I think very highly for it. There are few bugs that I would like them to be fixed. I would love for the more advanced features in our wish list to come to the ipad version of the Accordance. However, I suspect that we might be waiting for sometime. Here are my reasons:

 

The Accordance team is to be commended. For they have, to my knowledge, 5 development platforms: Windows, macOS, IOS, android and web development. 4 versions of Accordance plus web development. This is a major undertaking for such a small company. And yet their products, in my opinion, are the best in their class.

 

The way development has been conducted on the iOS version is exactly that: iOS version. It is a unified version, for the most part, between the iPad and the iPhone. I do not believe the team can afford to open a brand new development for a dedicated platform. Therefore, the kind of features that are seen are those which are common to both the ipad and iPhone. This is significant because the kind of features we are asking for are mostly advanced features for the ipad only. However, in order to do that, it will require the resources for developing a new platform. 

 

Furthermore, from product management point view, Accordance for iOS is seen as a platform limited to reading content. What I mean is that the immediate vision of the Accordance team is that the ipad is used to read the resources. If somebody wants to read a book or quickly look up certain information, the ipad would be a great device. However, when it comes to serious writing and sophisticated research, the user is encouraged to utilize macOS/windows versions. This reflects the kind of development resources in the system

 

Moreover, the direction of iPadOS/macOS and hardware development at Apple has possibly given a further reason for hesitation. It seems that MacOS and IPadOS are moving closer to each other. Not necessarily merging, but it is conceivable that in the near future an updated macOS app can be ported to iPadOS with little effort. In addition to that, the case for an iPad Pro for a pastor/minister was very strong in the past. Now, the new M1 MacBook Air is an interesting competition and compelling option.

 

At this point, given the fact that the iPadOS users being a small minority, I wonder if what we should be content for keeping up with yearly new iOS versions, fixing of bugs, and possible minor development.

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29 minutes ago, danielamari said:

At this point, given the fact that the iPadOS users being a small minority, I wonder if what we should be content for keeping up with yearly new iOS versions, fixing of bugs, and possible minor development.

 

I, for one, would not be content with just that.

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I probably havent used accordance on my mbp for 18 months now and mainly only use the ipad and iphone these days.

 

If you look at the version history, you can see that in the last 12 months we have had a lot of fixes and minor development and personally, i would trust for that to continue and im very pleased that bugs are squashed promptly when discovered.
;o) 

 

(i admit to having the 'deadly sins' of 'not being satisfied' and 'always wanting more' but the accordance team is helping me develop the virtues of 'patience' and 'creativity' to find different workflows while i wait!)

 

but i really do like the thought that has gone into the features we do have particularly around interlinear and the arrangement and appearance of our library!

 

B0FF1674-216E-4210-A466-AA20FDC39693.png

Edited by ukfraser
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23 hours ago, danielamari said:

It seems that MacOS and IPadOS are moving closer to each other. Not necessarily merging, but it is conceivable that in the near future an updated macOS app can be ported to iPadOS with little effort.

Unfortunately, it’s the other way around: Apple is making it easy to port  iOS apps to macOS, not vice versa. I don’t think the sophisticated macOS interface that took years to develop and assumes the user has a mouse or trackpad is ever to make it to iPadOS. I think that features now available only on desktop will eventually come to iOS, but will necessarily require new code for the user interface, fundamentally because a finger is a less precise pointing device than a mouse. This means controls have to be bigger, and it’s the reason Apple doesn’t provide the same GUI components on iOS or iPadOS that it provides on macOS.

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Actually, while I agree it is easier to go from iOS/iPadOS to MacOS, Apple is making it much easier to develop for multiple platforms simultaneously, including keyboard command support on all platforms.  They still are clearly wed to touch interface on iPhone, but they even support pointer (mouse) interaction on iPad.  I'm developing a multi-platform app right now.  Unfortunately, these are the newest technologies that require embracing all the state-of-the-art (Swift, SwiftUI, etc).  It's not necessarily as easy for older code bases to embrace this... and it's all still fairly new/immature (SwiftUI is only 3 y.o. at this point and is just getting some critical features — that said, it's already starting to outpace UIKit and AppKit in other areas).

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