I’m afraid I may be the prototypical “unable to see the forest for the trees” user anymore:
I’M A MESS (of course all of you know that in spades…)
Not sure if this article was already linked here, but The Verge doesn’t love Stage Manager:
But as soon as you really dig into Stage Manager, it falls apart. At best, it feels totally disconnected from everything else about the iPad; at worst, it’s just broken. Way too often, it’s both.
Hope I didn’t screw things up (Mods - help) but changed title to iPadOS 16.1 beacus that’s where we are - and another iPadOS experts (actually one of the most watched and known - Federico Viticci) just documented the MESS that is Stage Manager:
OK APPLE - just port over MacOS and stick a fork in it already…
Speaking of which, it looks like the blue devils are already considering it, probably due to the failed reception of Stage Manager:
Stage Manager is so BRUTAL that I wonder where I ever got the idea that an iPad Pro could be my lone device (I know - it’s the size and other Apple goodies like iMessage, FaceTime, News+).
Stage Manager positively makes my SP8 a dream as a Windowing environment.
To summarize my view of Viticci’s article - Stage Manager is FUBAR
That’s interesting and I learned a few things, but…
In other articles I’ve read of his he’s one of the long term Apple users that also annoy me greatly in the sense of entitlement they have over the platform, and the default assumption that they know best and that any variance from what THEY want is therefore invalid.
This is not a new thing with Apple users, going all the way back to the first appearance of was called multifinder in the OS 5 days.
Or for that matter when the IIGS came out and all the yelling about the GUI muddying everything over the "clean feel " of the II era OS.
Not to mention that the article seems almost custom designed to generate clicks, which is fine to a degree as he obviously needs them to justify himself. In other words, it feels to me a bit like piling on.
That all being said, I’m withholding judgement positive or negative until I’ve tried to apply real work to it.
I absolutely agree that the public beta has been far bumpier than is typical of most IOS betas, but the scope and potential of these changes are far larger as well. Fundamental changes to the IOS user paradigm is not hyperbole IMHO.
I may come across as going easy on Apple, but even when it was announced some of the more sober Apple reporter commented that they thought this was going to be an extended and likely rocky transition.
And as an aside, I’ve never been able to pin down the reason(s) but in my experience Apple users are by far harder to get genuinely useful information/observations from in the beta testing we ourselves have done compared to Windows users.
Heck, I can say that’s true going all the way back to my Radius days, where just getting a factual description of a bug versus a treatise on all the ways we were “doing it wrong” or that it was “un-apple-like”, was an ongoing struggle.
One last thing, I think Apple has been mostly shielded from what a fractured state the monitor business is right now and trying to deliver Stage Manager has been a painful reminder to them.
Again, not making excuses, but more just advocating a bit of patience may be in order. Yes Apple could have (and maybe should have) waited, but OTOH sooner or later you have to let something like this out before you can really figure out where the deficiencies are.
PS: Stage Manager on the Mac is equally problematic IMHO
Man, the way that’s written makes it sound incredibly complicated and frustrating to use. Wow…
It seems like they really need something like snap layouts. Did MS patent the heck out of that, or are Apple just unwilling to copy that approach? Works super well, and looks clean in an iPadesque kind of way. That still doesn’t resolve having to deal with multiple stages, but it would at least resolve annoyances with window placement.
Okay:
might be workable for me, and would probably get me to fork out for an iPadMac, Apple Pencil, and Magic Keyboard (and a large supply of pencil tips to keep it from clicking/tapping) — where do I send my money for a test unit?
Viticci can come across as self-absorbed and entitled (yes, I am looking into the mirror myself), but I have to say I think Apple really dropped the ball here. I beta tested iPadOS 16 up until they took out external display support, and still I find window placement and sizing god-awful and counterintuitive. I know I am working with a small pallet here on an iPad Pro 11, but the Surface Go 2 is even smaller and it was far better to work in multiple windows than Stage Manager.
Worse still, I think with Stage Manager Cook and company have done EXACTLY what Cook railed against ten years ago when he proclaimed the Surface as a convergence of a toaster and refrigerator. I am also reminded by numerous reviews and commentators that the number of iPad users who really want a windowed environment is MINISCULE compared to the mass majority - so I have to question why not just let our small minority dual boot into MacOS and be done with it - treat us like a jailbreaking subspecies and maintain the purity of iPad for all the rest…
They won’t BECAUSE they fear they are wrong and if they let the Genie out of the bottle the market for 13" Mac laptops will be shaken (not crumbled, but humbled)…
Every time I see an article like this, Journey’s “don’t stop believing” comes to mind.
Never say never, but to say I’m skeptical is a vast understatement. And the validation of the “leaker” by saying he predicted the centered camera on the new iPad… anyone that was paying attention was predicting it…
Journey - Don’t Stop Believin’ (Live 1981: Escape Tour - 2022 HD Remaster) - YouTube
I’m going to give stage manager a try just to see what the fuss is all about, but I will say that although I love tech, there were already too many ways to manage apps in iOS, and stage manager adds even more layers of complication. I’m beginning to feel like my folks in the late eighties/early nineties trying to understand what a “file” or a “folder” really meant.
So far in iOS we had
I only recently figured out that you can drag and drop apps from the finder into a split pane, or that you can slide away one of the split panes while in the task switcher. It’s all so complicated or undiscoverable that it’s taking me years to notice some of these options!
So given all that, stage manager is feeling a bit daunting atm. Let’s give it a shot! 
The second. Window snapping has existed in the Linux world for awhile as well. Apple has to make it look evolutionarily simple when they steal others’ ideas and I guess they haven’t figured out the right marketing lingo to make it sound believably original.
Agreed. Combing the message thread on Twitter, what the leaker claims is the UI is macOS but the underlying system and app support is still iPadOS underneath. So if and big if (taking this with a mountainside of salt") this is true, the macOS on iPad would only bring the UI coat of paint over presumably to replace the broken-down mess known as Stage Manager. However, don’t expect iPad OS to replace your MacBook with an iPad anytime soon if you are a power user who needs the system flexibility and app support of true full macOS.
Playing around with stage manager for a bit I don’t immediately hate it. 
I kind of like that apps open at slightly less than full screen. It feels a bit less constrained/claustrophobic.
I did turn off the dock since it took too much window space away. I’ve started just using cmd-space to search for apps, much like the way I use the Win11 start menu, so not much lost there.
For now I’m trying if I can use it with Stage manager on, but still use it like before, mostly single app based, and see where the friction starts.
Side note, I’ve already seen the first graphics glitch, with the settings app showing the upper right region in the wrong color if you touch pan the right pane. Looks like this could use more polish.
If you guys don’t mind a running commentary… here’s my first annoyance.
You can have multiple apps open in a workspace (up to four), say Safari and couple of news apps. But: if you tap the three dots at the top for any of those apps and choose Full screen to focus on that app, there’s no similar menu item to return to the previous view. So there is a “maximize” (full screen) button, but no “unmaximize” button. The solution: drag one of the Cheeto icons in the lower corners to make the window smaller. It works, but it’s a little disorienting at first, and a bit more work than a simple unmaximize option.
To continue in that vein, I can’t believe I’m sitting here with my 2021 iPad Pro wishing for freaking Windows 11 touch gestures!! How the mighty have fallen.
In Windows 11 you can grab the title bar of a non-maximized window and drag it against the top of the screen to maximize it. In an iPadOS workspace you can’t. It wouldn’t break anything it seems to include that, but instead we need to tap-tap (once for menu, once for selecting fullscreen).
In Windows 11 you can grab the title bar of a fullscreen app and drag down to make it windowed again, at the previous size. In iPadOS there is no such option, you need to manually drag the window corners to get to a size you like. If you drag the three-dot window handle of a fullscreen app down in iPadOS, it initially looks promising: the window moves down, and it seems like you have left fullscreen view. But once you let go, it floats back up to stay in fullscreen view. Gee, thanks!
Another observation, in the task switcher (cmd-tab) there’s zero indication of which apps belong together in a workspace. No outline around a group of apps, no shaded box, nothing. Everything looks like independent apps, until you tap one, and three or four apps in that workspace all show up. Surprise! You better have some good window management in your brain, because iPadOS isn’t helping.
Thinking about all this some more, I really think that the artificial “multitask in groups of four” is going to be a failure. It’s just too finicky and confusing. When a user adds a fifth app to a workspace, the oldest app (I think) quietly gets kicked out into its own workspace. So unless you mentally keep counting to four, you’re going to be annoyed to find an app gone from your workspace.
Instead of this mess, give us multiple desktops and allow us to drop as many apps as we like onto each desktop. Sure you’ll have to cache/background some of them, but at least I’d understand what was happening.
I’ll keep playing with it, but for now the whole concept seems pretty confusing.
Here’s another one, pretty funny: now that iPadOS shows workspaces along the left edge (with Stage Manager enabled), it would make sense to also reveal those workspaces with a left edge swipe when you’re on the Home Screen. But: Apple has reserved that left edge gesture for… widgets!
It’s kind of funny (in an infuriating sort of way) that both MS and Apple have decided to have a left-edge widgets gesture get in the way of multitasking. Convergence! :vb-grin:
@Bishop That might be an M2 iPad Pro feature only, at least I don’t see any indication of it in settings or in the pencil behavior.
Yes hover is M2 only
Why does Apple hate its pencil users… First we got the Pencil gen 1 with its weird charging method and that had an auto-disappearing cap. Then users had to shell out for a new ipad and a new pen to get wireless charging and better performance. And now the $130 pencil 2 users are SOL again, and have to upgrade their ipad to get the best pencil features. Pretty off-putting.