Are Most Looking at the iPad With the Wrong Perspective?

Alfredo Padilla — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:56:15 +0000

In a blog post on Friday, The Omni Group, a major developer of productivity applications for the Mac, announced that it will be bringing five of its most popular applications to the iPad platform, namely: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, OmniFocus and OmniGraphSketcher. According to its announcement, The Omni Group is making a major shift in its development cycles because it sees the iPad as “the best computing device for most of the things people use computers for.”

This news certainly makes one think about the placement of the iPad in the computing world. In the few days since the announcement, many have panned the device, focusing on things like the lack of multi-tasking and a built-in keyboard when arguing that it could not replace a computer for most people. The refrain “It’s just a big iPhone or iPod touch,” has been heard over and over again when dismissing the iPad as a computing platform. After all, the iPod touch is certainly an impressive device, but no one expects it to replace even a netbook, no matter how big the screen is. Even Leo Laporte, usually known as an Apple evangelist, declared himself somewhat confused by Apple’s demonstration of iWork, indicating that perhaps it oversold the device’s capabilities.

The Omni Group’s excitement about bringing its applications to the platform, however, is just the latest indication that some disagree with this characterization. For example Joe Hewitt, the former developer of Facebook for the iPhone, wrote a long blog piece discussing how much more capable the iPhone OS is than people think, and that it only lacked a larger display to really come into its own. Apple has also made itself clear about the capabilities of the iPad with its demonstrations of iWork applications that are not stripped down versions but fully capable desktop-class programs in their own right.

One problem may be in how many pundits view iPad applications right now. Despite Apple showing us just what was capable with iWork, most pundits are still focused on the fact that the iPad can run iPhone applications. They are thus distracted by the idea of scaling phone applications up to a larger device. Developers like The Omni Group and Joe Hewitt, however, make it clear that they are thinking about things from the opposite direction, scaling desktop-class applications and websites down to the iPad. It’s also clear that, like Apple, they see this transition not as a step down to a more limited platform, but as a lateral step to a platform that offers opportunities you can’t get on a desktop or phone device.

It may be that our perspective of the iPhone OS is simply off. Many consider it to be nothing more than a cell phone operating system, so they look at the iPad and wonder how capable a larger device running a phone’s operating system can be. The reality, however, may be that Apple sees the iPhone or the iPod touch as a small iPad, and that what we know of as the “iPhone OS” was actually meant to provide the foundation for a much more capable computing device from the very beginning.

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Upgrades, Darn Upgrades and Statistics

Bob Rudis — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:22 +0000

Hopefully Benjamin Disraeli will posthumously forgive me for the major abuse of his quote (made famous by Mark Twain), but the fine folks over at the Omni Group gave us all a sneak peek into some very interesting data they’ve been allowed by users to collect on various details of the operating system their applications run on.

Even though this is a very rough snapshot of the Apple landscape — OS X users who have at least one installed Omni Group application that has checked for updates and allowed data to be collected — it does provide some fodder for discussion and analysis.

Which Cat Rules?

The Omni folks seem to have an even spread of Tiger and Leopard users. While we do not have hard numbers to go with the data, it would seem that any developer who makes a calculated decision to develop a Leopard-only application needs to realize they are targeting a fraction of those who upgrade or just those who have purchased new systems.

The most reliable and recent official information I could find (quickly) noted that Apple’s Leopard update penetration was at 19% by end of March 2008. Since the chart does not distinguish between upgraded systems and newly purchased ones with OS X Leopard pre-installed, it is interesting to see that there is a convergence, which would lead me to believe that we are seeing a slowdown in Leopard migration and an small, steady increase in new systems with Leopard.

This next chart was very encouraging (as I tend to care more about security than anything else) since it shows that Mac users are pretty good at updating their systems within a small delta of minor versions being published by Apple (at least when it comes to Leopard).

What’s Inside?

If there is any indication of whether the Omni data is more skewed to a certain part of the Mac user-base, it was this next chart. I am not ready to believe that 50% or more of all Macs are now Intel-based, however Apple has had great sales data to report quarter-after-quarter. Even if we take the 50% at face value, I think it shows that the Universal Binary is not going away any time soon and that makers of Intel-only software have to fully understand their market or have legitimate constraints for such a decision (e.g. VMware or Parallels). It also stresses the need for developers to test their creations on as diverse of a platform spread as possible.

I was surprised to learn that the majority of users in this subset of Omni customers also works with only one display and this makes me wonder if the data takes into account the built-in display on Apple’s mobile systems when collecting the statistics.

There Has To Be A Better Way

Atomic Bird, makers of (among other utilities) Macaroni – a handy system maintenance utility — has also published some other statistics compiled from their use of the data collected via the Sparkle auto-update framework. There is some correlation and some divergence in the data as their information shows a clear migration from Tiger to Leopard. It may be that their user-base is just more likely to have updated, especially since they are likely to care about things like that given the types of products Atomic Bird makes.

Because both examples are skewed to a particular software vendor, it would be very interesting to see more aggregated statistics from Sparkle or even the new Google Update Engine (once use of it takes off in the OS X developer community). Either project could allow for application-specific information to be stripped and system/component information to be forwarded to a central collector. Either service could then give some information away for free and possibly monetize their service by providing more thorough data to developers who want to make serious decisions as to how to proceed with development choices.