Mobile Safari is holding the iPad back

Bradley Chambers (@bradleychambers) from 9to5mac and the excellent Out of School podcast does an excellent job of arguing the idea that the iPad needs to grow up in his 9to5mac piece:

I am constantly asking myself the question: why are certain tasks tedious to do on an iPad compared to on a Mac? It’s certainly not a hardware limitation.

He goes on:

The app holding the iPad back is Mobile Safari.

Yes, native apps are better.

Yes, web developers can build nice experiences in Mobile Safari, but they aren’t. Plenty of web services don’t have native apps. Even more of them have apps that are sub-par (I’m looking at you Google Drive, Docs, Spreadsheets, and Slides.)

And

Imagine being able to work in a native WordPress or Squarespace interface on an iPad with an external keyboard and trackpad? Imagine being able to use the full web version of Google Docs instead of the sub-par iPad apps? Imagine being able to do precise text selection on an iPad. This is what the iPad needs software wise. While touch-based interfaces have brought a lot of great innovations, I still struggle, ergonomically, to use them for hours as a time.

Spot on, as I struggle to make this post in my CMS on an iPad. He makes a few more suggestions of how the iPad can be more “pro” that I wholeheartedly agree with and makes a nice follow-up to what I wrote earlier this week.