Back in 2011, I was speaking at QCon London at the invitation of my friend and de Programmatica Ipsum co-conspirator akosma, and one of the conference’s community events was an iOS developer meet-up hosted in the conference centre. I think we had a speaker panel of the conference mobile track speakers: regardless, there was a panel, and I was on it.
This was when Steve Jobs’ analogy of PCs as trucks, iPads as cars was still fresh in everybody’s mind. Consensus in the room was that this made sense, that the iPad was an everyday computer where a Mac is “for pros”, and you couldn’t do a pro app, say Photoshop, for the iPad.
I was angry that a bunch of people who say that they are clever at making computers do things could so easily reject the idea that a computer could do a thing, particularly when it was a thing computers could already do. In a huff, I stomped out of the room, only to stomp back in a few minutes later carrying a flipchart. I turned to the first page and drew a big black rounded rectangle. “OK”, I said, “we’re going to design Photoshop for iPad. Go.”
Unsurprisingly, the room designed Photoshop for iPad. Nothing changed about Photoshop, or about the iPad, or about these people, except that previously they had been told by no less a person than Apple’s CEO that iPads should not be thought of as a computer for doing computer things. I had told them that it could be used for computer things and that they were the people who could make it happen, lo and behold, it happened. I don’t remember whether I had even used an iPad at that time; nonetheless, I led a team of designers who designed Photoshop for iPad.
What Apple were really saying with the trucks metaphor was “this is a new platform, please have low expectations”. “No Photoshop. No Office. Lame.” was not the review they wanted to see, and by controlling the narrative around what you should expect from an iPad, they controlled whether it lived up to expectations.
I think the point of my post is “we usually expect marketing to hype things up, beware of marketers hyping down your imagination”. I’m not quite ready to finish yet, though.
This year, of course, there are iPad Pros, for Pros, that do the kind of truck stuff we were told iPads are not for, such as Photoshop. This was inevitable. Unless Apple or Adobe went out of business, or the iPad or Photoshop really tanked, there was going to be Photoshop for iPad.
I’m wondering who wrote it, though.
I have no doubt that the developers at Adobe are capable of doing it. I also have no doubt that it’s strategically important for Apple in their new “iPad Pros are trucks” world, that there should be Pro apps for iPad Pros. I know that all of the platform vendors are happy to write ports of apps they want to see on their platforms, and give them to the app vendors to release under their own brands. To me, the story “Adobe realised this was a valuable addition for Creative Cloud customers” and the story “Apple realised this was a valuable addition for iPad Pro perception” are both convincing.
