Apple iPadOS 16 Beta Stage Manager (stage scheduling) for the iPad new multitasking adaptation and poor experience and other severe criticism, some people said it is “fundamentally wrong”, and even called on Apple to delay the release and improve the feature.
In a Twitter post earlier this week, Federico Viticci, founder and editor-in-chief of MacStories and a prominent member of the Apple community, outlined his disappointment with the iPad Front Dispatch. The feature is considered unstable, difficult to use, and has user interface glitches in the experience, among other things.
“If Front Desk Scheduler is the future of iPadOS for professional users, I hope Apple understands that it can’t be rushed. We’ve waited years for this, but it would be better to launch in spring 2023,” Viticci said, suggesting that Apple delay the release of Front Desk Scheduler and reconsider its approach.
Front Desk Scheduler first allowed users to overlay windows and use an external display on his iPad. However, Apple’s implementation of the feature has not been as clear as some had hoped.
iPad enthusiasts have been eager for the company to better leverage the power and multitasking potential of the iPad, and Front Desk Scheduler is Apple’s answer to those calls. When Apple introduced the M1 Apple Silicon chip to iPad Pro in April 2021 and to iPad Air last fall, the narrative around iPadOS and its inability to take full advantage of the iPad hardware took a major leap forward.
The desktop scheduling was designed to work only with iPads with the M1 chip and newer, which is making the feature increasingly controversial. Apple believes that only the unified memory architecture of the M1 chip, originally designed for the Mac, can support the heavy lifting required for front-end scheduling.
With technologies like display scaling and virtual memory swapping, we’ve laid the groundwork for a huge leap forward in user experience that can change the way users experience things,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, who announced pre-table scheduling at WWDC in June. Our Pro users can get their work done on iPad.”
Desk Scheduler is one of the few new features in iPadOS 16, but it is also present in macOS 13 Ventura. While they share the same name and the same basic idea, the implementation of Front Desk Scheduling on iPadOS 16 and macOS 13 Ventura is quite different.
For example, as Viticci noted in his early overview of iPadOS 16, Apple is seeking to relieve Mac users of the often onerous task of having to perfectly position overlapping Mac windows to create the ideal workspace. With front-of-the-stage scheduling on iPadOS 16, the system automatically moves applications to keep the main application being used “center stage” while other applications “gracefully move to the side” when opened.
"The idea behind Front Desk Scheduler is that users will get a system that wants to help maintain the benefits of overlapping windows while providing users who don't like the overlapping windows of the Mac with tools that can alleviate some of the pain behind window management. Front Desk Scheduler is also responsible for automatically focusing on the "center app," which gives users the option to hide or show the left Dock bar and recently used apps. If the Dock bar is retained, users will be able to quickly drag new windows into the workspace."
Viticci took to Twitter to share two feedback reports he submitted to Apple on front-of-the-stage scheduling, which is still being tested. First, he suggested an easy way to move windows from the iPad to an external display, since that’s not currently possible. The other feedback report outlines how the system “breaks” the app’s workspace when connected to an external display.
To the latter report, Apple responded that it was “acting as expected,” which Viticci said was “puzzling. In response to another suggestion that it would be easier to move windows and space to an external display, Apple said after “careful consideration” of the idea that it would not pursue it.
According to the leak, in a departure from precedent over the past few years, Apple plans to release iPadOS 16 in October this fall, rather than the expected September launch with iOS 16. The delay in the iPadOS 16 release should give Apple enough time to address concerns around front-of-house scheduling.
It is unlikely that Apple will remove the front-of-the-stage scheduling feature from iPadOS 16 when it is released, although it may choose to mark it as a Beta feature first until it is resolved and refined. Just like the universal controls in macOS Monterey.
