I turned on Stage Manager right away on my iPad after installing the new OS. I was surprised by how much I like it, at least the promise of it. I find myself switching back to “traditional” iPad multitasking (Full Screen, Split View, and Slide Over) to do certain things, but generally I have felt comfortable with Stage Manager. I think it’s very promising in a number of ways. I recently reported feedback to Apple through the Feedback Assistant wrote essentially the same thing:
I think Stage Manager is wonderful and transformative. It has the promise to be a really powerful means to interact with iPad, to meld the interaction models between iPad and macOS, and to greatly improve how we manage our activities on a computer. So, kudos to you for experimenting with this idea and bringing it to fruition.
There are things about it that seem in desperate need of improvement, though. It’s weird in that Stage Manager seems very intuitive in a number aways, and altogether non-intuitive in other ways. [Edit: I added some bolding to various sections of this longish post to make it easier to digest and navigate.]
Here are my take aways. Note that I have my Stage Manager running with Recent Apps and the Dock hidden.
Since I did not play the beta game this season, I seem to have missed out on all the major bugs. Stage Manager seems to operate “flawlessly,” in terms of mechanics for me: I can open; shuffle around windows; add new windows; close windows; resize windows; move windows on and off the stage; add multiple instances of windows; etc. I’ve seen some things I’d describe as strange behavior, but none of them have repeated such that I can describe them, and I have no idea whether they are attributable to Stage Manager or not. So, take my description of “flawlessness,” with a grain or two of salt.
I have observed the issue of not having complete freedom to resize windows any which way, but so far that limitation has not been a hindrance and I’ve been able to size and position windows pretty much how I want them. What I have noticed, though, is that some third-party apps don’t seem to repaint the screen quite right after a resize. I have windows with text boxes where I have paragraphs of text, but only a line or two of text shows, even though the window size appears to be large enough to show more of the text. Maybe there is some optimizations the app developers must address to make sure their apps work optimally under Stage Manager.
The default window size when you open a new app on a stage, seems generally good but sometimes feels cramped. In those cases, I just expand the window or use the full-screen option. That seems like a “duh” comment, but after using iPads for years not having to think about adjusting the size of an app, it’s a bit of a mental switch to be thinking about it.
Moving information between apps seems so much better. No matter how good Split View and Slide Over have been, swiping the iPad to a new space takes some switch-over time. That switch over time is avoided when you have the apps you need on the same active stage or in Recent Apps. That’s a nice touch.
I’m so comfortable working in Split View and Slide Over, that it’s been a bit of a paradigm shift in working this way and I’m not adjusted yet. I miss not having Slide Over in Stage Manager - as others have also struggled with. Stage Manager (even w/o Slide Over) may be a better model in the long run, but I do not have enough experience to weigh in on that yet. What I think would be ideal (at the moment) is having Stage Manager and Traditional iPad Multitasking coexisting side-by-side allowing the user to seamlessly move between both. See my comments below on shortcuts as to why I’m thinking this way.
Moving apps between app sets seems to be where the most work needs to be done in my view. I’m still not totally clear on how to get an app from Recent Apps into my current stage if that app is part of an app set itself (and I don’t want all the apps from the set coming on the stage). Here is what I asked Apple to do:
When you have an app set that is accessible in recent apps, it would be ideal if you could “open up the pile” and drag over any app in the pile onto the active stage.
I do really like, though, how you can bring in an entire app set onto the current stage by selecting add new window and selecting an app set from the App Switcher screen. If you have one app open on the stage, you can bring in a set that already has up to three apps in it onto the current stage. (If the app set in the window switcher already has four apps in the set, the iPad will just open that set and bring it on the current stage, pushing the formerly staged app into Recent Apps. That seems like a pretty good way to handle the situation to me.)
Lastly, I think if Apple could open up functionality for Stage Manager in the Shortcuts app, that would be really powerful for creating workflows. Here was my suggestion.
Shortcuts support should be prioritized for Stage Manager because it is such a fantastic productivity tool. Being able to use Shortcuts to seamlessly work between iPad traditional multitasking (Full Screen, Split View, and Slide Over) and Stage Manager to create app sets, put them on the stage, “clean” the stage by closing the set and transitioning to some other app set, etc. could be a powerful means of controlling one’s work flow. Apple could even pre-populate the gallery with starter shortcuts.
The kinds of functionality I’d want from Shortcuts would be the following:
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Detect whether Stage Manager is on or off.
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Switch Stage Manager on/off.
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With Stage Manager on:
a. Open a single app in a new stage [either a new window or activate the most recently used instance, at the user’s option; this way the user does not have to break-apart an existing app set she or he wants to keep together] on either the iPad display or the connected external display;
b. open the app to a specified size: default, narrow, or full screen;
c. Create app sets on either the iPad display or the connected external display;
d. If the app set is
(i) two windows, open them wth the default orientation or 1/2 and 1/2 (similar to Split View).
(ii) three windows, open them with the default orientation, or across the screen divided 1/3 each; or
(iii) four windows, open them with the default orientation.e. Close app sets (i.e., close out apps on the stage in favor of a different app or app set); and
f. move apps between displays from either the another display’s stage or recent apps.
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With Stage Manager off: Open an app in full screen or split view [existing functionality] but allow a toggle to activate (i) the most recently used instance [current functionality]; (ii) a new instance of the app [this way the user does not have to break-apart an existing app set she or he wants to keep together]; or (iii) an already open instance of the app that the user selects from a menu [this way the user can continue to work in an already open window of an app].