Qlab on iPad?

[Pip]

Hello Everyone!

This is perhaps a very naive question - but given we now have iPads that effectively have the guts of Macs in the M series chips, and which have mouse/ keyboard support, and have at least a degree of file management exposed to the user, USBC for data transport and input/ output of sound, video & network, is there any technical reason why ‘full fat’ Qlab couldn’t be made to run on iPads?

Go Button is a great app, but it’s naturally more limited than Qlab, and I’d dearly love to be able to just run Qlab natively on the iPad. Maybe I’m the only one?!

Apologies if this is a question that have been asked before!

Pip

[sam kusnetz]

On Jun 14, 2024 at 2:06:40 PM, Pip <pip....@gmail.com> wrote:

This is perhaps a very naive question - but given we now have iPads that effectively have the guts of Macs in the M series chips, and which have mouse/ keyboard support, and have at least a degree of file management exposed to the user, USBC for data transport and input/ output of sound, video & network, is there any technical reason why ‘full fat’ Qlab couldn’t be made to run on iPads?

Even though the Mac and the iPad share a system-on-a-chip, they remain very different systems. There are a few reasons why this would not be a small task…

The biggest one is that iPadOS and macOS are very different, and QLab is written using several “toolboxes” from macOS. There are equivalents in iPadOS, but none of them are direct replacements so it would be actually a very big job switching over. A large amount of the code of QLab would need to be entirely rewritten.

Another big reason is that iPads have very limited sound capabilities. On your Mac, if you’re playing a cue in QLab and then you open Music and start playing a track, QLab keeps playing. You just hear sound from both programs at once. On the iPad, playing audio in any program stops playback in other programs. Needless to say, that is not great for QLab folks!

For video, it’s almost worse… you can connect a single external screen to an iPad, but iPadOS maintains very strict control over how it can be used. Programs are barely allowed to know about it. It would be very hard if not impossible to achieve the same video output powers of QLab on an iPad.

iPad support for keyboards is good, but pointing devices work very differently. iPads have one USB-C port only, so you’d need to buy a dock just to allow an iPad to connect to power and an audio interface at the same time… the list goes on.

So!

I do not want to seem like I am against the iPad. Far from it; I love my iPad. I only want to illustrate that iPads are just about as different from Macs as they ever were, and rebuilding QLab to run on an iPad is not a simple affair. To do it properly would take a lot of careful consideration, hard choices, and a ton of work. I would never say never, but we have no immediate plans of this kind.

Best

Sam

[Pip]

Wow, thanks for taking the time for such a detailed answer!

I see - I knew about the audio limitation but could figure ways round that - didn’t realise there was such a deep seated difference in the ‘toolboxes’ available to developers!

Thanks again for taking the time!

[Andy Kanturek]

The next best thing is to run QLab Remote on iPad or iPhone.  You can find documentation at:

On Jun 14, 2024, at 2:05 PM, Pip <pip....@gmail.com> wrote:

Wow, thanks for taking the time for such a detailed answer!

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[Pip]

Yes, have the remote app and it’s great - but not quite the same thing, still requires a Mac to be present!