My latest hundred or so dollars to Apple for developer signing certificates has finished evaporating and the apps on my kids' ipads are now non-functional. The answer, obviously, is the one Steve Jobs gave while still in corporeal form: web apps. Alas, you can't be a prophet in your own house, your own town, or perhaps even the whole state of California where good web apps are concerned.
I used to use Cordova to bridge the gap and I still admire the framework mightily. Most of my apps were essentially only a manifest (and Apple's private key) away from happy functioning on my kids' machines. The latter point proves sticker than the former.
I've gone all Martin Luther and nailed my complaints to the wall. My biggest complaints about audio in web apps is that backgrounding and sleep are broken after more than ten years even for trusted apps pinned to the home page. OK. iPads now permanently mounted to the walls. They're on forever. They never sleep and they never multitask. They run a full screen web page. If the Apple ecosystem hasn't improved in ten years, there seems little hope now. This post is instead about two great devices that make this ecosystem go.
The first is the Redpark combo gigabit ethernet / charge over lightning / PoE box. My iPads are delightfully WiFi-free and always charged. The box fits in a 2-gang wall box behind the iPad. It just works like magic. Apple should be ashamed that they do not sell this box. Seriously.
The second is the iPad 'Windfall' wall mount from Heckler Design. You wouldn't guess that there are many different ways to fold sheet metal into a tablet mount. There apparently are. Just as there are a surprising number of ways to build an essentially all-glass tablet and have most of them suck, so it is with tablet mounts. The Windfall delights. The iPad mounts easily. The mount includes enough space for a POE adapter to be tucked inside for flush installs. The wall-mounted back bracket is drilled with the typical VESA holes and also for the holes on a 2-gang wall box, which is how mine are mounted.
In a more perfect device union, the Redpark box might have some GPIO and support WebUSB in addition to Ethernet, but it is hard to imagine such a box winning Apple's seal of approval. If Apple were the kind of firm likely to support the kind of user empowerment represented by WebUSB, I probably wouldn't need to nail iPads to the wall in the first place.
A Heckler mount and a Redpark adapter together cost more than some nice Android tablets, some refurbished iPads, and some dedicated PoE-enabled industrial touch screens on clearance. They made sense for me since I already had the iPads and the actual iPad user experience with full-screen Safari seems unbeatable for less than very silly money. If these iPads die prematurely from running non-stop then I'll probably replace them with more of the same.
