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Annoying differences in culture, or slow points of progress.

Android land:

  1. Copy files over network to Pictures/Wall Papers
  2. Launch set wall paper thingy.
iOS land:
  1. Copy files over…fuck that’s slow.
  2. Copy files over USB…gah still slow.
  3. Well fuck.
  4. Okay, Photos has no idea of how to import from my USB drive.
  5. Jack in to desktop.
  6. Launch iTunes.
  7. How the fuck do you make this music player push files to applications again?
  8. Clicks little iPad icon that’s not the obvious one.
  9. Where the heck is it?
  10. Google it and find directions that are out of date.
  11. Screw it. *click Photos*, *drag and drop shit*. Nope that don’t work either.
  12. Files -> On My iPad -> Wall Papers/…. -> share -> save image.
  13. Yeah, fuck if I’m doing that ~1,700 more times!
  14. Launch set wall paper thingy.
That’s just the short version of things I tried, being a stranger in a foreign land. Of my various attempts it’s hard to decide if I feel more trapped by the ’90s or the ’00s. So let’s just say it’s unlikely I will bother to change my iPad’s wall papers very often ™.
Also while I give kudos for being able to select multiple files and actually share them, *cough* save to the photos app, I would not recommend trying to select several hundred at a time and then tap share. You’ll just end up swiping the process away a few times.
Android’s nature of making defined shared places to stuff shit, and API hooks for Applications to resolve those is pretty intuitive to a nerd like me. Likewise the idea of making an application’s private files not usable dickable, rather attractive for many reasons.
iTunes, if you can find the right screen, pretty much lets you explore an what private files an application choose to allow or means of importing/exporting things they (probably) think of as a database. Which owes to the tradition of not having any real concept of shared storage that multiple applications can monitor. But it’s better than not being able to touch anything at all.
The only real forgiveness I have for these concepts, is once upon a time the bane of my existence was the amount of people that couldn’t double click a file after downloading it from a web page. Countless games were held up for hours because of the challenge of launching a map installer. I had kind of came to grips with the concept of a file somewhere between DOS 3 and Windows 98. So as counter intuitive as something like iTunes feels to me versus a file system, I do recognize if you can’t tell the difference between a mouse and a floppy disk, it’s probably easier to use iTunes’ model.
Or as I like to remember, remove choices, because most of us give up faster than I do 8=).