As time has gone on, my definition of success is being able to be fat, dumb, and happy for a while.
Qapla‘
Month: September 2019
Corky, snuggling up next to my tablet.
Passing thought: in a more perfect world, Apple’s AirDrop and Microsoft’s Nearby Sharing would probably have some kind of interoperability. ‘Cuz at this point: why not?
For most of the rest of us used to heterogeneous more than homogeneous environments, these were never going to be our solutions to the problem anyway. But I find it kinda funny how that works, which is usually incompatibile solutions to the same problem and hardly a standard between them.
Despite how typical solutions work out, I’m also kinda glad for the flexibility. My first choice for solving this for a very, very, very long time now has generally been network file shares, be it between peers or my own file server. With the passing of time the options have only grown, and the amount of devices that call for cables or cursing the lack of Bluetooth/Wi-Fi Direct have shrunk.
It’s probably funny that I consider e-mailing myself the lowest, most insulting way to move a file around but I’ll actually Bluetooth a file without a quip. I’m strange.
I find it kinda curious how things work.
Traditionally, if you had a PC or a Mac: you operated on blind trust. Well, almost blind trust if you had faith in antivirus software. But by in large the architecture of these systems let your software do anything you can, so there isn’t a gap between you uploading a file to Google Drive and some random time-waster uploading your super-secret.docx file to someone else’s server. That’s just how far the security architecture got by the time Unix and NT came into existence.
More modern platforms that rose up around touch screened phones aim for tighter security. Typically applications get strongly isolated from each other instead of being peers on par with the user, and restrictive access to your hardware instead of equal to yours. That’s been real progress IMHO, and one of the things that I really like about Android.
Digging into iOS, I also find it kind of curious how this works out.
iOS seems to take a more shrouded approach to what applications can request, in favour of focusing your attention on what they are doing. You can view some top level data about what applications can touch, based on the privacy settings group. Which largely amounts to hardware features like your camera and common personal data like your contacts. Not so a technical view such as a friendly one. Trying to STFW about the perms apps have access yields rather different experiences if you swap the words iOS and Android around. So in the end, you’re really trusting Apple far more than the application, IMHO. On the upside, it’s easier for Apple to push patches to devices than pretty much anyone can push to anything Android based in practice.
Android on the other hand traditionally required applications to state their permissions in advance when the user installs the application. Thus the trust lays between you and the developer with a sort of contract like transaction. The move to runtime permission twiddling in Android 6 is a lot more like the current experience on iOS, and I assume adapted from what Apple was already doing at the time or had been planning. But it’s easy to tell what an app can do, and all the more possible to look up online what permissions exist. No perms to access your camera? Then it can’t. A little Google-fu and you can get a list of what apps can ask for, and grok at it to draw your own conclusions.
In the end though it still boils down to trust. Does a flashlight need access to your contacts or detailed location? Probably not :P. Do you trust Apple or Google to keep an eye on things? Well, if not there’s always a flip phone.
At least modern operating systems aren’t as really nilly as DOS and the old Mac system software was, in letting apps have total control over the hardware. Because let’s face it, most programmer’s aren’t super genius about every aspect of your system.
Making a brief foray into iOS games, ironically begins with République.
It’s been quite a while since the game came out (2013 – 2016) but it’s quite nice to see the graphics quality. Scrolling through the app store, there were three real reasons I opted to play: more serious gameplay than I’ll usually go for on touchscreens, far larger than your average app (~3.2G), and should show whether or not the GPU on this thing is worth while.
Beyond that, I’d say try the game 😜
I also found it kind of funny, the selection of banned books you can find laying around. More than a few are recommendations from family and friends over the years, and for better or worse ones I haven’t gotten around to reading, lol.
One thing I’ve observed is that iOS seems to prefer what your doing and expeditiously updating stuff rather than staying in constant sync.
Which I imagine is thanks to the history that iOS has, back when background sync largely meant go buy a DROID and the size of iPhone batteries over the years.
Personally, I think that makes things like photo upload less dependable but overall I prefer battery life. Normally I’ll put my tablet on charge when I go to bed; don’t think my iPad has tasted charging cable since I unplugged it Friday morning. Plus it had to recharge ~1/3 of my Pencil on Saturday.
Current charge level is when I’ll seek my charger during the day.
Pretty much my greatest worry with the iPad migration has been whether or not I’d simply lose my mind in the transition. First few hours were borderline headaches trying to absorb the system quickly, but that comes naturally with such migrations.
Thus far, I’ve been able to use it without going crazy. Now that most stuff is moved over, I’ve made it about two days with it filling in as my primary device and I’m still sane, and haven’t wanted to pitch the device out a window even once. Pretty good signs.
Friday, I opted to leave Scarlet the Tab S3 home and bring Nerine the iPad along. This worked out the way I expected. Only real interruptions to my work flow was not being able to swipe words with the stylus, which arrives in the end of the month release if you don’t want to mess with third party keyboards. Second is not having my Exchange account setup, which is simply solved when I get off my arse.
Friday night and Saturday was more like tablet life as usual, and iOS seems up to that well enough. Really does help that most of the apps I rely on target both platforms. Face unlock also has wide enough a sensor range that I don’t have to lean very far to unlock it at my work bench, and most times it has failed at home involved a dog in the way, lol.
Overall I think that this is going to work. Versus someone finding me mumbling in the corner or half catatonic with rage.
Mysteries of iOS:
Added Pluspora to my home screen, and this opens stand alone with no real browser UI and its own multitasking entry. Reminds me of what Chrome used to do.
Added Blogger to my home screen, and this just launches Safari with the appropriate tab being created. Like any normal web page.
When indignation turns to comfort.
The look of indignation makes me think the bribe, I mean pretzel stick, wasn’t enough treat.