Month: September 2019

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I think the decision is largely made at this point. The fruit company is my tablet computing destination, whether I like it or not.

The dire lack of Android tablets with a stylus, the Q/A that matches Chrome OS’s rapid release cycle, and the shrinking number of companies making a ‘real’ Android tablet that is worth my time, has had me considering jumping ship for a while. Google’s pox upon multitasking making its way to my Tab S3, is pretty much the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Most of the software that I run on my Tab S3 supports both iOS and Android. Alternatives exist for the more systemy stuff at the edges, like the corporate printer or dealing with my file server. Pretty much if I find an analog to FolderSync Pro, the only thing I’ll really be losing software wise is free editing support for Microsoft Excel and Word. Before ending up with a Samsung that bundled MS Office, my long term solution was OfficeSuite Pro which has enough compatibility to handle documents at work. So for the most part I’m not worried much about software. It also helps that by living in Android land so long, iOS has been working its big boy shorts for while now instead of their update notes sounding like a baby’s toy.

When the 1″ crack in my Tab S3’s screen becomes terminal, I’ll have little option but to replace it one way or another, and I have had a very long time now to contemplate what that will be. For now I’m just happy the what the hell moments related to the crack are few and far in between versus my heavy tablet use.

In Android land: the only things that are viable replacements are the Tab S4 and S6, which are old and new successors, respectively. Negatives to both are they will also come with Google’s pox and they’re widescreens. DeX isn’t going to fix what Pie did to multitasking and I greatly prefer 4:3 and 3:2 tablets.

No Chrome OS device exists yet that aligns with my requirements, and the only ones worth paying for are too big to replace my Tab S3. And that just leaves iPads. Which for as little love as I have for Apple, and my lack of caring for iOS, solve the problem Android has been most screwing me with the longest–there’s a lot more freaking iPads to choose from that support a decent stylus than their are Android devices with a decent stylus.

It’s always been hard to find an Android tablet with a nice stylus, and Samsung while expensive has filled that role pretty swell. But they’re kind of becoming the only vendor to choose from, both in terms of an Android tablet that meets my requirement for stylus, and Android tablets in general.

I also find it kind of funny how this works out. In the old days when Android tablets were quite new, I found the iPad excessively overpriced and Android underappreciated; Apple has at least solved that with their expanded selection. Likewise, most new iPhone launches were followed by me scratching my head and wondering how people lived so long without essential features; iOS release notes stopped feeling like a slow as hell iteration several years ago.

And then there’s the fact, that I’ve never actually owned an Apple product. I’m more at home with an xterm than a Mac. More than a few of my friends have soft spots for fruity products, and have since at least as far back as the iPod and PowerBook. Me, never have. But I suppose there is probably a first time for everything.

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omgubuntu.co.uk: PineTime is a $25 Linux Smartwatch, Coming Next Year.

While I’d say it sounds more like a hack your pen than a consumer product, I have to admit it solves my number one beef with smart watches: cost.

You see, unless I can leave my smart phone at home there’s not much you can offer me that’s worth several hundred bucks. I don’t live an active enough life to need the cool fitness features and it’s unlikely you’re going to replace my instant messaging any better than Google’s failed to do so. Thus in the end, I still need a phone.

Most of my life between ten and twenty, I typically wore a watch. I also grew up in an era where a calculator and stop watch function was about as smart as most watches got. Then I got a smart phone around age 22, and shortly there after I just stopped wearing a watch.

I kind of believe that form follows function, and a traditional watch doesn’t have enough function to me that it’d be worth spending for a really nice one. My smart phone is more than I really want to carry but is far more functional than a dumb watch. It’s also got more features than a watch cool enough to sync to an atomic clock. In short, I’m not the kinda person you can market smart watches to, I’m the one in the back rolling his eyes. For some use cases smart watches are really nifty. They just don’t fit into my life. A smart phone is more practical for my life than what current smart watches offer.

On the flipside, I find the PineTime kind of interesting. Because it’s cheap and it’ll probably be the easiest to roll your own software for. But multiply the price by ten, and not even that would be attractive for a mook like me. Most really good watches, and most smart ones, cost more than that.

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Passing thought: I’ve had hard drives smaller than Nvidia’s driver download, nevermind flash drives smaller.

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Willow is disappointed that I positioned the tuna where she can’t get a sniff, and Corky tries to console her.

The response to their treat for the night is a rather different one.

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That my friend’s jumbo sized iPad Pro casually outruns my desktop, is a little perturbing from the perspective that my Core i5 is getting pretty damned old. But at least, it still does its real job pretty well and that job kind of demands a massive GTX card.

That old reviews of the Air 2 suggest similar browser performance to my Snapdragon 820 on the other hand, is both comforting and annoying.

Trying to make some comparative analysis from old data is also tricker. People’s choices in benchmarks have changed over the years, and in the case of iPads usually moot as you traditionally had no real choices, hahaha; meanwhile those of us in Android land, long had a lot more products to choose from.

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CNET: Nintendo Switch’s new SNES feature is ruining everything.

After reading this, I’m not sure if I should grumble or snortle for a number of reasons. But when I remember the difficulty of video games from my era, I kinda picture children today in tears.

My theory still is time oriented.

Big dollar games come out all the time. You play them. You move on. That’s what the industry wants. Games these days begging easier, some of that is good design and some of that reflects that we won’t be playing it very long.

By contrast the games I had as a child, all had long shelf lives. When I got my SNES, I played Super Mario World and Super Mario All Stars pretty often. Those were new, cool things when I was a little kid. When my SNES finally was retired, closer to the PlayStation 2 era than the N64, I still played them.

I remember a card game that I played around middle school age, called Yu-Gi-Oh. My Game Boy cartridge is sitting in the closet somewhere next to Pokemon Blue and Gold. You see, I used to play that Yu-Gi-Oh cartridge a lot. One day I figured out how the really simple A.I. worked. No matter what the long game looked like, the A.I. would calculate the best response to your move. Knowing this, it didn’t take much crunching to decide how to manipulate the A.I. and defeat it. Always.

Why did I stop playing that cartridge? Was it because I lost my interest in the card game? Nope. In fact, I still enjoyed the trading card game for a number of years after that. I stopped playing the video game version because it was too damned easy. It went from passing time with some fun to wasting time with no fun. Thanks to removing the challenge.

By contrast, the only thing that really changed about how I play Super Mario Bros is the words I shout at the screen 🤣. When I revisited the game in my twenties, I wondered how I didn’t smash it, and then remembered how hard it was to get new video games back then. Hehe.

Pie sucks at multitasking

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Things that Pie has wrought: Google’s curse.

Overview now has a more useful grid like view. Aside from the nauseating effect that happens when closing an app makes them all resort but at least it is really fast on the Tab S3’s hardware. on the downside multitasking is now chunky and fundamentally broken.

In the previous version the overview screen was a chunky phone centric sliding flipper but apps had a button on the side of their card, so you could open them in the current side of the screen. Now each app has its icon on the top of the card, and you get a menu when you tap the icon. Containing app info (used to be long touch/hold), open in split view, open in pop up (floating window) view, or lock the app. Which is a lot slower but at least flexible.

So instead of very, very quick access to snapping an app to either side of the screen: you get very slow access to deciding if you want it split or floating. The ability to just turn the currently running application into a floating window has been removed. Which is both good and bad: the gesture was easy to trip when you didn’t mean to but was also extremely convenient if you wanted something like a calculator floating over a web page. I’m not sure if the UI the device used on Oreo was a Sammy thing or a Google thing, but it was pretty nice.

Now here’s why I say fundamentally broken in Pie.

Splitting the screen and hitting overview used to place the overview in the currently active side of the screen. So if you wanted to replace one of the applications, you just tapped it and hit overview. Vola, really fast and simple and obvious. And good if you decided both apps needed to change before you were done.

After updating to pie: the overview ALWAYS opens in the bottom or the right side of the screen, based on whether you’re in portrait or landscape orientation. I have yet to find any way to invert the split apps–you used to tap the resize bar in between and have a UI to switch them. ‘Cuz that is useful. Now you’re stuck with the first app chosen being in the top/left side until you’re done. You might think the first app would show up and you could just select it again? Nope, its card gets removed from the overview.

Likewise you can only stuff in apps from the overview grid that were running. I used to be able to hit a button and select apps from a launcher instead of requiring them to be already opened in the background.

But really, whose fault is it for destroying the multitasking functions? Google’s. It’s Google’s fault. Why do I say this? Because my Google Fi phone running Android One and its pure Googely experience has virtually the same broken multitasking UI. The only real difference is my Samsung changes the string “Split view” to “Open in split view” and adds the popup and lock entries to the menu. Likewise on the phone sized screen it’s a sliding view of the exact same cards rather than a grid view of them.

Suddenly I realize why DeX became so popular among users of newer model Tab S’s that shipped with it. It’s not because DeX mode is that more PC like: it’s because Google fucked Android’s multitasking experience. And I fear, if I was to dig up the CDD for Pie, it would say OEMs aren’t allowed to fix it anymore, lol.

Of course my model being older, DeX is not a feature that was integrated into it. Much like how my model was the first to get USB-C charging but alt modes for driving a monitor didn’t show up until the Tab S4, which does have DeX. Reasons to buy an iPad, += 1.

I find it a great shame. Samsung has done multitasking for so many years, I first used it on my Galaxy SIII phone a very long time ago.  In recent years it became a standard piece of Android, which was a really good thing until Google pissed down the feature’s throat and crippled its utility for real multitasking.

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As I watch my tablet upgrade to Android 9, I find my mind flashing to when my phone updated closer to Pie’s release–and the distinct feeling that “All my icons are different for no good reason. Other than that: it’s hard to tell anything changed.”

But it’s worth noting, I use my Galaxy Tab S3 excessively every day, but my Moto X4 is only lightly used. Because unless I’m literally walking around in public or answering a text message in the middle of the night: there’s a 95% chance that I’ll use my tablet instead.

Both devices were released in 2017 and had Android 7/Nougat as their original operating system image. The primarily difference is my Android One edition got Pie around Christmas time and my Sammy gets pie to the face shortly after Android 10 launches.

That’s par for course for Samsung’s tablets in the past, except seeing three major OS versions on one tablet is odd for them; I had the upgrade to Android 8/Oreo to be the Tab S3’s final operating system based on previous experiences with their high end tablets. I’ve owned a lot of those.

If anything actually changes that makes me give a flying floop, it’ll probably rely on Samsung’s UI customizations. Because on the more “Pure” load my phone uses, “Damn it, my icons are all different”, really was the most noticeable difference. The bit about text selection might be more in my face on a tablet but wasn’t necessary on my phone, nor is it on my big screen; especially with pen in hand.

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First world problems: when you’re an Alien fan and you see Covenant on sale for such a low, low price that your Blu-ray collection must now become complete again.

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A few notes for my own reference, Octane 2.0 and Jetstream 2.

Scarlett: ~9,000 ; ~20
— Snapdragon 820.

Stark: ~23,000 ; ~65
— Core i5 3360M

Centauri: ~30,000 ; ~80
— Core i5 3570K.

Which amounts to my Tab S3, Latitude E6430S, and custom desktop with their scores rounded to the nearest whole number.

I’d also run things on Cream’s N3700 but it’s VNC session and various services make it an unfair candidate for such a test. Likewise I left Celes and it’s N3060 at work because my Chromebook has been gathering dust as of late in favour of making Stark work harder.