Year: 2019

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Looking at the iPad From Two Angles

Skimming through the Wikipedia entry on the original iPad, I found a reference to this old review from the NYTimes, and I can’t help but scratch the feeling that I probably read it a micro-eon ago closer to when I bought the Asus EeePad Transformer, my first tablet, or closer to when the article was written. Let’s just say that it’s probably been a long time!

In any case, it’s a pretty great double view on the iPad, and general tablet concept, and in many ways still rings true. I also find it a little amusing that at the bottom, it notes having made it into a print edition for April 1st 🤣.

iPads, flash drives, and VLC, oh my!

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A simple round of experimentation.

Loaded one of my flash drives with a nice collection of video files from my anime collection, to serve as a portable cache. There’s usually several forms of flash media in my tablet sleeve, alongside a super speed USB-C to USB-A adapter; so proper spot ^_^.

The Files app is content enough to open my Matroska (.mkv) files in VLC, and might be more video aware if I had gone with MPEG-4 containers. VLC is happy enough to do what I want, which is to play my files and have enough feature completeness that I can choose which audio and video streams to decode.

Probably due to running from USB media, it doesn’t seem to be able to use my m3u8 / vlc playlists. But I can’t say that I mind that very much, since I rarely use video playlists when I’m more mobile than Plex to my Fire TVs.

One of the negatives I’ve heard of VLC is its library management, which is kind of expected but quizical. VLC is a superb video player, and easier to teach mortals than how to run MPlayer. But it’s never been meant to manage libraries of media files; much like iOS was never really meant to manage sharing directories between apps. Over in Android land, I usually opted to use Samsung’s vidoe player and Solid Explorer, but I’m weird :P.

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https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1439852114

Nice to see Life is Strange: Before the Storm featured. Having played the original, I found it made the in between prequel more worth while than I had expected. I’d imagine a modern iPad could run it well enough, since my Xbox never broke a sweat.

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Surface reveals new holiday lineup and introduces a new category of dual-screen devices built for mobile productivity.

Yippee ki yay, Surface!

The refreshes of the existing stuff are somewhat less exciting; I might care more if the regular laptop can drive a eGPU over Thunderbolt, otherwise it’s mostly iterative goodness.

Far, far more interesting to me is the Neo and the Duo.

Surface Neo is the device I’ve long wanted to see someone build, and have a snow balls chance of not screwing up the productivity side of the software. The keyboard trick, is where I shout, “Fuck, yeah!”. Pretty much it matches up with the oh so wish it becomes a product, rumors from earlier this year.

Duo on the other hand is a long overdue device IMHO. Thanks to how Nadella era Microsoft has played out, I’ve been kinda wanting to see a Microsoft based Android device. It might not be as technologically innovative  as something like the Galaxy Fold, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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On one hand, I never paid much mind to the differences between PC and Mac modifier keys. And for the most part, if you just s/control/super/g most things will feel at home.

On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that the remapping of my various keyboards ctrl/super/alt based on how Macs do things, will confound and give me headaches when movements become like super+arrow = home ; alt+arrow = move by word; rather than fn+arrow = home; ctrl+arrow = move by word ; etc.

And then there is the fact that the key map in my head is basically an XFree86 key mapping….lol.

Because for the most part, I have lived in the land that Unix and CP/M wrought. Thus whenever I use quick editing shortcuts that are universal to GUI apps, as opposed to inspired by vi and emacs, I am very, very, very quick to execute actions like shift ctrl+left+left to select the previous two words.

If I am found laying on the floor, twitching, it’s probably Google’s fault. If I’m found laying on the floor spinning in circles, it’s probably because my Bluetooth keyboards are shared between a PC, and an iPad, and third things that are like PCs.

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Interesting. I post to my blog often enough that Shortcuts shows the create a post link in “Shortcuts from Your Apps”. If I run this from the home screen widget it works great: but going “Hey, Siri: Captain’s Log Supplemental”, I just get a blank tab referencing handoff.

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Behind the Scenes: Improving the Tag Experience for Evernote on Mobile

Kinda like where this is going. With my switch from Android to iOS, tags suddenly become less part of the pie rather than one of the largest pieces.

As a 90% interface, I find that the main win for Evernote is the raw performance the iPad begins to the table. Instead of sighing and waiting, it’s more like waiting for animations to finish than waiting on data to load. But beyond that I’d say it feels a bit lack luster, like it takes the worst of the Android UI and glosses it over with iOS conventions.

On the flip side they make it easier to print or export notes outside the app (yippee ki yay) and you can do some fancy formatting by entering a set of symbols that auto convert to rich text stuff, that I don’t think is supported on Android.

So yes, improvements are welcomed 😊