Computers

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The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

Apple is a lot of things, some good, some bad; consistent is not one of those things.

I actually used to have a fairly high opinion of Apple’s design skill, until the first time I tried to help an iPhone user. That was somewhere around the 3GS or iPhone 4. At which point I wondered how the fuck anyone could use the things.

Over in the land of PCs and Macs, I kind of recognize that many oddities exist. A great many are also artifacts leftover from a time where Apple or Microsoft did a thing, and were probably the first to really do it, rather than following on the trail of standards and successful giants. But that feeling never has repaired my opinion of the fruit company’s software. Today is also a much more connected world than the ‘90s and ‘80s were.

Apple actually does make some great stuff, and folks that helped create those products and experiences should be proud of their work. But like anything else with ten trillion moving parts, consistency kind of goes out the window quite rapidly.

I will admit though:

How would anyone ever figure out how to split-screen multitask on the iPad if they didn’t already know how to do it?

Is the kind of thing, that lead me to start making jokes about having to swipe friend in Elvish.

The iPad has developed a pretty nice on boarding experience, give or take four hundred privacy notices, and the user guide in the Safari default bookmarks is well worth giving anyone that has never used an iPad before. But there is definitely IMHO, a trend towards learning to swipe and gesture in elvish.

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One of the things that I think people mocking tablets, often forget is how revolutionary desktops were once upon a time.

In its context: the IBM PC and many of its close relatives were not powerful computers by any means, yet they helped change the world. The 5150 was no where near as capable as expensive time sharing systems, but it was cheap, and it was good enough.

For under ten grand you could get a pretty nice setup, and for a few grand you could get something worth using. Most early PCs ran an operating system that was a simplistic piece of crap, compared to what you would expect to find on computers costing tens of thousands, but it was enough for getting things done. Combined with the very anti-IBM approach of openness and third party support it caught on, and exploded—effectively wiping out competition from previous attempts to build an affordable ‘Good enough’, and eventually becoming more ubiquitous than the more capable machines that came before.

Remind you of the rise of Android and iOS any? In many ways the extent, and methods that exploded Android into the dominate phone OS, and a major player in tablets, reminds me a lot of how we went from computers that were too expensive to be personal, and reached a point where literally everyone can have their own computers.

You know, that kind of makes me feel more positive at Microsoft’s efforts with Metro and UWP, lol.

Random neurons firing

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My habit of preferring the wall-facing side of the bed, and leaving the open side to the comfy dogs, remind me that I never tended to write much in bed.

Trying to update handwritten notes: the net result is not having enough room to starboard to move my arm: which impacts my legibility. I.e. having to micro-manage my finger muscles, both results in crappier writing and a more exhausting experience. Which also means my tablet will have a harder time converting my writings to more useful typed text.

This kind of got me thinking: about the days I used to keep physical notebooks and binders as my modus operandi rather than computers and things. And you know what the norm was back then? Typically, I’d be found on a step stool, in front of a tall dresser, because that was the only large work surface other than the floor. Plus that dresser was in my closet, owing to the lack of space we had, and offered easy access to additional storage.

By the time I really tended to update notes from bed, I had already reached the point of sleeping draped over a laptop and vaguely wondering how the screen stayed attached, lol.

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The iPad at 10: A New Product Category Defined by Apps

As someone that’s come to rely on tablets heavily, despite avoiding the fruit company for much of the past decade, I kind of like the notion of tablets as a middle category—because that’s where most people’s computing lands.

A long time ago, I preferred laptops to desktops for the portability. Today, I don’t really believe in desktops so much for two main reasons: laptops aren’t as underpowered as they used to be, and rack mounted servers pwn most towers if you’re really going for raw compute power.

Tablets kind of answer the ability to do most of what regular people do with their computer. But aren’t so tied to the concept of a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and tower; laptops both suffer and benefit from rubbing the same software. And tablets would mostly suck for running the same software as desktops, far more than it would from adding a mouse and monitor to today’s tablets.

For better or worse: software often defines are interactions with devices. Think otherwise? Try using Windows 95 without a mouse or keyboard 🤣

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Strange an unusual things:

When hostname.domain gets assigned to prefix.someotherip, yet hostname has prefix.manuallyassigned. Or should we say that Cream had its expected address but my router server decided another, unused address was to be resolved to its name.

On the flipside, forcefully renewing the network connection and everybody is happy again. *Shrugs*

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Buggy behavior observed:

  1. Apple keyboard stopped inserting characters into Safari.
  2. Can’t move Apple keyboard in floating mode, had to restart Safari.
  3. For a while, Safari wouldn’t drag from dock in order to go split screen.
  4. Split screened Safari and Google News – G.N. would no longer accept input events until I stopped split screen.
  5. Lockscreen in portrait mode, but iPad in landscape mode, until unlocking.
And that’s just since getting home from work. Notably most of these revolve around operating system components, text input, and multitasking: the keyboard, the browser, and an application that embeds the browser.
I guess it’s time to rebootenze the fruity device, again.
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GOOGLE ANNOUNCES TIMELINE FOR THE END OF CHROME APPS ON CHROMEBOOKS

Personally, I’ve had little care for most Chrome apps other than the SSH client. Browser windows and tabs were the norm for my interaction prior to Android support. Most that I’ve installed on my Chromebooks were more about having a shortcut in the dock or a dedicated window than anything else really app like.
I look at the end of native client stuff with a small amount of sadness, since it was an intriguing idea. But today, you’d probably be screwing with Web Assembly or whoever passes for that since I last looked in on the subject.
But then again in kind of weird. I don’t consider Javascript a good idea unless it’s legible Javascript rather than pimpy faced fad of the month Javascript. And likewise, I prefer application development for platforms like Android and conventional Linux to slamming everything down the browser hole.
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Microsoft is updating one of Windows 10’s oldest apps – but you won’t like the change

When you consider that Office is one of Microsoft’s big money makers for client side, and the main competition in browser space is an advertising company (Google), I’m not inclined to hold it against them very much. You can always install Libre Office or  Abiword if you really want free.

Rather: I’m just glad that Notepad gained support for Unix style end line markers. Most use I’ve had for Word Pad since the fall of 32-bit Windows has been to view text files that aren’t in DOS format, on machines that aren’t mine, or are in the process of setup. Prior to 64-bit Windows becoming the norm for NT based systems, I’d usually use edit.com for that purpose: but support for 16-bit DOS applications aren’t included in Windows x64.

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Things that remind me 16 GB of RAM isn’t enough for anything: when opening a nearly 1 gigabyte perf.data file in perf report, both takes forever and consumes ~92.5% of memory according to htop.

And somewhere along the way it exits with a message about being killed, and a toast pops up about my WiFi disconnecting. I’m sure the kernel OOM killer had a lot of fun.