Computers

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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 😊

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Micro Center’s flash drives might not be the most sexy performing drives ever to grace USB, and personally, I think their memory cards are better. But in terms of the cheapest there is, I’ve owned worse.

Plus when there’s a coupon for a free one, you’ve got my attention, lol.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 x64 (UWP) (C) 2007-2018 hiyohiyo
                          Crystal Dew World : https://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

   Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :    32.740 MB/s
  Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :     9.412 MB/s
  Random Read 4KiB (Q=  8,T= 8) :     4.671 MB/s [   1140.4 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q=  8,T= 8) :     0.003 MB/s [      0.7 IOPS]
  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     4.665 MB/s [   1138.9 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :     0.001 MB/s [      0.2 IOPS]
  Random Read 4KiB (Q=  1,T= 1) :     4.438 MB/s [   1083.5 IOPS]
 Random Write 4KiB (Q=  1,T= 1) :     0.004 MB/s [      1.0 IOPS]

  Test : 1024 MiB [F: 0.0% (0.0/28.9 GiB)] (x5)  [Interval=5 sec]
  Date : 2019/09/30 18:53:36
    OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 18362] (x64)
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https://youtu.be/jFACcujmdE4

In all the years prior to getting a laptop, or hell before adapting fancier than vim methods of typing notes—I wonder how the – to + thing never occurred to me.
Generally speaking, if I tended to take more free form transient notes, I’d probably adapt the rest of that method to my notes. Typically my work notes revolve around pen driven swipe typing, and my home notes on handwriting to text conversion. Getting just quick unconverted handwriting usually means that I’m stuck in a meeting or footing it between server racks.
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Bug: noun: when you slide a notification to the side with a Pencil, and tapping clear launches Apple Notes instead of clearing the notification.

On the flip side, 13.1 -> 13.1.1 has made iPad OS feel less like a buggy mess in the name of selling stuff. Also, I am likely more of a stylus using whore than most at the fruit company.

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Apple’s usage of Swift more than double in iOS 13

And part of me has to wonder if this is a large contributor to why the leap from 12 -> 13 basically changes the obvious bug count to effectively zero, to I may need to start counting with a second set of fingers.

The worst culprit ironically, has been Messages—especially when used with slide over and floating keyboard.

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Over the past week, I’ve generally followed a rule: Scarlett, my Tab S3 shouldn’t be routine. Hurdles and bugs aside, Nerine the iPad has pretty much been a success.

Apple’s remarks about performance have been relatively accurate IMHO. If you buy good stuff and run it into the ground, the Pros are damned powerful; if you buy cheap shit than odds are the basic iPad is still faster. My systems range between Core i5 and Celeron/Pentium processors from the Ivy Bridge and Braswell era. Basically really good and really cheap shit 😛. Hardware has been very top notch.

Software, well if you are used to a traditional computer: I’d say that Android will feel more familiar than iOS/iPadOS the further off the beaten path you go. But at least thanks to iOS 13: I no longer feel like a Bluetooth keyboard is the only way to type a lot, so much as how to type punctuation heavy text or to input and edit text at a very high rate.

From the prospect of an iPad replacing my main computer, it’s been pretty swell overall. The fact that Android has pretty much filled that role since 4.2~4.4, and before that supplemented my main computer since 3.x, it’s also safe to say that I’m not normal.

For a long time now, I’ve had no qualms about leaving my laptop behind in favor of my Android tablet. If I was going to spend a lot of time compiling or expected to need to VPN with the office then I’d consider lugging my development beast along. Other wise I’d rock Android and save like four pounds 🤣.

Seems an iPad can replace my Android tablet well enough, in the ways that matter. Which means that it can also replace my laptop for whenever the development beast isn’t required, nor my desktop’s monster GTX.

Actually given the performance A12X has been providing, I don’t think I want to study how powerful the GPU is.