Computers

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As I begin to settle into my main machine running iOS, these are the Android apps I’ll really miss big time.

Beyond that, pretty much everything I use tends to be cross platform. Much like how most of the desktop apps I use, compile and run on both Linux and NT: most of the apps I use run on both Android and iOS. Many of them are also similar enough that the deltas are local convention, much like how Windows and *nix builds often relocate where editing application settings go in their menu bars.

But of course there are a few Android apps that I’ll miss, because they aren’t cross platform.

Aqua Mail

There’s not many mail clients that I like. In fact the next in line are the Berkeley mail program and the Mutt, both of which run in unix terminals; one of which could still be used on a teletypewriter with paper in place of a display So it’s safe to say most mail clients are kind of meh in my eyes, and I’ve used a lot of them since the ’90s.

Aqua Mail on the other hand is a superb client. Between how well it runs on my Tab S3 and my Chromebook, I wish I could transplant the damned thing to my Linux and NT machines as well. Be it my personal e-mail accounts or business accounts, it’s become the gold standard in my sending e-mail.

FolderSync Pro

The cornerstone of managing my wallpaper collection for a long time has been FolderSync Pro. Over time it’s great abilities to pretty much file sync anything to anything else have been pretty awesome.

Each of my Android devices have at least three jobs.

  1. Every night, move photos to my file server under Camera Uploads/{Host name}.
  2. Every week, sync my interal storage to my file server under Backups/{Host name}/Internal.
  3. Every month, sync Pictures/Wall Papers with the master in my cloud drive of choice.
Combined with alternate methods of syncing my photos offsite, FolderSync Pro basically makes it so I have to worry more about powering on my file server after a power break than I do about my device’s local files.

Photo Wall FX

Been using this so long that I don’t even want to check the receipt. Nor do I want to see when it was last updated, it’s kinda orphanware now. Over the years, I’ve amassed a lot of wall papers. The way I have my Androids rotate between them at random is Photo Wall FX. In addition to that simple goal, it’s generally been good about scaling and cropping the wide variety of images to fit my screens.
I’ve actually been worrying a bit, how the lack of updates and quirks with Android’s evolution interact. When Google stops allowing old-ass apps on new-ass devices this would be the first one I’d notice gone.

ArtFlow Studio

When it comes to drawing with my S-Pen, I end up in ArtFlow. It’s the most full featured drawing app I’ve met, and over time got good enough that I stopped bothering to look. 
By full featured: I mean whenever I go do something the process is like I’d expect from an app targeting desktops. To get any better than Art Flow, you’d have to talk to people that draw for a living instead of making this doofus glowy and happy.

Juice SSH

Since most of what I do depends on a Linux terminal environment, like literally if it doesn’t involve reading web pages or responding to e-mails, I’m likely to be found in an xterm or on my tablet.
Juice SSH has been a long companion, I’ve been using it for at least 6 years now. First on my Android 4.x tablets and later on my Chromebook as well, where the performance beat the tar out of the Chrome SSH thing. If it were better at copying terminal contents ala xterm, Juice SSH would be nearly perfect.

Samsung’s Calendar

Ahh, I remember the day I first realized how great it was. See, I used to have to take my mother to doctor’s appointments and cover her copays. But my momma was the kind who used a paper calendar. I stopped using a paper calendar when I was still in grade school. Thus whenever we had an issue of something that was on her calendar but not on mine, friction occurred. 
Easiest way I found to solve that is when making the next appointment on our way out, just duplicate the event and update it with the new appointment. Actually it works so well, I do the same with my own health care.
So, I’m standing in the middle of the doctor’s office and looking at my Nexus 5, and I’m like, “What the !@#$, why can’t I just duplicate today’s event and change the date, like on my Galaxy SIII?”. In the years since a preference for Samsung over Google has become stronger. I mostly ignore Google Calendar on my current, non SamWiz phone.

Nova Launcher

Honorable mention goes to Nova because not only is it the best Android launcher I’ve used in the post ADW world, it beats the tar out of Apple’s concept of a launcher šŸ˜œ
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Comparison of technology:

Where I come from:

  • Have “alarm sound I want.ogg”
  • Send to Android via {Bluetooth or cloud thing or usb or thousand different ways}
  • Stick in Alarms folder.
  • Oh, cool the whole OS knows that’s an alarm tone!
Where I am going:
  • Have “alarm sound I want.ogg”
  • ffmpeg -i “alarm sound I want.ogg” -acodec aac “alarm sound I want.m4a”
  • Ahh fsck, I may as well install iTunes.
Of course if I was a normal asshole, I’d just put my alarms on my phone like everyone else. As opposed to my tablet. But hey, who said I am both normal and an asshole? šŸ˜œ

As for Apple’s part in this, their side of this was really simple and straightforward. Give or take feeling like I just teleported more than a decade back in time to the stone age of needing a wire to transfer files. At least USB-C is thinner than my null modem cable.

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Thus far, I think Iā€™ve come to the following conclusions:

  1. Google is better at building a larger ā€œSystem ā€œ, but will kill you with a hammer to a few major sore spots.
  2. Apple will favor doing well whatever they focus on, but will kill you with paper cuts to many minor spots.
Iā€™m also pretty sure that those responsible for the design of iOS, itā€™s been a very long trend of people that love gestures. Iā€™m still learning to swipe friend in elvish.
For the most part it has been a pretty good experience getting to learn my way around an iPad. It very much reminds me that Apple is a products company that learned how to do software and services, rather than a software company.

Random things I love about iOS:

Password management is freaking awesome. Rather than bake it into the line edit widgets like Google did, Apple puts a button over the keyboard that lets you easily bring up the password UI and search for stuff. It is the best freaking way Iā€™ve ever met!
The whole slide over thing beats the hell out of annoying floating windows and bubbles. Those suck. iPad slide over makes up for how chunky switching apps feels. I will sorely miss the double tap a button and switch to last app trick from Android, but will love and abuse the multitasking features of my iPad šŸ˜.
Siri seems to have the best level of tweaking Iā€™ve ever seen. Really, Iā€™m not fond of voice assistants but being able to use it with apps is great. Go into settings and you pretty much know what shortcuts an app makes available; kind of like how Android had shortcuts you could toss on your home screen, apps make such shortcuts available to Siri. Iā€™m less inclined to throw my Google searches at a voice thingy than I am to want hands free use of an app.
By being late to the iOS game, Iā€™ve probably missed most of the things that would really piss me off.

Random things I hate about iOS:

Compared to Android the launcher has zero value. Because who wants to make it easy to organize your apps automatically when you can just make people drag folders of crap across four screens.
Dragging and dropping is even more pervasive on iPad than PC, and that is no surprise given the same company made macOS. Which is fine, and probably a great paradigm for touch centric devices. But I find that it is painfully slow. E.g. dragging and dropping a hyperlink to Safariā€™s Tab bar is neat, but it feels more like waiting for a carā€™s cabin to heat up in the morning than something smooth and fast.
More than a few things are counter  intuitive but fairly obvious. Iā€™m pretty sure that in the course of time, Iā€™m either going go insane or be a happy enough expat.
I despise how clunky and slow editing text is on my iPad Pro compared to my Android tablet. Itā€™s less issues like keyboard management and more that it is a tap happy affair created by folks that love slowly dragging and dropping everything instead of quickly tapping and sliding a cursor pip around. The two finger track pad trick built into Appleā€™s keyboard is really a useful trick. Itā€™s on par with using a scroll wheel to move your cursor left/right and being able to suddenly mouse around: but I only learned this trick by poking around the user guide in a browser. Otherwise Iā€™d have no clue it existed. Beyond that, I really wish Apple would steal Googleā€™s cursor stuff from Android!
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Forbes: Is Google Chrome A CPU Hog? Chrome Vs FireFox, Safari, Microsoft Edge.

A number of years ago, before Chrome was really a thing I came to much the same conclusion: the web is a resource hog!

I had a 64-bit Linux machine that would be constantly swapping if I was using more than a few tabs. Tried changing between Opera and Firefox without any luck. It wasn’t the browsers being pigs, it was webpages making like Hungry, Hungry Hippos with memory. Javascript, images, network calls, heavy styling, etc. 2 GB of RAM just was not enough anymore. In the end, I put more memory in the machine and it sucked a lot less.

Yes, modern browsers are hogs, but not as much as modern web applications!

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

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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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.

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Never brothered read Intel’s errata sheets in the past. After reading the documents for some of the hardware that I have to deal with, I think I could use a stiff drink and a few checks for BIOS updates.