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Yep, Willow is a smart one. She’s all comfy, lol.

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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.

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Happiness or sleepiness, I’m going to say both 😄

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Convincing Willow that if I let her eat the whole bag of treats, she wouldn’t be able to walk, it’s kind of hard to decide if the incredulous look on her face says “And then you’d call me fat!?” or “You mean, the bag is really that full!?!?”

Yes, you don’t want to know how many treats she gets.

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Annoying differences in culture, or slow points of progress.

Android land:

  1. Copy files over network to Pictures/Wall Papers
  2. Launch set wall paper thingy.
iOS land:
  1. Copy files over…fuck that’s slow.
  2. Copy files over USB…gah still slow.
  3. Well fuck.
  4. Okay, Photos has no idea of how to import from my USB drive.
  5. Jack in to desktop.
  6. Launch iTunes.
  7. How the fuck do you make this music player push files to applications again?
  8. Clicks little iPad icon that’s not the obvious one.
  9. Where the heck is it?
  10. Google it and find directions that are out of date.
  11. Screw it. *click Photos*, *drag and drop shit*. Nope that don’t work either.
  12. Files -> On My iPad -> Wall Papers/…. -> share -> save image.
  13. Yeah, fuck if I’m doing that ~1,700 more times!
  14. Launch set wall paper thingy.
That’s just the short version of things I tried, being a stranger in a foreign land. Of my various attempts it’s hard to decide if I feel more trapped by the ’90s or the ’00s. So let’s just say it’s unlikely I will bother to change my iPad’s wall papers very often ™.
Also while I give kudos for being able to select multiple files and actually share them, *cough* save to the photos app, I would not recommend trying to select several hundred at a time and then tap share. You’ll just end up swiping the process away a few times.
Android’s nature of making defined shared places to stuff shit, and API hooks for Applications to resolve those is pretty intuitive to a nerd like me. Likewise the idea of making an application’s private files not usable dickable, rather attractive for many reasons.
iTunes, if you can find the right screen, pretty much lets you explore an what private files an application choose to allow or means of importing/exporting things they (probably) think of as a database. Which owes to the tradition of not having any real concept of shared storage that multiple applications can monitor. But it’s better than not being able to touch anything at all.
The only real forgiveness I have for these concepts, is once upon a time the bane of my existence was the amount of people that couldn’t double click a file after downloading it from a web page. Countless games were held up for hours because of the challenge of launching a map installer. I had kind of came to grips with the concept of a file somewhere between DOS 3 and Windows 98. So as counter intuitive as something like iTunes feels to me versus a file system, I do recognize if you can’t tell the difference between a mouse and a floppy disk, it’s probably easier to use iTunes’ model.
Or as I like to remember, remove choices, because most of us give up faster than I do 8=).
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Thus far, I’m liking iPad OS 13.1 pretty well.

Here’s to hoping some future 14 or 13.x version makes the swipey typy stuff work when the system keyboard is in iPad mode rather than floating iPhone mode.

Can’t say that I’d mind if hover support was added to the Pencil, since being able to do mouse hover like goodness was a really sweet aspect of using Samsung’s S-Pen. But considering that is based off stuff that Android UI has had, like for freaking ever, and iOS is still pretty rudimentary about mouse support, probably won’t be any time soon.

Really, the keyboard part is what things livable for me versus iOS 12; the other changes are mostly goodies like not needing a third party file manager. Having to use the floating mode to type the way in used to isn’t how I’d like it to be, since it requires greater precision but I can live with it more than I can without it. To quote an old Toby Kieth line, “I ain’t as good once was,
But I’m as good once, as I ever was.”