iPadOS is a definite improvement

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Initial thoughts on iOS 13.1, iPad flavor.

My number one beef with text editing is resolved. Which is to say: it’s now more like an Android drag and drop cursor instead of a dinky 3.5” screen. The whole zoom and drag thing made more sense on the ridiculously tiny screen size than modern iPhone and pretty much any iPad size screen. Combined with the drag and drop centric nature of Apple things, this may be better than Android because of how free roaming it has become. Sadly you can’t drag and drop it with the Pencil 😔.
My number one beef with text input is only resolved if you use the floating keyboard. You can’t do swipe / glide style typing with the normal keyboard: you’ve got to set it to the funky floating view that has a more phone like layout. I’d prefer the freedom to choose whichever my task rather than having to go with floating just to be able to swipe words at my normal speed.
Blogger’s side bar for entering labels is now less buggy than Chrome for Android, which was about as glitchy as mobile Safari. So I’m thrilled with that!
I was already happy with Safari. Most people will be quite happy now that masquerading as an Intel based Mac is the default. The only time it should really make a decent at this point is with web applications like Google Docs that use pretty different stuff if you appear as a mobile browser. Me, I just feel saddened that it doesn’t masquerade as an ARM based Mac, and that those don’t technically exist. To be fair, I’d rather have iOS or Android than Mac OS on Macintosh form factors.
Interestingly, you can configure Safari to download files to a shared / connected server, but not storage providers like the usual cloud storage apps. I wonder if that’s a matter of implementing some interface or if Files uses something private or ACL based for that.
Using the Files app pretty much leaps from being the most rudimentary tools to being pretty complete. Zip file handling is more focused on the case where we pack and unpack small bundles of files than when we want to see what is in something from other people. General file management is pretty solid if you remember how much Apple likes long touch with pop up and context menus.
Connecting to my file server was easy peasy. Entered the server name, cream, and my login and it connected pretty instantly and seems to treat it as first class as internal storage. No discovery like you would expect from more mature software, and no need to fully qualify the address (e.g. cream.home) or stoop to entering the IP like bare bones software. I’m perfectly happy because it works great and I know the name of my server!
And it’ll probably be another ten years before I think the launcher has stopped sucking. But I’ll take the option of more smaller icons and whether or not I want widgets on a slide in rather than fixed position.
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A difference in printing:

Android:

  1. Office printer too old. Use third party app.
  2. Configure printer.
  3. Just works(tm).
  4. Open file from cloud storage.
  5. Save as new file to cloud storage.
  6. Go print -> select this printer from OS print dialog.

iOS:

  1. Office printer too old. Use third party app.
  2. Configure printer.
  3. Test page is binary.
  4. Fuck it, i”ll just use LInux.

Debian:

  1. CUPS does everything.
  2. Download file from cloud storage.
  3. Edit file and save as new file.
  4. Upload new file.
  5. Print.
It’s not very often that I print at work but there are usually two use cases. One is I sometimes have to print out Excel files as part of getting paid. The other is I sometimes need to print out my notes for sharing, either by paper or PDF.
For the most part, looks like printing from the iPad is not going to be a thing. Where as my Android was actually my least effort way to print stuff.
On the flip side, iOS apps more often offer the option to print shit than Android ones. For example, Evernote has a print option in its menus for iOS but on Android, you need to go through a browser or get a machine with any other client app.
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Google Play Pass bundles 350 Android games and apps for $4.99 per month.

I find it kinda interesting how the trends have been leaning with the subscription concept. The real need for folks to make a profit is usually what drives decisions; most on the other side of the coin want a decent experience, and if you’re lucky would actually pay something.

Right now, we have a reasonably successful subscription model offered on Xbox. Google and Apple are both launching game subscriptions for their platforms. I’d sign up in a heartbeat if Valve offered a good one for Steam.

To me, personally I think its a great idea.

Over in more serious gaming land, most of the revenue model seems to be focused on sales early in the game release cycle. After a while, being in a subscription package is probably a way for publishers to gain more revenue not less. How well that translates into mobile, I do wonder.

Generally I’ve long since stopped caring about Android gaming. There’s good potential there but short of something Android powered and as universally successful as a PlayStation or Xbox, it’ll never become the gaming platform I’d like to see; read enough it to keep a Window license laying around. But more than a few people play games on their phones and tablets, whether or not the games are crappy or spectacular, there’s plenty of players.

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Well, I can at least say Hey, Siri does the one thing I use OK, Google for.

My typical use case is something like this: “OK, Google: remind me at 17:30 to do laundry.” For a long time now my main beef has been that marking things done from the notification never works. Which bloats anything that displays reminders. Of late even trying to save a reminder has sucked: either the save button just because spins and saves it, or I answer the voice feedback and instead of saving the reminder it converts my answer into a web search. Glory of updates I expect.

When you consider my phone is an Android One device running on Fi, and this crap has been going on long enough that I’ve finally stopped using the feature a few weeks ago, it doesn’t bode well. Weeks of the voice thing, months of the spiny save button, and years of no concept of done. Kinda fed up.

“Hey, Siri: remind me at 17:30 to do laundry.”
It actually saved the thing.
The notification opened a reminders app and made me check it done.
Oh, wow it’s actually working!

SMH.

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It’s probably funny that of all the software that I use on my Androids, Chrome is the least likely to be following me over to iPad OS.

As a web browser, Safari meets my needs pretty darn well. Although to be fair, so did Microsoft ‘s Edge on NT, so I’m probably nuts 🤪.

Bringing Chrome along wouldn’t really net me much benefit, aside from syncing my browser history across devices. I don’t really use bookmarks anymore, after being a first rate bookmark whore most of my life. History wise, I’m less concerned because of how my usages tend to vary: bench machine at work is where most of the history I care about recording happens, and good luck getting a version of Safari for GNU/Linux, lol.

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As time has gone on, my definition of success is being able to be fat, dumb, and happy for a while.

Qapla‘

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Passing thought: in a more perfect world, Apple’s AirDrop and Microsoft’s Nearby Sharing would probably have some kind of interoperability. ‘Cuz at this point: why not?

For most of the rest of us used to heterogeneous more than homogeneous environments, these were never going to be our solutions to the problem anyway. But I find it kinda funny how that works, which is usually incompatibile solutions to the same problem and hardly a standard between them.

Despite how typical solutions work out, I’m also kinda glad for the flexibility. My first choice for solving this for a very, very, very long time now has generally been network file shares, be it between peers or my own file server. With the passing of time the options have only grown, and the amount of devices that call for cables or cursing the lack of Bluetooth/Wi-Fi Direct have shrunk.

It’s probably funny that I consider e-mailing myself the lowest, most insulting way to move a file around but I’ll actually Bluetooth a file without a quip. I’m strange.

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I find it kinda curious how things work.

Traditionally, if you had a PC or a Mac: you operated on blind trust. Well, almost blind trust if you had faith in antivirus software. But by in large the architecture of these systems let your software do anything you can, so there isn’t a gap between you uploading a file to Google Drive and some random time-waster uploading your super-secret.docx file to someone else’s server. That’s just how far the security architecture got by the time Unix and NT came into existence.

More modern platforms that rose up around touch screened phones aim for tighter security. Typically applications get strongly isolated from each other instead of being peers on par with the user, and restrictive access to your hardware instead of equal to yours. That’s been real progress IMHO, and one of the things that I really like about Android.

Digging into iOS, I also find it kind of curious how this works out.

iOS seems to take a more shrouded approach to what applications can request, in favour of focusing your attention on what they are doing. You can view some top level data about what applications can touch, based on the privacy settings group. Which largely amounts to hardware features like your camera and common personal data like your contacts. Not so a technical view such as a friendly one. Trying to STFW about the perms apps have access yields rather different experiences if you swap the words iOS and Android around. So in the end, you’re really trusting Apple far more than the application, IMHO. On the upside, it’s easier for Apple to push patches to devices than pretty much anyone can push to anything Android based in practice.

Android on the other hand traditionally required applications to state their permissions in advance when the user installs the application. Thus the trust lays between you and the developer with a sort of contract like transaction. The move to runtime permission twiddling in Android 6 is a lot more like the current experience on iOS, and I assume adapted from what Apple was already doing at the time or had been planning. But it’s easy to tell what an app can do, and all the more possible to look up online what permissions exist. No perms to access your camera? Then it can’t. A little Google-fu and you can get a list of what apps can ask for, and grok at it to draw your own conclusions.

In the end though it still boils down to trust. Does a flashlight need access to your contacts or detailed location? Probably not :P. Do you trust Apple or Google to keep an eye on things? Well, if not there’s always a flip phone.

At least modern operating systems aren’t as really nilly as DOS and the old Mac system software was, in letting apps have total control over the hardware. Because let’s face it, most programmer’s aren’t super genius about every aspect of your system.