When you’re tempted to go get a midnight snack but your doggo is so comfortable….
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? 😜
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.
Thus far, I think I’ve come to the following conclusions:
- Google is better at building a larger “System “, but will kill you with a hammer to a few major sore spots.
- Apple will favor doing well whatever they focus on, but will kill you with paper cuts to many minor spots.
I’m also pretty sure that those responsible for the design of iOS, it’s been a very long trend of people that love gestures. I’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 I’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 😁.
Siri seems to have the best level of tweaking I’ve ever seen. Really, I’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. I’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, I’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 Safari’s Tab bar is neat, but it feels more like waiting for a car’s cabin to heat up in the morning than something smooth and fast.
More than a few things are counter intuitive but fairly obvious. I’m pretty sure that in the course of time, I’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. It’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 Apple’s keyboard is really a useful trick. It’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 I’d have no clue it existed. Beyond that, I really wish Apple would steal Google’s cursor stuff from Android!
Of course the first test of the iPad Pro’s camera I make, is a picture of Willow, lol.
Since my phone is usually tossed in a corner somewhere, when I’m home most dog photos I take are taken by my tablet. Because that’s the camera I have without walking into another room 😛. Having a camera that doesn’t suck versus my Galaxy Tab S3’s was part of the logic in going for the 11” Pro, alongside my distaste for replacing all my USB-C with that Lightning bull crap.
If you’ve ever wondered how effective a trident would be as a weapon, all you need to do is get a finger caught between a dish and a fork while loading the dishwasher. Enough to go owey and break a layer of two of skin is all it’ll take to convince you.
No, you should not make like Roman gladiators while doing this.
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!
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.
omgubuntu.co.uk: PineTime is a $25 Linux Smartwatch, Coming Next Year.
While I’d say it sounds more like a hack your pen than a consumer product, I have to admit it solves my number one beef with smart watches: cost.
You see, unless I can leave my smart phone at home there’s not much you can offer me that’s worth several hundred bucks. I don’t live an active enough life to need the cool fitness features and it’s unlikely you’re going to replace my instant messaging any better than Google’s failed to do so. Thus in the end, I still need a phone.
Most of my life between ten and twenty, I typically wore a watch. I also grew up in an era where a calculator and stop watch function was about as smart as most watches got. Then I got a smart phone around age 22, and shortly there after I just stopped wearing a watch.
I kind of believe that form follows function, and a traditional watch doesn’t have enough function to me that it’d be worth spending for a really nice one. My smart phone is more than I really want to carry but is far more functional than a dumb watch. It’s also got more features than a watch cool enough to sync to an atomic clock. In short, I’m not the kinda person you can market smart watches to, I’m the one in the back rolling his eyes. For some use cases smart watches are really nifty. They just don’t fit into my life. A smart phone is more practical for my life than what current smart watches offer.
On the flipside, I find the PineTime kind of interesting. Because it’s cheap and it’ll probably be the easiest to roll your own software for. But multiply the price by ten, and not even that would be attractive for a mook like me. Most really good watches, and most smart ones, cost more than that.
Passing thought: I’ve had hard drives smaller than Nvidia’s driver download, nevermind flash drives smaller.
Willow is disappointed that I positioned the tuna where she can’t get a sniff, and Corky tries to console her.
The response to their treat for the night is a rather different one.
