Apple

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Mac Stories -Beyond the Tablet: Seven Years of iPad as My Main Computer

Seven years after I started (slowly) replacing my MacBook Air with an iPad, my life is different, but one principle still holds true: I never want to find myself forced to work on a computer that’s only effective at home, that can’t be held in my hands, or that can’t be customized for different setups. For this reason, the iPad Pro is the best computer for the kind of lifestyle I want.

While my tablet life style hasn’t been due to health problems and having started in Android land, hasn’t been so focused on dealing with an operating system limiting my abilities, I really agree with the above excerpt. Particularly the part I have added emphasis to.
Working from Android, I’ve had pretty complete file management since the beginning. As much as I prefer apps and their own data, such as Evernote and Play Music over wrangling files around like the stone ages, it’s nice having comprehensive control. I hope that apps on iOS will become more attuned to the file system, because files are kinda nice for sharing some forms of data between applications. As opposed to cases like my experience setting up a custom alarm tone or wallpapers. Being a fuck ton versions late to the party, I got to miss the lack of a file system part and have arrived for the apps still aren’t used to their being a file system part.
Another perk of coming late to the party, is while I experienced Android’s growing pains for multi tasking, I don’t really have to re-experiences them with iOS. Samsung did the whole split screen a lot of freaking years ago, well before Google mucked with it.
Having only scratched the surface on the shortcuts stuff, I have to admit that it’s a large part of what makes Siri interesting, aside from being less of a pain in my Fi phone then Google’s voice shit. I’ll probably be referencing this article later when I screw with shortcuts more.
Accessories are another thing I find attractive about iPads. Android was pretty quick to bring support for things like keyboards, mice, hard drives, monitors, controllers, etc. Aside from Google Play Services combined with Ethernet breaking push notifications for eons, it’s been a pleasent experience using external devices with Android.
What hasn’t been fun is anything form fitting. Aside from largely generic cases adapted to fit specific models, the options have sucked. Turning an iPad into a clamshell ala EeePad Transformer TF101, has been a thing for years on iPad. Some accessories are easier purchased than made at home, if available to begin with. Not to mention how badly Android needs more than a hardware Specific  S-Pen for those of us who demand a real stylus.
Sometime I also need to play with the external monitor truck noted in the end; really I like the concept, and it basically reflects the fact that I’d like better external monitor support without having to run regular PC shit.
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https://www.cnet.com/reviews/apple-ipad-10-2-inch-2019-review/

While I’m not sure that I agree with the storage comment, I think the article’s parting comment is spot on. Pretty good one.

You see, if your customer thinks maybe they should have spent a few C-Notes more on that faster, sexier model that’s better than them buying your only product and thinking it’s a cheap piece of shit, and that they should have gone with someone else’s product. In that sense options are a very good thing, and the Fruit Co has done well IMHO to offer the basic, mid range, and high end models.

Most tablet goers would probably be best served by the Air and its excellent trade off between price and performance. Most actual people will probably be happy with the cheapest issue, and unless it’s your main computer, odds are no one needs a Pro. All depends on how much you live on your tablet.

Coincidentally, my 90~95 % of the time computer is my tablet and I have a usage around 26/64 GB, or just a bit over 40% storage utilization. On my last Samsung, the 32 GB was just starting to get tight but was still quite effective when you’re not full of games and videos instead of apps and books. While iPads note have decent support for external drives, they do lack the internal micro SD slot common on Samsung tablets.

Personally, I’d like to see tablet computing become more popular but my belief is that you should use what works best for you. That is to say: you do you, and I do me. Not everyone has the same computing needs or preferences, and freedom of choice rocks.

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Part of me wonders if iPad OS 13.1.3 makes the pen swipey friendly floating keyboard even more prone to doing its wiggle off screen act, and other bullshit—or if I should just reboot my ducking iPad Pro every hour. This is getting highly annoying when tablet == main computer.

Apple, debug your shit.

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iPadOS review: The iPad is dead, long live the iPad–Step by step, Apple is taking the iPad in a wholly new direction.

Ars’ is probably the best in depth review that I’ve seen of iPadOS 13, outside of YouTube videos.

While pretty much every freaking thing about the Fruit Company’s operating system demands you learn to swipe friend in Elvish, Dwarvish, and sometimes enemies in Klingon, the multitasking is pretty win. In my eyes: Google mostly frakked it up with Android 9/Pie, and the ubiquitous metaphors of stacking window managers just suck when you throw fingers at them.

Coming from Android land: the iOS home screen is pretty damned primitive. Like any more primitive and iOS 12 would have had me pounding rocks together to make fire. It still mostly smells of cave men in iPadOS 13, but has a longer beard.

The floating keyboard supporting swipe style typing, pretty much rectified my only true issue with Apple’s keyboard. Not that I like it being one glitchy mother fucker. The amount of times I’ve had my FKB decide to reposition itself, usually by zig zagging its ass until the drag bar is offscreen — or simply fscked up input, is insane for a released product. But when it doesn’t make me have to reboot my iPad it does work really, really well; much like Gboard on my Samsung. Like Mr. Axon, I’d rather see the input as part of the regular full sized touch keyboard but I’ll take whatever progress I can get.

Editing text in iPadOS 13 being improved, I don’t think can be overstated. When I first booted up my iPad Pro, I felt like trying to move the cursor for editing text was bad. Somewhere between having my hands wrapped up like a movie burn victim and fuck it, I’m returning this shit level bad. Seriously, the two finger trackpad trick the keyboard does is the only reason I persisted to see what iPadOS 13 would bring. By contrast, iPadOS 13 feels like someone finally admitted that the era of 3″ phone screens and being totally hopeless typing at all on the damned thing, is long since over; or needs to be.

I for one, look forward to 13.2 in the hopes of less bugginess–and have high hopes for 14.x being an iterative improvement on the system.

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iPadOS review: 50 percent more computer

Little surprised to see the top note about bugginess, which has been something more experienced than heard about from things I see or read on the Internet.

It does amuse me though that this article’s leading beef is the lack of multi user support. Which I think is only half valuable.

On our side of the coin, or at least mine: it is a Personal Computer world. A large part of the success of the microcomputer owes to beefing so cheap that we can all have our own instead of time sharing a larger system with our peers. In fact, PCs were really damned slow to become multiuser if you ran something closer to DOS/Windows than Xenix/SCO. But hey, even dumb ass Windows people had to get with that program by the 2000s 😜.

For me, my iPad is probably far more personal than my desktop. Much as your desktop is probably more personal than a corporate main frame. It’s just that like laptops, most  tablets aren’t cheap enough to use as a frisbee.

Where multiple users really make sense to me on tablets, are the case where you may have a communal tablet on a counter or table somewhere. In which case, I’m sure Apple would rather you buy two iPads for more than one iPad Air, or better yet just buy a new higher end model and repurpose your old model 😄.

For business and class room use, I think you can make the case for multiuser support far more seriously than with tablets in people’s homes. Where it may be more important that a device remain on the premises and within a certain area of operation. Not sure about commercial uses but to my understanding Apple already has some kind of multiuser stuff if you’re using a school provided iPad.

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Looking at the iPad From Two Angles

Skimming through the Wikipedia entry on the original iPad, I found a reference to this old review from the NYTimes, and I can’t help but scratch the feeling that I probably read it a micro-eon ago closer to when I bought the Asus EeePad Transformer, my first tablet, or closer to when the article was written. Let’s just say that it’s probably been a long time!

In any case, it’s a pretty great double view on the iPad, and general tablet concept, and in many ways still rings true. I also find it a little amusing that at the bottom, it notes having made it into a print edition for April 1st 🤣.

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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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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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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=).