Apple

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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 Google it and find directions that are out of date.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.”

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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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.

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AppleInsider: I replaced my Mac with my iPad Pro for a week — here’s how it went.

Kudos for not publicly blaming the app developer when you’re test driving a beta version of the operating system and relatively young features.

The concept that things aren’t difficult but more time consuming, and the feeling of jumping between apps is typical of pushing modern mobile-centric operating systems harder than most. Or at least that’s my opinion having been a tablet but since Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb.

What I think people should really ask themselves are three things:

  1. Do I really do that often?
  2. Is what I do most, smooth?
  3. Can I do this here?

When you do something very often it becomes more important how smooth the process is.

If you spend a lot of time shuffling data between applications, paradigms like: Android intents (sharing), drag & drop, and the almighty Unix pipe become more important IMHO. Spending time juggling file open and save as dialogs; etc can become a drag pretty rapidly when what you’re really trying to do is manipulate and share data instead of leaving a trail of temporary files. I get happier when I can quickly move my data between applications without having to go out of my way to make the transfer happen.

Just because a method of operation or workflow is different doesn’t mean it sucks or that it is great.

What’s the quality difference between one tap and two menus deep? How often you do it! We find ourselves doing certain tasks more frequently than others. You will evaluate a function in a spreadsheet cell far more often than you will lookup what function performs any given task. As a side effect it’s effective to be able to smoothly insert common functions with a little typing; a menu to find a specific type of function instead of Googling it is a plus. Having to walk through several menus and a multi page wizard as the only way to input data would just be deranged and painful for an application like a spreadsheet. Software for getting real work done will care more about the tasks you do all the damn time than software just trying to do the task once in a blue moon.

But here’s the one that tends to be most cut and dry: can you really do this? Yes, odds are you can or you will give up pretty quickly. Just because you can run a word processor on your phone doesn’t mean you should write that five hundred page novel on your phone. Just because it’s backed up to the cloud doesn’t mean you won’t cry when you drop your phone in the toilet either 😜.

Software takes time to mature and different people (and problem domains) have different ways of working. There is a big gap between what you do constantly and what you do occasionally, and that tends to be where it goes south.

Ahh, now I’m rambling 😂.

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Engadget: Engadget readers love the iPad Pro 12.9.

I find it curious that as things has marched in there is really two kinds of people. Those who think that tablets are garbage and those that love their tablets.

In both cases people trying to push the software tend to miss PC’isms that they take for granted or just learn to achieve the same things in different ways.