An orange in an apple orchard
How to Customize the Look of Your Cursor in iPadOS 13.4.
This was something I had hoped would be possible after messing with the new mouse support. The default cursor is rather too damned tiny for my tastes, which I assume is an artifact of designers with 20/10 eyesight or a Mac thing. But it’s waaay smaller than I’d expect, coming from Linux and NT machines.
A little bit of tweaking later, and it’s quite nice 🙂.
Top bar: 09:06
https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1475021190
I can’t help but look at this Post-it notes app, and debate if this is an indispensable idea—or just the destroyer of my sanity, lol.
Typically I only use Post-it notes in the meat space when I have a high property reminder, so much that I should pin it to my monitor, or the like. Ditto if I need to tape a note on a piece of equipment because I can’t just scratch NFG into the property of others. Left to my own devices, I’m pretty paperless for about the last fifteen years or so.
But I know well the value of short, concise, orderly, notes.
Buggy behavior observed:
Yay, it looks like iPad OS 13.3 fixed the holy-crap-the-packets-are-gone level of lagosity when combining Bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Me thinks this will get some use.
And I’ve yet to cry bugs, bugs, bugs everywhere and not a fix in sight as hard as < 13.2.2~13.2.3. As far as I can tell the only knew issue is the mouse wheel scrolling is broken, and that’s hardly a problem compared to can’t effin’ type ‘it.
If I run a split screen on my 23” at a usable font size, I arrive at approx 119×52 characters of display.
Comparably, if I SSH into my machine with a font size easy on the peepers for the 11” screen, the results are a very respectable 109×32 characters display. Which is probably the Shelly app’s default, or a notch or two above.
Running iVim locally, with a default font that’s hard on the peepers unless using the external monitor: 149×47 characters.
Generally, I aim for about 80×35~45 characters as a terminal. Going around 160 is when I start consider :vsplit windows viable instead of relying on regular :split windows. Maybe I’m weird but I tend to like having a source file | header file combo in my vim session, when I’m afforded a big ass editing surface.
Thinking about these numbers, I kind of hope that Apple fixes the brokeness for keyboard/mouse support. I can use my keyboard, or I can use my mouse, but the moment that both are connected, iPadOS 13.2.3 decides that keyboard I/O should become like packet flow over a smoke signals modem. Which makes me less thrilled to dock my iPad until OS 13.2.4 or 13.3 happens, and cross my fingers that I won’t be stuck waiting until iPadOS 14.
I suppose that I could try pairing another Bluetooth mouse to see if for some reason, it simply hates my Logitech mouse, but I don’t imagine that I’d be that lucky with how much of a buggy mess iOS 13 has been.
Reasons to look forward to a knew iPadOS version: if I connect my keyboard or my mouse individually, they work excellently. If I have both connected: the keyboard lags at a rate of 5+ seconds per character with frequent drops and repretitions.
So basically, Apple seems to have broken the ability to use a keyboard and a mouse at the same time in 13.2.3. Nevermind that that mouse support and productivity are cornerstone goals for iPad OS 13 o/.
On the positive side, disconnecting the mouse fixes the keyboard distruption about as instant as the connection terminates. And restores it as fast as the mouse reconnects. So unlike most issues I’ve experienced with iOS 13 bugs, reboots aren’t required.
I find this less amusing when you take both the fact that I am more inclined to use my tablets with mouse/monitor/keyboard than most people, and that the touchscreen keyboard vs the physical keyboard is a delta of about 40~50 words per minute in my typing speed. And Apple’s floatly keyboard with the pen input is one of the buggist mother fuckers ever shipped.
One thing that I actually do like about using an iPad with a mouse is the spell check.
PC’s typically follow the model of right click → menu → suggestions or right click → suggestions on top of the context menu. Where the particulars of everything are application specific and very non portable, usually.
My iPad? Click the word → just give the suggestions and make you click again for the menu. Subsequent clicks toggle between spell check suggestions and the menu. Android usually just opens a context menu when you click the word, and keeps text selection different from spell checking. +/- some OEMs like to disable that by default (and Samsung used to remove the feature, way back when), iOS and Android mostly make it the OS’s job for text input things.
To cut down on bugs, Apple is changing how it develops its software
Well, at least it sounds like Apple gives a damn.
The report also says that Apple “privately considered” iOS 13.1 to be “the actual public release” and that the company expected only die-hard fans would update to iOS 13 within the short week between its initial release and the iOS 13.1 update. This is a surprising expectation, given that the company often publicly boasts of how quickly its users adopt new software updates compared to competing platforms.
And that’s just funny when you’ve got your own cult, or several.
My Modern iPad Home Screen: Apps, Widgets, Files, Folders, and Shortcuts
http://flip.it/jQ8Bd3
The idea of putting apps you frequently multitask with in the dock is one that makes me think. The small number of apps in my dock reflect applications that I frequently switch to, and plenty that I split or slide are somewhere in my home screens.
Most of my use for folders has been to group related but infrequent applications together. E.g. all the banking apps I might launch a few times a month get a folder. But most document related apps get an entire page of the home screen.
Largely I find it amusing as well. The operating system and apps are more giant phone like than Android tablets, for most of the platform’s respective lives. But iPad OS 13 and other recent iOS releases for iPad, really make the user experience suck less.