Top bar: 09:06
Clock over the Notification Center: 09:06
Widget on the home screen: 09:00
Sometimes I find it amusing how my iPad tells time.
iOS
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:
- Apple keyboard stopped inserting characters into Safari.
- Can’t move Apple keyboard in floating mode, had to restart Safari.
- For a while, Safari wouldn’t drag from dock in order to go split screen.
- Split screened Safari and Google News – G.N. would no longer accept input events until I stopped split screen.
- Lockscreen in portrait mode, but iPad in landscape mode, until unlocking.
And that’s just since getting home from work. Notably most of these revolve around operating system components, text input, and multitasking: the keyboard, the browser, and an application that embeds the browser.
I guess it’s time to rebootenze the fruity device, again.
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.
Some random numbers
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.
Damn it, fruit co!
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.
Part of me is tempted to try a keyboard case like this one, and part of me thinks I have enough useless things. There’s at least two variants by various mostly generic vendors, Procase just happens to be one of the cheaper offerings with USB-C charging support.
My experience with keyboards and tablets have been a touch spotty, given my taste in device size versus my requirements for a keyboard. The smallest that I find really useful for a keyboard are models like Logitech’s K380, and their old K810. Which is about as full size a keyboard as you can get while ditching the keys that don’t really matter, and settling for laptop style arrow keys.
Device wise, I’ve usually favored smaller. One of my most heavily used tablets was the Galaxy Note 8.0, but it was useless with a keyboard case. An external keyboard like the K810 works beautifully, but a 16:10 tablet just yields a useless keyboard if you make it fit a case. An 8″ wide case means the keyboard will be so ridiculously cramped that you’re better off using the touch screen keyboard^.
The only good thing about 10″ widescreen tablets were their screen size overlapped with the smallest you could squish a laptop keyboard down and expect it to be worth typing on. The 9.7″ standard tablets I’ve had push that down a peg, but aren’t useless. Using the keyboard case that Zagg made for the Tab S2, I found it a bit too cramped to really want to use seriously, but at least it was large enough to be useful rather than counter productive.
When I look at the size difference between my K810 and my 11″ iPad Pro, I contemplate where this winds up. I’ve usually found 12″/4:3 laptops a rather a touch cramped.
One of the differences, I think is also the OS. In Android, using Gboard I generally could write a couple dozen paragraphs on my Tab S2 and Tab S3 without caring about the touch screen; throw in glide/swype typing using an S-Pen and I was damned efficient. Rather using keyboards with Android was more important for tasks like bash and vim sessions over SSH.
On the other hand, the way iOS works for editing text using Apple’s keyboard: I’m inclined to think that text editing on an iPad was more of a scream at the top of your lungs and beat people with a stick kind of necessary for iOS 12; in iOS 13, it’s not as bad but due to the buggy’ass nature of Apple’s on screen keyboard, I would still say use a keyboard. It’s like the most important iPad accessory, where as for an Android device, I would say a real (i.e. Wacom based) stylus is the most important accessory.
So I find myself wondering if it’ll actually be worth it. The lossage to keyboard space is worrisome but it’s much closer to normal than other tablets I’ve owned, and if I had gone with the 12.9″ behmeth, I wouldn’t even be contemplating the question since its so huge ^_^. But in my head, I figure if all else fails, I could velcro a real keyboard to the thing, and if I really wanted to get jiggy I could put my dock and hard drive on the back in a similar fashion.
In any event: the case would be getting removed and attached fairly often. The little magnetic case I use with my Pro, mostly serves for times when I want a stand to go and when I want a little more protection at work. At home, my device pretty much runs naked unless I’m using the case for a stand at my desk, and I prefer my devices naked.
^ To be fair, I also feel the same way about sliders. My HTC Doubleshot’s keyboard didn’t make up for the dinky 3.7″ screen, and I was better off with the Galaxy SIII’s 4.8″ screen in every single sense of typing shit.