iOS

by

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.

by

Interesting. I post to my blog often enough that Shortcuts shows the create a post link in “Shortcuts from Your Apps”. If I run this from the home screen widget it works great: but going “Hey, Siri: Captain’s Log Supplemental”, I just get a blank tab referencing handoff.

by

Behind the Scenes: Improving the Tag Experience for Evernote on Mobile

Kinda like where this is going. With my switch from Android to iOS, tags suddenly become less part of the pie rather than one of the largest pieces.

As a 90% interface, I find that the main win for Evernote is the raw performance the iPad begins to the table. Instead of sighing and waiting, it’s more like waiting for animations to finish than waiting on data to load. But beyond that I’d say it feels a bit lack luster, like it takes the worst of the Android UI and glosses it over with iOS conventions.

On the flip side they make it easier to print or export notes outside the app (yippee ki yay) and you can do some fancy formatting by entering a set of symbols that auto convert to rich text stuff, that I don’t think is supported on Android.

So yes, improvements are welcomed 😊

by

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.

by

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.

by

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=).
by

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

by

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.