iOS

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I find it kinda curious how things work.

Traditionally, if you had a PC or a Mac: you operated on blind trust. Well, almost blind trust if you had faith in antivirus software. But by in large the architecture of these systems let your software do anything you can, so there isn’t a gap between you uploading a file to Google Drive and some random time-waster uploading your super-secret.docx file to someone else’s server. That’s just how far the security architecture got by the time Unix and NT came into existence.

More modern platforms that rose up around touch screened phones aim for tighter security. Typically applications get strongly isolated from each other instead of being peers on par with the user, and restrictive access to your hardware instead of equal to yours. That’s been real progress IMHO, and one of the things that I really like about Android.

Digging into iOS, I also find it kind of curious how this works out.

iOS seems to take a more shrouded approach to what applications can request, in favour of focusing your attention on what they are doing. You can view some top level data about what applications can touch, based on the privacy settings group. Which largely amounts to hardware features like your camera and common personal data like your contacts. Not so a technical view such as a friendly one. Trying to STFW about the perms apps have access yields rather different experiences if you swap the words iOS and Android around. So in the end, you’re really trusting Apple far more than the application, IMHO. On the upside, it’s easier for Apple to push patches to devices than pretty much anyone can push to anything Android based in practice.

Android on the other hand traditionally required applications to state their permissions in advance when the user installs the application. Thus the trust lays between you and the developer with a sort of contract like transaction. The move to runtime permission twiddling in Android 6 is a lot more like the current experience on iOS, and I assume adapted from what Apple was already doing at the time or had been planning. But it’s easy to tell what an app can do, and all the more possible to look up online what permissions exist. No perms to access your camera? Then it can’t. A little Google-fu and you can get a list of what apps can ask for, and grok at it to draw your own conclusions.

In the end though it still boils down to trust. Does a flashlight need access to your contacts or detailed location? Probably not :P. Do you trust Apple or Google to keep an eye on things? Well, if not there’s always a flip phone.

At least modern operating systems aren’t as really nilly as DOS and the old Mac system software was, in letting apps have total control over the hardware. Because let’s face it, most programmer’s aren’t super genius about every aspect of your system.

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Making a brief foray into iOS games, ironically begins with République.

It’s been quite a while since the game came out (2013 – 2016) but it’s quite nice to see the graphics quality. Scrolling through the app store, there were three real reasons I opted to play: more serious gameplay than I’ll usually go for on touchscreens, far larger than your average app (~3.2G), and should show whether or not the GPU on this thing is worth while.

Beyond that, I’d say try the game 😜

I also found it kind of funny, the selection of banned books you can find laying around. More than a few are recommendations from family and friends over the years, and for better or worse ones I haven’t gotten around to reading, lol.

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One thing I’ve observed is that iOS seems to prefer what your doing and expeditiously updating stuff rather than staying in constant sync.

Which I imagine is thanks to the history that iOS has, back when background sync largely meant go buy a DROID and the size of iPhone batteries over the years.
Personally, I think that makes things like photo upload less dependable but overall I prefer battery life. Normally I’ll put my tablet on charge when I go to bed; don’t think my iPad has tasted charging cable since I unplugged it Friday morning. Plus it had to recharge ~1/3 of my Pencil on Saturday.
Current charge level is when I’ll seek my charger during the day.
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Pretty much my greatest worry with the iPad migration has been whether or not I’d simply lose my mind in the transition. First few hours were borderline headaches trying to absorb the system quickly, but that comes naturally with such migrations.

Thus far, I’ve been able to use it without going crazy. Now that most stuff is moved over, I’ve made it about two days with it filling in as my primary device and I’m still sane, and haven’t wanted to pitch the device out a window even once. Pretty good signs.

Friday, I opted to leave Scarlet the Tab S3 home and bring Nerine the iPad along. This worked out the way I expected. Only real interruptions to my work flow was not being able to swipe words with the stylus, which arrives in the end of the month release if you don’t want to mess with third party keyboards. Second is not having my Exchange account setup, which is simply solved when I get off my arse.

Friday night and Saturday was more like tablet life as usual, and iOS seems up to that well enough. Really does help that most of the apps I rely on target both platforms. Face unlock also has wide enough a sensor range that I don’t have to lean very far to unlock it at my work bench, and most times it has failed at home involved a dog in the way, lol.

Overall I think that this is going to work. Versus someone finding me mumbling in the corner or half catatonic with rage.

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Mysteries of iOS:

Added Pluspora to my home screen, and this opens stand alone with no real browser UI and its own multitasking entry. Reminds me of what Chrome used to do.

Added Blogger to my home screen, and this just launches Safari with the appropriate tab being created. Like any normal web page.

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As I begin to settle into my main machine running iOS, these are the Android apps I’ll really miss big time.

Beyond that, pretty much everything I use tends to be cross platform. Much like how most of the desktop apps I use, compile and run on both Linux and NT: most of the apps I use run on both Android and iOS. Many of them are also similar enough that the deltas are local convention, much like how Windows and *nix builds often relocate where editing application settings go in their menu bars.

But of course there are a few Android apps that I’ll miss, because they aren’t cross platform.

Aqua Mail

There’s not many mail clients that I like. In fact the next in line are the Berkeley mail program and the Mutt, both of which run in unix terminals; one of which could still be used on a teletypewriter with paper in place of a display So it’s safe to say most mail clients are kind of meh in my eyes, and I’ve used a lot of them since the ’90s.

Aqua Mail on the other hand is a superb client. Between how well it runs on my Tab S3 and my Chromebook, I wish I could transplant the damned thing to my Linux and NT machines as well. Be it my personal e-mail accounts or business accounts, it’s become the gold standard in my sending e-mail.

FolderSync Pro

The cornerstone of managing my wallpaper collection for a long time has been FolderSync Pro. Over time it’s great abilities to pretty much file sync anything to anything else have been pretty awesome.

Each of my Android devices have at least three jobs.

  1. Every night, move photos to my file server under Camera Uploads/{Host name}.
  2. Every week, sync my interal storage to my file server under Backups/{Host name}/Internal.
  3. Every month, sync Pictures/Wall Papers with the master in my cloud drive of choice.
Combined with alternate methods of syncing my photos offsite, FolderSync Pro basically makes it so I have to worry more about powering on my file server after a power break than I do about my device’s local files.

Photo Wall FX

Been using this so long that I don’t even want to check the receipt. Nor do I want to see when it was last updated, it’s kinda orphanware now. Over the years, I’ve amassed a lot of wall papers. The way I have my Androids rotate between them at random is Photo Wall FX. In addition to that simple goal, it’s generally been good about scaling and cropping the wide variety of images to fit my screens.
I’ve actually been worrying a bit, how the lack of updates and quirks with Android’s evolution interact. When Google stops allowing old-ass apps on new-ass devices this would be the first one I’d notice gone.

ArtFlow Studio

When it comes to drawing with my S-Pen, I end up in ArtFlow. It’s the most full featured drawing app I’ve met, and over time got good enough that I stopped bothering to look. 
By full featured: I mean whenever I go do something the process is like I’d expect from an app targeting desktops. To get any better than Art Flow, you’d have to talk to people that draw for a living instead of making this doofus glowy and happy.

Juice SSH

Since most of what I do depends on a Linux terminal environment, like literally if it doesn’t involve reading web pages or responding to e-mails, I’m likely to be found in an xterm or on my tablet.
Juice SSH has been a long companion, I’ve been using it for at least 6 years now. First on my Android 4.x tablets and later on my Chromebook as well, where the performance beat the tar out of the Chrome SSH thing. If it were better at copying terminal contents ala xterm, Juice SSH would be nearly perfect.

Samsung’s Calendar

Ahh, I remember the day I first realized how great it was. See, I used to have to take my mother to doctor’s appointments and cover her copays. But my momma was the kind who used a paper calendar. I stopped using a paper calendar when I was still in grade school. Thus whenever we had an issue of something that was on her calendar but not on mine, friction occurred. 
Easiest way I found to solve that is when making the next appointment on our way out, just duplicate the event and update it with the new appointment. Actually it works so well, I do the same with my own health care.
So, I’m standing in the middle of the doctor’s office and looking at my Nexus 5, and I’m like, “What the !@#$, why can’t I just duplicate today’s event and change the date, like on my Galaxy SIII?”. In the years since a preference for Samsung over Google has become stronger. I mostly ignore Google Calendar on my current, non SamWiz phone.

Nova Launcher

Honorable mention goes to Nova because not only is it the best Android launcher I’ve used in the post ADW world, it beats the tar out of Apple’s concept of a launcher 😜
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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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Thus far, I think I’ve come to the following conclusions:

  1. Google is better at building a larger “System “, but will kill you with a hammer to a few major sore spots.
  2. Apple will favor doing well whatever they focus on, but will kill you with paper cuts to many minor spots.
I’m also pretty sure that those responsible for the design of iOS, it’s been a very long trend of people that love gestures. I’m still learning to swipe friend in elvish.
For the most part it has been a pretty good experience getting to learn my way around an iPad. It very much reminds me that Apple is a products company that learned how to do software and services, rather than a software company.

Random things I love about iOS:

Password management is freaking awesome. Rather than bake it into the line edit widgets like Google did, Apple puts a button over the keyboard that lets you easily bring up the password UI and search for stuff. It is the best freaking way I’ve ever met!
The whole slide over thing beats the hell out of annoying floating windows and bubbles. Those suck. iPad slide over makes up for how chunky switching apps feels. I will sorely miss the double tap a button and switch to last app trick from Android, but will love and abuse the multitasking features of my iPad 😁.
Siri seems to have the best level of tweaking I’ve ever seen. Really, I’m not fond of voice assistants but being able to use it with apps is great. Go into settings and you pretty much know what shortcuts an app makes available; kind of like how Android had shortcuts you could toss on your home screen, apps make such shortcuts available to Siri. I’m less inclined to throw my Google searches at a voice thingy than I am to want hands free use of an app.
By being late to the iOS game, I’ve probably missed most of the things that would really piss me off.

Random things I hate about iOS:

Compared to Android the launcher has zero value. Because who wants to make it easy to organize your apps automatically when you can just make people drag folders of crap across four screens.
Dragging and dropping is even more pervasive on iPad than PC, and that is no surprise given the same company made macOS. Which is fine, and probably a great paradigm for touch centric devices. But I find that it is painfully slow. E.g. dragging and dropping a hyperlink to Safari’s Tab bar is neat, but it feels more like waiting for a car’s cabin to heat up in the morning than something smooth and fast.
More than a few things are counter  intuitive but fairly obvious. I’m pretty sure that in the course of time, I’m either going go insane or be a happy enough expat.
I despise how clunky and slow editing text is on my iPad Pro compared to my Android tablet. It’s less issues like keyboard management and more that it is a tap happy affair created by folks that love slowly dragging and dropping everything instead of quickly tapping and sliding a cursor pip around. The two finger track pad trick built into Apple’s keyboard is really a useful trick. It’s on par with using a scroll wheel to move your cursor left/right and being able to suddenly mouse around: but I only learned this trick by poking around the user guide in a browser. Otherwise I’d have no clue it existed. Beyond that, I really wish Apple would steal Google’s cursor stuff from Android!
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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.