Tablets

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Over the past week, I’ve generally followed a rule: Scarlett, my Tab S3 shouldn’t be routine. Hurdles and bugs aside, Nerine the iPad has pretty much been a success.

Apple’s remarks about performance have been relatively accurate IMHO. If you buy good stuff and run it into the ground, the Pros are damned powerful; if you buy cheap shit than odds are the basic iPad is still faster. My systems range between Core i5 and Celeron/Pentium processors from the Ivy Bridge and Braswell era. Basically really good and really cheap shit 😛. Hardware has been very top notch.

Software, well if you are used to a traditional computer: I’d say that Android will feel more familiar than iOS/iPadOS the further off the beaten path you go. But at least thanks to iOS 13: I no longer feel like a Bluetooth keyboard is the only way to type a lot, so much as how to type punctuation heavy text or to input and edit text at a very high rate.

From the prospect of an iPad replacing my main computer, it’s been pretty swell overall. The fact that Android has pretty much filled that role since 4.2~4.4, and before that supplemented my main computer since 3.x, it’s also safe to say that I’m not normal.

For a long time now, I’ve had no qualms about leaving my laptop behind in favor of my Android tablet. If I was going to spend a lot of time compiling or expected to need to VPN with the office then I’d consider lugging my development beast along. Other wise I’d rock Android and save like four pounds 🤣.

Seems an iPad can replace my Android tablet well enough, in the ways that matter. Which means that it can also replace my laptop for whenever the development beast isn’t required, nor my desktop’s monster GTX.

Actually given the performance A12X has been providing, I don’t think I want to study how powerful the GPU is.

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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.”

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Reasons to be sad or glad: when browser benchmarks on your tablet tend to be 40~60 % more awesome than on your desktop.

As the Core i5-3570K ages, Centuari’s claim to fame points to the ample amount of memory installed and that its old ass 780 GTX card is both a beast, and probably draws more power at power on than many people’s computers… but that machine’s primary task is Direct3D gaming not surfing or compiling.

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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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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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!