New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

xpost to GBX way upthread re nexus7 vs ipad mini:

I test mobile applications for a living. I use a number of devices and I can assure you the ipad murders any android device, mostly for the following reasons:

* Android has a back button that is sometimes on the hardware and sometimes on the touch screen. Most android device functions are counter-intuitive but this particular one is so fucking wack it makes me want to murder people on a weekday basis. How hard is it to swipe FFS?

* The android marketplace - The android app stores are simultaneously a complete clusterfuck and severely limited in quality apps. When you develop an app for iOS it must be sent to apple for best practices review, testing and approval before they will put it in the app store. Android have no such approach. You can create any piece of shit and make it immediately available in the android store. Zero quality control. I remember the first time I used the android store. I was looking for YouTube. I got back pages of app results, none of which were YouTube. Just a whole bunch of dodgy YouTube downloaders and uploaders etc that provided no explanation as to whether they allow you to search for videos or even play them. Most importantly, popular apps that you would find in the apple store are often scarce in the android stores. Id guess at maybe a 10% chance of finding a popular apple store app in the android marketplace. I tried to find Candy Crush on my Kindle Fire not so long ago. Turns out android don't have Candy Crush (which was insanely popular at the time) but there were dozens of inferior ripoffs for those who are happy throw their standards off of a cliff.
Oh and the stores (at least the Google play store) are set up to know the specs of your particular device and will block you from downloading an app if you device specs don't meet all of the app developers chosen requirements. e.g. if you have the Nexus 7, which only has a front-facing camera, and the app you want has been marked by the developer as having a function that uses a back facing camera, you may have no intention of using that particular function but you still cant download the app.

* Reliability - When we release an update to my work software we release it to apple and android at the same time. Without fail the help desk issues start flooding in and they're all android related. Device manufacturers and carriers have free licence to jack the platform up as they see fit, which results in a lot of unknown functional variables that, obvs, cannot be coded for. Usually we will ask the client to see if they can recreate the issue on a co-worker's iPhone. 99% of the time they cant recreate the error on the iPhone. At that point we explain the manufacturer/carrier customization and have to leave them with 'Sorry but we cant do anything about your problem'.

As for contact, document, video, photo and music sharing; Google have made it clear they don't want any content moving out from the Nexus7 tablet. There are ways around this but not so much with video. With an iPad you can airdrop pretty much any of your files to another user and you don't need to be on WiFi to do it. Then there is the remote app and glorious apple tv we've been enjoying for years now.

The short story is android have sacrificed reliability and quality for customization. Apple, of course, are at the other end of that particular spectrum which hurts them in some ways but a high percentage of the time it does what I want and it get me what i want with little effort on my part.

All that said, I have to say the Nexus7 is by far the best android device I've used. Its design is clean and its functionality a lot more intuitive than most androids. Still, there is that app store.

fabulous post!

* Android has a back button that is sometimes on the hardware and sometimes on the touch screen. Most android device functions are counter-intuitive but this particular one is so fucking wack it makes me want to murder people on a weekday basis. How hard is it to swipe FFS?

this is (for me) the single best thing about ios 7. not that it wasn't possible/occurring before, but having it be a fundamental part of the ui has changed how i feel about using my ios devices. when swipe-to-go-back isn't supported in an app, i forever find myself phantom-swiping like an idiot, waiting for something to happen.

also, it does a surprisingly good job of recognizing when you're swiping from the edge and when you're not

oh and get the wifi + cellular. I got the ipad 2 wifi only and regretted it almost daily. I'm still happy with my 3rd gen ipad that has both.

For peeps upthread bemoaning the data costs for the wifi + cellular ipad check this out (!!!)

"T-Mobile announced Wednesday that it would offer "free data for life" on cellular-enabled iPad Airs"
http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/t-mobile-offers-free-ipad-data-plan-yes-free-beer-8C11448553

Its only 200MB per month but hell.

xposts to GBX again

thx sunny!!

I used to have an iPad (first gen), which I used a lot till it became pretty slow and I gave it to my parents.

A year ago I bought a Nexus 7. I like it at first but after a month or two I found myself hardly ever using it. I'd rather use my iPhone at home even though it's smaller.

There. That's my tale of iOS v Android tablets.

brb trying to recruit sunny to work at my workplace

Also, my Nexus 7 seems to have slowed down much faster than the iPad did, something other people have reported

http://tabtimes.com/analysis/ittech-os-android/2013/08/22/how-google-nexus-7-exposes-big-myth-about-android-tablets

Mavericks freed up 15GB over here.

Heads up - iMovie 10 has a new file format. The migration will leave your earlier iMovie installation/projects intact, but if you have a lot of projects & are committing to v10 completely - don't forget to delete/archive the old data as it uses up a lot of space.

Mavericks has done something bad to font smoothing. I've said this in the past (10.4 and 10.6 were bad here iirc) but this time it seems actually broken. The entry field on iMessage is properly pixelated.

I wonder if it's only on non-Retina screens, maybe.

this is (for me) the single best thing about ios 7. not that it wasn't possible/occurring before, but having it be a fundamental part of the ui has changed how i feel about using my ios devices. when swipe-to-go-back isn't supported in an app, i forever find myself phantom-swiping like an idiot, waiting for something to happen.

OH MY GOD THANK YOU, I have spent two weeks infuriated that ios 7 made the back button impossible to find, not realizing they'd introduced swipe-back.

I'm on a non-ret mba stet, and my imessage text field seems ok? (I'm pretty mr magoo-like tho tbf)

what's the score with the different colours in imsgs now? Am I supposed to know why one friend's msgs are pink and another's green? I just keep thinking they're smses but obv that can't be it..

could be a design throwback to iChat

safari actually fast and nice in Mavericks, and it has the two finger swipe forward/back that is nice

Mavericks has done something bad to font smoothing. I've said this in the past (10.4 and 10.6 were bad here iirc) but this time it seems actually broken. The entry field on iMessage is properly pixelated.

i had this problem on upgrading to mavericks, fixed it by going to system preferences > displays > display and switching resolution from "scaled" to "best for display"

Mavericks severely fucked over my Gmail's ability to deal with Mail. But I switched over to Airmail (only $2) and it's been a great replacement thus far.

Airmail, what's that? Still using Sparrow but getting a bit bored with it.

And Sparrow never gets updated because it was sold to Google last year.

http://airmailapp.com/

It's way faster than Mail and much lighter weight in memory.

also: here's what Mavericks did to gmail/Mail relationship

oops it's here

http://www.tuaw.com/2013/10/23/how-mavericks-ruined-apple-mail-for-gmail-users/

christ almighty what did they do to the volume control

at least on android you can customise your keyboard

and install app killers

So updated to Mavericks and ios 7.0.3 or whatever and have apparently lost the ability to sync over wifi. Am I alone in this?

wifi sync breaks all the time - try connecting it via USB, it'll probably start working again after you disconnect

update iTunes also?

textmate guy is crowd-funding his email client. could be good!

http://freron.com/crowdfund2014/

lol the textmate guy is crazy

wow airmail is pretty dope

it looks a bit ios5

jumping from 10.6 to 10.9 I didn't know about the reverse scroll thing. immediately installed Scroll Reverser (naturally) to fix it, but ugh, it's stupid that you can't even change that in default settings without plugging in an apple mouse (i gave mine away years ago)

you shouldn't need a 3rd party app for that on 10.9, there should be a setting in the trackpad preference pane that says "use natural scrolling direction" or something. uncheck that

i have no trackpad or Apple brand mouse (on iMac) so the option doesn't even appear, it's stupid

What's going on w/ scrolling?

textmate guy should probably release textmate 2.0 or just point everyone to sublime text

after 10.6 they reversed the scrolling mechanism - i.e. wheel down pushes the page content up, wheel up pushes content down - to replicate iOS finger dragging. makes sense with the Trackpad but for mouse wheel it's bizarre

it's like those savages that use invert y-axis in FPS games

the option appears for me and i'm not using an apple mouse

what's your 'mouse' section of the pref pane say

Oh - that's how I like it. When I bought a Mac I changed that shit ASAP.

xp

I'm def pretty happy with AirMail, mainly because I'm so hitched to gmail. I think it's faster than Mail and for $2, I can forgive the UI. Not like a have a choice given that Apple fucking BROKE Mail w/gmail.

AirMail is the one that looks a lot like Sparrow but has multiple windows for some reason, right?

my gmail in apple mail in MAVERICKS seems fine, no idea what the problem is supposed to be, but maybe that's just because I'm a MAVERICK

no restarts since the third one thk fk

calling it. best OS yet

AirMail reminds me of Sparrow. Doesn't have multiple windows but has multiple panes. Maybe you can option-break them off into individual windows but I never would do that.

Other than Apple fucking BREAKING Mail on me, Mavericks seems solid as hell.

my gmail in apple mail in MAVERICKS seems fine, no idea what the problem is supposed to be, but maybe that's just because I'm a MAVERICK

yeah idk what everyone's talking about.. gmail with Mail is one of the few things that didn't break for me on maverix

everyone is just going for it and installing a .0 release, huh

life is for living, lukas

I'm kind of surprised people still use desktop applications for mail.

I suppose some people need offline access.

I've used mailplane since the beginning. It's basically a fancified SSB, so not a full app thought it has some offline abilities, it's not synching or downloading everything, it just give you your own gmail browser with a bunch of improved features, menubar alert, resizing attachments, random stuff like that. Mostly I like to just have email open in a window that's not dependent on my browser.