[OT] tablet programming

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 14 December 2015 at 15:01:36 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
wrote:
> On 12/12/2015 01:13 AM, Joakim wrote:
>>
>> Desktop Android's certainly not there yet for everybody, but 
>> it is for
>> my admittedly low demands, and soon will be for everybody, as 
>> google has
>> said they're working on built-in multi-window for the next 
>> version of
>> Android.
>
> Personally, I would need far more than just multi-window 
> support for Android to be a worthwhile desktop OS for me. A lot 
> of the issues (though not nearly all) relate to software 
> ecosystem.

Yes, even after Android gets multi-window, it will take years for 
all the software to adapt.  Hell, there still aren't that many 
Android apps that have a tablet UI, despite Android tablets 
having been around for years.

Also, this is purely psychological, but I feel claustrophobic 
when using multi-window that doesn't allow arbitrarily-sized and 
overlapping windows, even though I don't use that feature most of 
the time.

> For example, I can't even find a halfway decent alternative to 
> windows notepad, let alone any better text editor.

I find that hard to believe, considering Notepad may be the worst 
text editor I've ever used. :) I've been using the vim package in 
Termux, same as I do on every other machine.

> Basic undo/redo support is rare in Android software, as is 
> saving/loading actual files and sharing user files between 
> different programs on the same machine, which is something 
> desktops had pretty much sorted out decades ago.

I don't know about the prevalence of those features, as I 
uninstall far more apps from any Android device than the few I 
usually install, but I suspect undo/redo will become more common 
as Android starts getting used more for productivity and file 
support has always been there, if not front and center for mobile 
usability reasons.

> The whole backup/restore situation is a mess (there's an 
> article that explains my issues with it better than I can, but 
> my link to it is buried somewhere ATM), PalmOS already had 
> backup/restore sorted out much better over a decade ago. Heck, 
> even same with iOS if you can tolerate iTunes and, well, 
> Apple/iOS.

I've never restored an OS, so not something I've had to deal 
with. I usually simply manually backup any files I consider 
important, and almost never put anything worthwhile in app 
settings, so don't care about those.  For example, I never 
bookmark anything in browsers, going from memory and google 
search instead.

> That's just a few off-the-top-of-my-head examples. There's many 
> others, like the bluetooth keyboard lag/unresponsiveness that 
> you've already mentioned, and I can confirm from experience.

No doubt, it will take a while for mobile OS's to become more 
productive, as opposed to being used mostly for consumption, like 
browsing or listening to music. But that is inevitably what's 
going to happen, just as PCs killed off the more powerful 
workstations.

My point was simply that if you program and like to do a lot of 
stuff from the command-line, the recently introduced Termux app 
actually makes for a surprisingly pleasant experience on an 
Android device.  And programmers are guinea pigs for what 
everybody else eventually does.