Poll: how long have you been into D

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sun, 7 Jul 2013 16:51:32 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Sun, Jul 07, 2013 at 02:38:15AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > 
> > Yea. I don't accept that "smartphones" are really phones. They're
> > PDA's with telephony tacked on.
> 
> Ah, what's in a name? If they want to call PDA's with telephony
> "smartphones" then so be it. I wouldn't sweat it with names that are
> arbitrary anyways.
> 

True, but people just end up calling it a "phone" anyway, even though
that's literally like referring to a car as a "portable radio". Or like
the hipsters who insist on calling the internet a "cloud", as if they
think there's some sort of distinction. Just too much "wrong word"
going on in general. For non-native English speakers I can understand
(English *is* goofy), but native speakers should know how to speak
their own damn language.

> 
> > Not saying that's necessarily a bad way to go - it's fine if PDA is
> > your primary use-case. But if you're mainly interested in a phone
> > it's not only complete overkill, but also the wrong set of design
> > compromises.
> 
> I guess the whole point was to have PDA functionality that included
> telephony so that you didn't have to carry two devices around?
> 
> Mind you, having two devices isn't always a bad thing... try looking
> up something buried deep in the device while talking on the phone, for
> example. A royal pain when it's the same device!
> 

Yea, I agree. OTOH, back at college around 10+ years ago, I ended up
feeling so chained down by all the crap I was carrying around
everywhere (I was still a total tech geek at the time), that I had a
"fuck this shit" moment, and permanently left my books at the dorm, my
wristwatch in my pocket, and generally came to appreciate minimizing
the amount of "stuff".

But of course, a modern dedicated camera + flipphone + PDA/smartphone
would probably take up less total space than *just* the music player
alone that I had been carrying around at the time (An MP3 CD player -
just shortly before the HDD MP3 players started showing up.)

> 
> > They do, like you say, soak up ridiculous amounts of battery power
> > too.  Especially Androids.
> 
> Really? I didn't find my Android significantly worse in battery usage
> than my old iPod (and that was an *iPod*, not an iPhone). Or maybe
> both are equally bad. :-P
> 

*shrug* Maybe it was just the Nexus S. And I did always have WiFi
enabled on that since the cellular service was only connected to the
iPhone.

> Yeah ever since my wife got an iPhone, our attempts to fall asleep
> have been constantly interrupted by annoying dings and zings every so
> often from stray emails, notifications,

Yup.

>people sending text messages
> in the middle of the night for no good reason, etc..
> 

Call me a disgruntled die-hard IM fan, but I always got annoyed at
people who took issue with odd-hour SMS. Whether GAIM, Outlook, or SMS,
if you don't want incoming messages interrupting you, then *turn the
damn speakers off*. Makes no damn sense to leave it on and then bitch
about what's obviously going to happen. Of course, these stupid devices
will also vibrate and light up and do everything short of spray water
and smack you in the face, but really that's just part of a bigger
problem: They need to have a proper, convenient, sleep mode anyway.
They can call it a "shut the fucking thing up" mode. :)

Neither of my Palm devices ever pulled any of that "look at me! look at
me!" shit (Well, aside from the alarms that I *deliberately* set, and
also twice a year when DST would start/end - but even then it didn't go
nearly as multisensory-hyperactive as this iStuff does every time one
of your contacts types or farts or whatever...and on iOS the stupid
thing does it *twice*...I got so sick of that damn thing *repeating*
every fucking SMS I received whenever I chose not to give it the
attention it demanded. iOS really makes me miss Apple 2).

> We try to make the best of it, though. I set my morning alarm to a
> rooster call, and she set hers to dogs barking. A hilarious way to
> wake up. :-P
> 

Heh. If I faced that every morning, both devices would end up launched
out the window within the first week ;)


> 
> > And on iOS - well, it *might* be working like a taskbar, but
> > honestly I never could really tell what the hell its semantics
> > were. I was always just *guessing* that it was the list of running
> > programs...which made me wonder why it would (apparently?) keep
> > freaking *everything* I was done using running in the background (at
> > least, as far as I could tell).
> 
> Yeah I could never figure out what was running in the background on my
> old iPod. And couldn't find a way to manage background tasks either.
> It would just run slower and slower until a crawl, and then finally
> just freeze and fail to respond to anything (or run at 1 screen
> update every 5 minutes -- completely unusable). Then it's time for
> the two-finger salute -- power + home for 10 seconds to hard-reboot
> the contraption.
> 

On the iPhones, you can hold the button (uhh, yea, *THE* button) for a
couple secs (don't recall if you have to already be on the home screen)
and it'll show a taskbar/dock-like thing that's basically equivalent to
Android 4's task switcher (except tinier). But like I said, I could
never tell whether or not iOS included "recently used but not running"
junk in that like Android does. Or if it was even some sort of
"suspended apps" thing. Or whatever. It never gave any indication what
was going on with them.

> After I got all the data and apps I needed on my Android, I retired
> the iPod and haven't turned back since.
> 

Yea, the only reason I'd ever have an iHipster device at this
point would be for cross-platform mobile development. There's plenty I
hate about Android even compared to iOS (The VMed systems API, and
Google persistently trying to get you to give them all your personal
data, as opposed to Apple's native code and "Don't wanna use iCloud?
Ok, yea sure, back everything up directly to your own computer then,
that's cool with us.") But overall, Android is definitely less
irritating, less idiotic (ex: sideways keyboard is accessible
*consistently*, user-selectable default apps for various things), and
is just overall the lesser of the two evils.

> 
> > They're too damn opaque.
> > 
> > At least Android actually has a decent task manager. It's just too
> > bad you have to dig so far to get to it, which prevents it from
> > being a real taskbar substitute.
> 
> You *could* just move it to your front screen, y'know! ;-) That's what
> the home button's for. Two clicks to kill off a misbehaving app (of
> which there are too many, sad to say -- browsers being one of the
> frequent offenders).
> 

Hmm, I could have sworn that on mine the task manager was simply a
somewhat buried *part* of the settings program. I guess it's kinda been
awhile though.

In any case, that's still not as nice as if the task switcher simply
didn't insist on cluttering itself with "recently used" junk that isn't
even running. But yea, sticking the task manager on home would have at
least been an improvement.

> 
> If I had to, I'd jailbreak it. Seriously, the iPod became
> significantly easier to use after I jailbroke it

Mine was unfortunately a loaner that I was forbidden from jailbreaking,
but I don't doubt at all that would have made it far nicer to deal
with. (Well, maybe it *is* fortunate, because if it *had* been mine,
there were about 20 times I probably would have hurled the thing into
the nearest brick wall. I can't begin to tell you how tempting that
was.)

> -- I could actually
> copy files over SSH, for crying out loud! None of that "install
> iTunes first, use our poor reinvention of a filesystem interface just
> to transfer files, wait 15 minutes for the sync just to transfer a
> 50KB file" nonsense. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the
> concept of running a full-fledged OS (which is actually a Unix core
> IIRC) only to artificially cripple its functionality so that you can
> only use the contemporary equivalent of a 2400-baud dumb terminal
> interface on it.
> 

Yea, I couldn't agree more. Syncing with iTunes is obtuse as hell and
borderline broken. And I have severe practical and ethical objections
to artificial restrictions.

> 
> > Last I heard you do still have to use a Mac to submit to the App
> > Store, and again, you have to use that one particular proprietary
> > toolkit (which also means no D), but at least it's *possible* to
> > make iOS stuff without putting up with OSX.
> [...]
> 
> Good luck having D apps accepted by the App Store.

I'd be surprised if those dumbfucks in App Store Approvals would even
notice.

Besides, it seems more likely (and more feasible) that they'd probably
just check that it uses the proper Carbon API, or Cocoa or whatever
it's called on iOS. (Not that I've ever actually dealt with App Store
submission.)

> I'm betting on D making it on Android first.

That'd be my guess as well.

> If we get off our lazy bums and actually
> make D work on Android before the ship passes, that is.
> 

:)