Poll: how long have you been into D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sun, Jul 07, 2013 at 02:38:15AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Sat, 6 Jul 2013 14:08:20 -0700
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> > 
> > I resisted "upgrading" to a "smart"phone for many years (people used
> > to laugh at me for carrying around such a prehistoric antique -- to
> > a point I took pride in showing it off to the kids), until the
> > battery life started to wear out and require charging once a day.
> > Finally I succumbed to my phone company who kept bugging me about
> > upgrading (and of course, I chose an Android instead of an iPhone).
> > Well, it's nice to upgrade, I suppose, but I found that I *still*
> > have to recharge once a day 'cos of the battery drain from all those
> > advanced "features" that were never there in the old phone. Sigh...
> > 
> 
> 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.


> 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!


> 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


> Maybe it's all the VM/dynamic shit. I did generally get a couple days
> out of the iPhone (as long as I didn't play Rage), instead of the
> "just *barely* one day" I got with the Nexus S (even with the cellular
> stuff disabled). That may not sound too bad to some people, but with
> the phones, the near-daily recharging got to feel like an enormous
> ball-and-chain (not to mention *trying* to turn off the damn sound
> globally every night so the stupid things wouldn't wake me up for
> notifications and other shit that I don't care about when I'm
> sleeping). I already have enough shit to do every time I go to bed and
> wake up, I don't need that added to my daily overhead.

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

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


[...]
> > At least Android actually has a task manager that lets you kill off
> > misbehaving apps and things that shouldn't be running that are
> > taking up 50MB of RAM for no good reason. On my old iPod, I'd have
> > to hard-reset every few days 'cos some misbehaving app would soak up
> > 100% RAM and 100% CPU and the thing would brick.
> 
> Yea, that's one of the zillions of things that bug me about
> iOS/Android: There's no equivalents to the taskbar or "close program"
> buttons. Sure, they both have something that pretends to be like a
> taskbar, but on Android it tosses in "recently used" stuff with no
> indication which ones are actually running.

Just long-click the 'task manager' icon to the front screen and you can
fire it up to kill off stray apps whenever you want. :-P


> 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.

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


> 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).


> > *And* I can actually write my own apps for Android without needing
> > to buy a Mac just to install the dev tools.
> 
> Amen to that.
> 
> BTW, if you don't mind using a proprietary toolkit (Marmalade:
> <http://madewithmarmalade.com>), you *can* develop iOS stuff without
> ever having to touch a Mac. But to put it on your actual device you
> still have to pay Apple's Developer iRansom (well, or better yet just
> jailbreak the stupid thing instead).

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


> 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'm betting on D
making it on Android first. If we get off our lazy bums and actually
make D work on Android before the ship passes, that is.


[...]
On Sun, Jul 07, 2013 at 12:34:52PM +0200, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> Am 07.07.2013 09:49, schrieb Russel Winder:
> >On Sun, 2013-07-07 at 09:38 +0200, Kagamin wrote:
> >[…]
> >>I heard, wifi consumes the lion share of battery charge, try to
> >>disable it.
> >
> >WiFi can be a big battery drain, but so is the screen, and (perhaps
> >most importantly) the mobile aerial. The second of these is perhaps
> >obvious, the first and third depend on distance to the receiver since
> >the output signal of the phone is variable, the mobile signal much
> >more than the WiFi. If a phone is continually searching for a mobile
> >base station battery power will plummet.

Hmmm. It seems that I've just acquired a new appreciation for airplane
mode(!).


> I used to work for a certain Finnish mobile company. There is no if.
> 
> The mobiles need to continuously talk with their cells to handle
> antenna transitions, network notifications, sms/mms protocol handling
> among many many other things.
[...]

No wonder battery life seems better in airplane mode! I'll have to keep
that in mind.


T

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