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> I'm of course not the target audience for iPads, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking they're anything but a toy. iPads have been getting a lot of prod

by npunt 11y ago

> I'm of course not the target audience for iPads, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking they're anything but a toy. iPads have been getting a lot of productivity improvements lately, however many have decided they're just a toy and in doing so have been rather blind to their advance. To just name one, extensions allow inter-app handoff and are quite powerful at this point and well received by iOS devs and power users. Extensions solve the document transfer use case discussed in this subthread, and they don't invoke cognitive load around filesystems. I'm hoping we can use 3d Touch to trigger them from the share button to further improve their efficiency. But that's cool, lets all keep dragging files around with a mouse or typing in terminal and wait where did I save that file I was just working on again? Another way to think about this is with iOS, Apple is going down the list from most common to least common use cases for end users, whereas over the last several decades with CLI and then WIMP interfaces, traditional PC devs have been going up the list of use cases from most dev-oriented to most end user. Nothing wrong with the results of the latter for development, but it turns out there's a lot more end users than there are devs, and an exposed filesystem is a sacred cow of that the latter approach that can be solved in more than one way for the end user. > It takes something much more serious for a new computer generation to usurp its predecessor Mainframe guys said the exact same thing about minicomputers.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
But that's cool, lets all keep dragging files around with a mouse or typing in terminal and wait where did I save that file I was just working on again? How are those things innate to having a hierarchical file system? A straw man if I ever saw one. Mainframe guys said the exact same thing about minicomputers. And they were right. Minicomputers didn't take in definitively until they became self-hosting.
- npunt 11y ago
  > How are those things innate to having a hierarchical file system? A straw man if I ever saw one. Not innate to having an hfs, just innate to using one. Of course you could drag files around with your finger, or tap into subfolders, or use the keyboard, but those are not taking advantage of strengths of the platform. Meanwhile share sheet extensions are well suited to the modern paradigm of touch, social, and cloud, where the target of a file may or may not be a local filesystem or even an app in its strictest sense. This interface represents an alternative to finding files in folders when working between apps, which is where my comparison was directed. Maybe I misunderstood and you're arguing that iOS doesn't have a hierarchical file system, but thats opposite of what you were complaining about (obfuscated file systems) earlier in this thread. lmk. > And they were right. Minicomputers didn't take in definitively until they became self-hosting. Minicomputers were still considered 'less serious' than the mainframes long after they stopped being terminals, and they were capable of far less. Unless I misunderstood and you're arguing that iPads have not yet reached some modern equivalence to self-hosting... and that equivalence must involve an exposed file system... because it must be able to bootstrap its own operating system...? Genuinely confused by this rebuttal, but open to hearing your ideas.

by npunt 11y ago

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

But that's cool, lets all keep dragging files around with a mouse or typing in terminal and wait where did I save that file I was just working on again? How are those things innate to having a hierarchical file system? A straw man if I ever saw one. Mainframe guys said the exact same thing about minicomputers. And they were right. Minicomputers didn't take in definitively until they became self-hosting.

npunt 11y ago
> How are those things innate to having a hierarchical file system? A straw man if I ever saw one. Not innate to having an hfs, just innate to using one. Of course you could drag files around with your finger, or tap into subfolders, or use the keyboard, but those are not taking advantage of strengths of the platform. Meanwhile share sheet extensions are well suited to the modern paradigm of touch, social, and cloud, where the target of a file may or may not be a local filesystem or even an app in its strictest sense. This interface represents an alternative to finding files in folders when working between apps, which is where my comparison was directed. Maybe I misunderstood and you're arguing that iOS doesn't have a hierarchical file system, but thats opposite of what you were complaining about (obfuscated file systems) earlier in this thread. lmk. > And they were right. Minicomputers didn't take in definitively until they became self-hosting. Minicomputers were still considered 'less serious' than the mainframes long after they stopped being terminals, and they were capable of far less. Unless I misunderstood and you're arguing that iPads have not yet reached some modern equivalence to self-hosting... and that equivalence must involve an exposed file system... because it must be able to bootstrap its own operating system...? Genuinely confused by this rebuttal, but open to hearing your ideas.