9 ms·

"In contrast to iOS where all app data is siloed off, exactly as it should be." Which is also why trying to do anything productive on a smartphone is such an u

by ris 11y ago

"In contrast to iOS where all app data is siloed off, exactly as it should be." Which is also why trying to do anything productive on a smartphone is such an uphill battle. Arbitrary programs not being able to exchange arbitrary files is totally crippling for any use-cases that go off the rails of what one single app wants to let you do.

gizmo 11y ago
Sharing data and interopability between applications is a hard problem, but Apple is on the right track. In any case, starting out with something with sound fundamentals and then improving usability is a much better approach than starting with something that is fundamentally broken and adding kludges to make it more secure.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
This is my biggest pet peeve with iOS. That and the way background services act. Why can't I have an app that syncs my photos to my server run at night without the location hack? Ugh.
b1340276 11y ago
That may be a roadblock but the primary reason why smartphones are relatively unproductive is because a touch only interface has the disadvantage that you can only interact with things that are visible on the screen. When your screen is less than 7" big and 30% of that space is wasted by a virtual keyboard then the only way to design a UI for a smartphone is to have as few interactions as possible, otherwise we end up having to constantly scroll up and down. The end result is that a lot of apps are hiding core functionality behind the hamburger icon.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  copy paste already works wonder to share pictures and the like between multiple programs on iOS at least, one can easily extend the pattern in a desktop environment and even add more entry point as long as they are user initiated, kind of like you can access the clipboard in browser only if it's on the stack of a user initiated event.
  - pdkl95 11y ago
    How do I type for src in $(find . -type '*.png') do sdir="$(echo "${src}" | dirname)" name="$(echo "${src}" | basename)" dstdir="/mnt/www/images/${sdir}" optipng -out "${dstdir}/${name}" "${src}" convert -scale 120x120\> "${src}" "${dstdir}/small_${name}" done into a GUI's "copy paste" feature?
    - Sanddancer 11y ago
      you long press the f for the terminal window to start hilighting text, and drag it to the e in done, and then choose copy.
    - LoSboccacc 11y ago
      You don't there are plenty better ways to list and filter files check out how beos did it. You could do literally the same and you didn't even need to drop to the console.
marcosdumay 11y ago
There ought to be a system level API that a program may call to get to read or write a user supplied file. Opening any random file should be reserved to just a few core applications.
- drdaeman 11y ago
  It's not that simple, and it's easy to misdesign such API. Say, VLC team had argued that a video player may need to open a supplementary subtitle file. If application can be only granted access to a single video file - that's impossible. I think there were other examples, but I don't remember those off-hand.
  - nine_k 11y ago
    Filesystems are trees. VOX could have read access to a particular tree (~/Videos) and no access to everything else, including but not limited to ~/Documents/Finance
    - drdaeman 11y ago
      But what if I want to watch ~/Downloads/big_buck_bunny.mkv?
      - nine_k 11y ago
        Explicitly mark it as available by moving / hardlinking it to ~/Videos.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    It's certainly not simple. This is a big UX problem, but one worth solving.
- zanny 11y ago
  Its called Mandatory Access Control. It has existed for over a decade in the mainline kernel. Ubutnu, Fedora, Suse - everyone but Arch, pretty much - supports one of its implementations. The problem is more that I do not believe any distro is shipping a default-deny policy. Unknown programs are simply given the kitchen sink rather than having, say, user friendly prompts saying "this program has no access control and wants to open X or use Y, allow?" But we definitely have the technology, and it does not take any heavy overhead isolation to do it.

by ris 11y ago

gizmo 11y ago

Sharing data and interopability between applications is a hard problem, but Apple is on the right track. In any case, starting out with something with sound fundamentals and then improving usability is a much better approach than starting with something that is fundamentally broken and adding kludges to make it more secure.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

This is my biggest pet peeve with iOS. That and the way background services act. Why can't I have an app that syncs my photos to my server run at night without the location hack? Ugh.

b1340276 11y ago

That may be a roadblock but the primary reason why smartphones are relatively unproductive is because a touch only interface has the disadvantage that you can only interact with things that are visible on the screen. When your screen is less than 7" big and 30% of that space is wasted by a virtual keyboard then the only way to design a UI for a smartphone is to have as few interactions as possible, otherwise we end up having to constantly scroll up and down. The end result is that a lot of apps are hiding core functionality behind the hamburger icon.

LoSboccacc 11y ago
copy paste already works wonder to share pictures and the like between multiple programs on iOS at least, one can easily extend the pattern in a desktop environment and even add more entry point as long as they are user initiated, kind of like you can access the clipboard in browser only if it's on the stack of a user initiated event.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  How do I type for src in $(find . -type '*.png') do sdir="$(echo "${src}" | dirname)" name="$(echo "${src}" | basename)" dstdir="/mnt/www/images/${sdir}" optipng -out "${dstdir}/${name}" "${src}" convert -scale 120x120\> "${src}" "${dstdir}/small_${name}" done into a GUI's "copy paste" feature?
  - Sanddancer 11y ago
    you long press the f for the terminal window to start hilighting text, and drag it to the e in done, and then choose copy.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    You don't there are plenty better ways to list and filter files check out how beos did it. You could do literally the same and you didn't even need to drop to the console.

marcosdumay 11y ago

There ought to be a system level API that a program may call to get to read or write a user supplied file. Opening any random file should be reserved to just a few core applications.

drdaeman 11y ago
It's not that simple, and it's easy to misdesign such API. Say, VLC team had argued that a video player may need to open a supplementary subtitle file. If application can be only granted access to a single video file - that's impossible. I think there were other examples, but I don't remember those off-hand.
- nine_k 11y ago
  Filesystems are trees. VOX could have read access to a particular tree (~/Videos) and no access to everything else, including but not limited to ~/Documents/Finance
  - drdaeman 11y ago
    But what if I want to watch ~/Downloads/big_buck_bunny.mkv?
    - nine_k 11y ago
      Explicitly mark it as available by moving / hardlinking it to ~/Videos.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  It's certainly not simple. This is a big UX problem, but one worth solving.
zanny 11y ago
Its called Mandatory Access Control. It has existed for over a decade in the mainline kernel. Ubutnu, Fedora, Suse - everyone but Arch, pretty much - supports one of its implementations. The problem is more that I do not believe any distro is shipping a default-deny policy. Unknown programs are simply given the kitchen sink rather than having, say, user friendly prompts saying "this program has no access control and wants to open X or use Y, allow?" But we definitely have the technology, and it does not take any heavy overhead isolation to do it.