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Here are some mobile concepts that I miss on OS: - not thinking about files: I can open Notes/Drafts on my phone and get a textbox. I kinda get this with Jopli

by rtpg 6y ago

Here are some mobile concepts that I miss on OS: - not thinking about files: I can open Notes/Drafts on my phone and get a textbox. I kinda get this with Joplin, barely. - Real sandboxing, with a nice permission layer - Extremely easy sharing of data between apps. Of course files are theoretically a great sharing mechanism, but the sharing mechanism in mobile OS's are the logical conclusion of the clipboard - URIs that go deep into other apps. Lets you easily say "go over here to see details" from a completely separate system The fact that lots of stuff are webapps lets you get pretty far on Desktop too but I think these metaphors are power user features that the desktop could learn from

swiley 6y ago
I can open vim on my iphone/desktop and get a textbox. I don't see what storing things in files has to do with that. >Extremely easy sharing of data between apps. hah no. Try sharing large batches of files on iOS. with plenty of apps there's no way to do this (and often the only way to do it if you can is with the files app.)
ziotom78 6y ago
I remember that some of these points were targeted by the Étoilé environment [1]. It was a desktop environment targeted for GNUstep and programmed in Objective-C that tried to rethink a few fundamental concepts of the Desktop Environments available at the time (~10 years ago). Among them, proper file versioning for everything, seamless app interoperability and data sharing, etc. Sadly, the developers never managed to go beyond a few core libraries and a nice theme (the GUI used GNUstep under the hood). I followed the development with great interest till they stopped updating the site; I believe that the effort would have required many more developers. What a pity! [1] http://etoileos.com/ http://etoileos.com/
realusername 6y ago
To each their own I guess, on my case I which phones would learn from desktop interfaces and let me manage files and apps properly.
josteink 6y ago
> not thinking about files And I hate app-data not being files, not being portable. My data may be stuck inside a SaaS and only accessible through a closed-source app, and I have nothing to say about it. > Real sandboxing, with a nice permission layer Sandboxing apps is a good thing. Depending on your use-case, Snap/Flatpak or containers kinda solve this, but they are not the default way of running apps for now. What mobile does wrong here though, is that it also sandboxes the user, not giving the user full access to his device, nor letting him let his apps get that access either. This is user-hostile, on all current major mobile-platforms. > Extremely easy sharing of data between apps I would rephrase this as barely functional sharing, for only the limited subset of data the application has decided to implement sharing for, and only in ways the application-developers have considered inter-app sharing. On a desktop, I as the user, have the power to decide how I want to share data and invent new ways data can be shared and utilized. > URIs that go deep into other apps While that is certainly a neat feature, it's an app-centric feature. How do you know which kind of apps I have installed? How do you know which of those apps within that niché I have installed? And if you're not going to make it app-centric, you have to make it file/data-centric anyway... Which leaves us Android. Android does this better than iOS by having an intent-system which lets you register ability to handle both files, urls and subsets of those, and other apps can query for which apps supports which file/url-intents. So basically just a minor addition to the system we already have had on all desktop OSes for decades now. And again: that's a system which already works really well when files are first-class concepts which everything else builds on. So it's all back to files. If you want to empower the user, you must have files.
- rtpg 6y ago
  Files are emphatically _not_ good first class primitives for rich sharing. If you have a contacts program, are you going to make each contact a file? What about performance or bulk editing? From that program's perspective, the ideal is probably to have a single file (SQLite DB for example). But now you don't have granular sharing mechanisms except through a clumsy export which requires you to give a name to the thing and put it somewhere and open it in the other program. Meanwhile I hit the share sheet on my phone for the Contact. Some apps know about this form for data and can ingest it. Others fallback to text. It's the clipboard model, not the files model. Files are _fine_, and it lets you do stuff like reverse engineer the format and do cool stuff. But it's clunky as hell when you have something relatively ephemeral.
Tainnor 6y ago
The "no files" part of mobile OSs is the worst part for me personally. I constantly re-download the same PDFs, have to look forever for "that particular picture", etc., because even though you can technically access the file system on Android it's not like the majority of apps supports a file manager interface, and many apps just dump their file somewhere without explicit structure, so I basically never find what I need.
- rtpg 6y ago
  Please note I didn't say "no files". I said "better clipboard". I like files as a thing to be exposed. But I think that for day-to-day work being able to move stuff around between apps without fidgeting around with files is very valuable.
- 3np 6y ago
  Also if you want to do anything beyond “what the devs already thought about” you either need deep understanding of the specific system/app or rounds of trial and error. Case in point: tried sharing a vpn config with an Android user over Signal. They couldn’t do anything with the file, just yielding an error message saying it was unsupported. Sending the exact same file with a .pdf extension allowed them to download it and import it in their VPN app (only after downloading and installing a generic file manager app, though). Every now and then I struggle with some file that I can’t figure out how to move between apps. Something as seemingly simple as downloading an mp3 file from a browser and importing it to a music player app is quite an ordeal on iOS.
thekyle 6y ago
What do you mean by "Extremely easy sharing of data between apps"? In my experience it's quite difficult to get your data out of one app and into another one.

by rtpg 6y ago

swiley 6y ago

I can open vim on my iphone/desktop and get a textbox. I don't see what storing things in files has to do with that. >Extremely easy sharing of data between apps. hah no. Try sharing large batches of files on iOS. with plenty of apps there's no way to do this (and often the only way to do it if you can is with the files app.)

ziotom78 6y ago

I remember that some of these points were targeted by the Étoilé environment [1]. It was a desktop environment targeted for GNUstep and programmed in Objective-C that tried to rethink a few fundamental concepts of the Desktop Environments available at the time (~10 years ago). Among them, proper file versioning for everything, seamless app interoperability and data sharing, etc. Sadly, the developers never managed to go beyond a few core libraries and a nice theme (the GUI used GNUstep under the hood). I followed the development with great interest till they stopped updating the site; I believe that the effort would have required many more developers. What a pity! [1] http://etoileos.com/ http://etoileos.com/

realusername 6y ago

To each their own I guess, on my case I which phones would learn from desktop interfaces and let me manage files and apps properly.

josteink 6y ago

> not thinking about files And I hate app-data not being files, not being portable. My data may be stuck inside a SaaS and only accessible through a closed-source app, and I have nothing to say about it. > Real sandboxing, with a nice permission layer Sandboxing apps is a good thing. Depending on your use-case, Snap/Flatpak or containers kinda solve this, but they are not the default way of running apps for now. What mobile does wrong here though, is that it also sandboxes the user, not giving the user full access to his device, nor letting him let his apps get that access either. This is user-hostile, on all current major mobile-platforms. > Extremely easy sharing of data between apps I would rephrase this as barely functional sharing, for only the limited subset of data the application has decided to implement sharing for, and only in ways the application-developers have considered inter-app sharing. On a desktop, I as the user, have the power to decide how I want to share data and invent new ways data can be shared and utilized. > URIs that go deep into other apps While that is certainly a neat feature, it's an app-centric feature. How do you know which kind of apps I have installed? How do you know which of those apps within that niché I have installed? And if you're not going to make it app-centric, you have to make it file/data-centric anyway... Which leaves us Android. Android does this better than iOS by having an intent-system which lets you register ability to handle both files, urls and subsets of those, and other apps can query for which apps supports which file/url-intents. So basically just a minor addition to the system we already have had on all desktop OSes for decades now. And again: that's a system which already works really well when files are first-class concepts which everything else builds on. So it's all back to files. If you want to empower the user, you must have files.

rtpg 6y ago
Files are emphatically _not_ good first class primitives for rich sharing. If you have a contacts program, are you going to make each contact a file? What about performance or bulk editing? From that program's perspective, the ideal is probably to have a single file (SQLite DB for example). But now you don't have granular sharing mechanisms except through a clumsy export which requires you to give a name to the thing and put it somewhere and open it in the other program. Meanwhile I hit the share sheet on my phone for the Contact. Some apps know about this form for data and can ingest it. Others fallback to text. It's the clipboard model, not the files model. Files are _fine_, and it lets you do stuff like reverse engineer the format and do cool stuff. But it's clunky as hell when you have something relatively ephemeral.

Tainnor 6y ago

The "no files" part of mobile OSs is the worst part for me personally. I constantly re-download the same PDFs, have to look forever for "that particular picture", etc., because even though you can technically access the file system on Android it's not like the majority of apps supports a file manager interface, and many apps just dump their file somewhere without explicit structure, so I basically never find what I need.

rtpg 6y ago
Please note I didn't say "no files". I said "better clipboard". I like files as a thing to be exposed. But I think that for day-to-day work being able to move stuff around between apps without fidgeting around with files is very valuable.
3np 6y ago
Also if you want to do anything beyond “what the devs already thought about” you either need deep understanding of the specific system/app or rounds of trial and error. Case in point: tried sharing a vpn config with an Android user over Signal. They couldn’t do anything with the file, just yielding an error message saying it was unsupported. Sending the exact same file with a .pdf extension allowed them to download it and import it in their VPN app (only after downloading and installing a generic file manager app, though). Every now and then I struggle with some file that I can’t figure out how to move between apps. Something as seemingly simple as downloading an mp3 file from a browser and importing it to a music player app is quite an ordeal on iOS.

thekyle 6y ago

What do you mean by "Extremely easy sharing of data between apps"? In my experience it's quite difficult to get your data out of one app and into another one.