5 ms·

The article brings up a great point. This tool is so esencial I wonder why is it that Apple and Android have not made this natively much simpler. Seems like a g

by somid3 13y ago

The article brings up a great point. This tool is so esencial I wonder why is it that Apple and Android have not made this natively much simpler. Seems like a great venture to be a part of.

veesahni 13y ago
see additional discussion on the other HN topic here, including comments from one of the founders https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6218991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6218991
- brettcvz 13y ago
  I'll comment here as well, the other one seemed to have gotten bumped
myko 13y ago
> Android have not made this natively much simpler. This is already amazingly simple on Android natively though. This is an attempt to make it similarly simple on iOS.
- brettcvz 13y ago
  Intents has done a great job on android - I have some minor quibbles with it, but it's light years ahead of what iOS had pre-Ink Edit since I can't reply to milesokeefe: As an avid android user (Galaxy Nexus), some things about intents that I feel are poorly designed: - No support for bidirectionality. There's no sense of "I'm done with this action, take the results and send it back" - No sense of intelligence in terms of what actions are shown. As far as I can tell, it seems to be filtered by content type, sorted by Most Recently Used. - Unclear actions - iOS suffers the same issue, where it's not really clear what it means to open in another application.
  - milesokeefe 13y ago
    Just curious, what are your minor quibbles?
  - myko 13y ago
    > No support for bidirectionality. There's no sense of "I'm done with this action, take the results and send it back" - Doesn't startActivityForResult fit this use case? > No sense of intelligence in terms of what actions are shown. I agree here, it can be annoying to pair down the list of applications which will handle an intent. If one wants specific applications one can use the package manager to check its existence and then use that.
    - biafra 13y ago
      You can also reduce the list before presenting it to the user.
  - phillnom 13y ago
    As myko stated, you're wrong about intents lacking bidirectionality, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8823206/how-to-return-data-through-intents http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8823206/how-to-return-dat...

by somid3 13y ago

The article brings up a great point. This tool is so esencial I wonder why is it that Apple and Android have not made this natively much simpler. Seems like a great venture to be a part of.

veesahni 13y ago

see additional discussion on the other HN topic here, including comments from one of the founders https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6218991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6218991

brettcvz 13y ago
I'll comment here as well, the other one seemed to have gotten bumped

myko 13y ago

> Android have not made this natively much simpler. This is already amazingly simple on Android natively though. This is an attempt to make it similarly simple on iOS.

brettcvz 13y ago
Intents has done a great job on android - I have some minor quibbles with it, but it's light years ahead of what iOS had pre-Ink Edit since I can't reply to milesokeefe: As an avid android user (Galaxy Nexus), some things about intents that I feel are poorly designed: - No support for bidirectionality. There's no sense of "I'm done with this action, take the results and send it back" - No sense of intelligence in terms of what actions are shown. As far as I can tell, it seems to be filtered by content type, sorted by Most Recently Used. - Unclear actions - iOS suffers the same issue, where it's not really clear what it means to open in another application.
- milesokeefe 13y ago
  Just curious, what are your minor quibbles?
- myko 13y ago
  > No support for bidirectionality. There's no sense of "I'm done with this action, take the results and send it back" - Doesn't startActivityForResult fit this use case? > No sense of intelligence in terms of what actions are shown. I agree here, it can be annoying to pair down the list of applications which will handle an intent. If one wants specific applications one can use the package manager to check its existence and then use that.
  - biafra 13y ago
    You can also reduce the list before presenting it to the user.
- phillnom 13y ago
  As myko stated, you're wrong about intents lacking bidirectionality, see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8823206/how-to-return-data-through-intents http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8823206/how-to-return-dat...