8 ms·

What iOS Can Learn from Unix

52 points by ananddass 13y ago

mscottmcbee 13y ago
Android has this in the form of intents. Not quite as useful, but still works well. Maybe look at more than just iOS when talking about "the mobile space".
- pjmlp 13y ago
  And Windows Phone adopted it in the form of contracts as well.
jpinkerton88 13y ago
I would like to see this done well. However, with Apple trying to protect and cater to the "every-day user", I wonder if we will ever see something like this, because of the security implications that come with it.
- rcoh 13y ago
  We think that the key is to provide a limited and controlled interface between the apps (which is what we're trying to do). We'll see how it goes :-)
- kunai 13y ago
  It's a fallacy that the every-day user doesn't want or need a filesystem. They do need a filesystem and interoperable components. What they do NOT need is a hierarchical based filesystem that limits you to a directory trees. It's an organizational nightmare, and unless you've ever used git before it's a literal hell for the average user. Instead, a flat filesystem with smart names, tagging, and metadata is the way forward. Subdirectories will be relegated to those who want them. As for security, that excuse is nonexistent when Apple has the final authority to application interoperability and analysis. If an implementation is flawed, they can reject it at will and tell the developers to improve it.
  - jpinkerton88 13y ago
    I agree. I was just trying to imagine what Apple's will do since they have been trying for years to eliminate the file system for the every-day user, even on OSX (iTunes, iPhoto, Notes, etc.)
gdubs 13y ago
I've posted this before, but it's relevant to mention AudioBus which is a way to pipe separate music apps together on one iOS device. I've incorporated it into one of my apps and it works really well. According to Michael, it's creator, it uses Mach Ports to communicate between apps. Apple embraced it and included it with GarageBand.
- alayne 13y ago
  At this point there is JACK, AudioBus, and soon inter-app audio in iOS7.
  - swift 13y ago
    Apparently AudioBus has already been updated to be interoperable with inter-app audio: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/09/audiobus-for-ios-7-update-is-already-here/ http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/09/audiobus-for-ios-7-upd...
k_bx 13y ago
> What iOS Can Learn from Unix Having concept of "files" to be able to open pdf you just downloaded from email/browser inside pdf reader?
- glhaynes 13y ago
  You can totally do that today.
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  Do you need the concept of files in order for that to happen?
  - k_bx 13y ago
    Well, I think yes (mimetypes at least).
    - zeckalpha 13y ago
      Sure, but the user doesn't need to know about the filesystem.
      - k_bx 13y ago
        Yes. He doesn't. He just taps on file he downloaded. Or opens reader app (which scans all pdf's for him).
tuxracer 13y ago
So really this is, "What iOS can learn from a 2008 Android device"? The author is wrong in his footnote. Android intents are both action and file type based or even wildcard URL based. http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1219228/complete-action-android-41-jelly-bean-ss-16-verge-300.jpg http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1219228/complete-action-an...
- rcoh 13y ago
  Ah, thanks for the heads up. I've updated the footnote.
fournm 13y ago
From a user perspective, intents are more useful and cover almost everything they're talking about. Most people really don't want to think about the how, they just want to share something to Facebook somehow. Having a standard way to just hook the Facebook app for it is what they really need. It is a shame that we can't get more app functionality sharing in place, but really I don't know if we necessarily want to bring that much dependency management into the mobile space at large either.
- rcoh 13y ago
  Intents are useful, but could be better. A standard way to hook into the Facebook app is fine for Facebook but what about when the space is more fragmented? Should app authors have to integrate with every document viewer or Mail App?
  - Navarr 13y ago
    Standard way to hook into the Facebook app is a "Share Intent" which can be picked up by any other social network application; such as Google+, my text messaging app, Google Hangouts, and so many others. Even allowing "copy to clipboard" and "Pin" and whatever else. Almost every Android app creates a Share Intent listener to pull in data. If there's a document viewer, it'll listen in for the file types it supports when you try to open a file (I think its a VIEW intent). It's all very impressive and very, very useful.
    - alayne 13y ago
      Unless they've changed it, you'll have to use the FaceBook SDK to do anything more than post a URL. FB's intent support is bad.
    - rcoh 13y ago
      Ah, yeah. I was talking about iOS in particular. Android intents are pretty sweet -- a couple the missing bits to make them great in my mind are -- App discovery: tell me about apps that can use my content if I don't have any? -- Action curation: What do users think are the best app for this action?
bitwize 13y ago
Small isolated components lead to communication overhead and can cripple performance. They offer certain advantages, too, but this is no different from any other software-engineering tradeoff. There's a reason why the winning kernel is a monolithic kernel, and the winning init system is one large God-daemon that replaces many smaller legacy daemons.
- rcoh 13y ago
  There's a difference between the performance you want in your kernel and the performance you need sharing to Facebook. It seems like creating monolithic mobile apps is premature optimization.
nraynaud 13y ago
I think they avoid a lot of features because they are immediately used for spam. Like the tray icons for windows, the start menu entry, the desktop icons, the chrome plugins, the menu icons in Mac OS X, the notifications etc. The marketers are a plague, they destroy everything.
residualmind 13y ago
This is why I'm still not able to wrap my head around some developers' fascination or love for iOS. Or actually apple at all, since the Apple ][ tbh. Especially when it is becoming more clear that they target the "consumer" range. Unless it's only for profit. But love? Off topic, sorry. Android intents.
- MrScruff 13y ago
  I think you're conflating being a software developer and being a power user.
masswerk 13y ago
I think that there's more to it than what's mentioned in the article: Todays mobile OSes (and iOS prominently) have been designed as consumer OSes. Now it is becoming apparent that mobile devices are eventually becoming a platform for work (well, "work" might be a bit exaggerated here) and targeted task-fullfilment too. Time to rethink the mobile OS as a whole.
- rcoh 13y ago
  Yes. The Ubuntu Phone / OS is a interesting byproduct of this idea.
- manojlds 13y ago
  Android does this already. Windows 8 (RT) and Windows Phone do too. The article is only about iOS.
  - masswerk 13y ago
    Think of Mac OS Automator for mobile devices (let's name it "Task Composer"), letting you assemble whole workflows based on pipes. But this would potentially harm any AppStore interests, so this will never happen, not on any of the current platforms. (Edit: This would also afford to expose system calls to the end user, being the end of consumer haven.)
  - earlz 13y ago
    Windows RT does NOT do this.. They have a few very limited APIs for IPC, such as Search.. other than that, it's very tied down. Even so much so that it's impossible to make a universal file browser. You have to declare ahead of time which file extensions your application should be capable of opening
- mtts 13y ago
  Maybe that's exactly the point - they're consumer OSes. And while Android already does this, with intents, I doubt most consumers are very happy with this feature (if they even know it exists). You want to do something with an image, for example, and you're greeted with a huge list of apps that all claim to handle images. Not only is it hard to find the app you want, most of the ones in the list have nothing to do with the task you're trying to accomplish. Hardly user friendly behavior. FWIW, I personally don't really mind the huge list and can find my way around it, but I'm a heavy Unix user that does most of his work in the terminal already. Most consumers are not.
ratherhost 13y ago
What the author wants is Android. iOS doesn't work that way, and for good reasons.
mimiflynn 13y ago
When I read the headline I thought "isn't iOS based on Darwin?" and then I read the article. Good points, but I feel the headline is a bit off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)
gwu78 13y ago
How about we produce an enclosure that looks about as good as an iPhone or iPad (as some are already doing; hello Samsung). Inside we put cheap electronics, but with no barriers to what software can be run (hello Apple) and no barriers to inspecting each and every line of software code that will be running on our device that we own (hello, Apple). Finally, we install our own open source OS (say, UNIX). That UNIX might be so simple that we could, if desired, compile it ourselves from scratch. Maybe even the compiler itself. No better route to security, if there is such a thing. If iOS is so great and there is demand, Apple can sell us a license to run it on our device. My guess is that few would pay for this. More likely, the market would demand a windowing GUI, not an entire OS (e.g., one borrowed from CMU, FreeBSD and NetBSD; hello again Apple). Could developers respond and deliver one? UNIX can do lots of things well. And well enough. That's probably why iOS relies on UNIX and not some other OS. But iOS won't let you do all the things that UNIX will let you do. Conclusion: iOS is inferior to other, more open, more traditional UNIX alternatives. Apple does make a nice windowing GUI. And some very nice enclosures. Each worth a price, no doubt. But UNIX, the code that does the important stuff, has always been free.
- alanctgardner2 13y ago
  There is no barrier to what software will run on your nexus device. For example, I could put android, or Ubuntu on my Nexus 4. Doesn't that meet all your requirements? The hardware is even sold near cost, by a well-known manufacturer.
  - jordanthoms 13y ago
    Yeah - the only restriction on a Nexus is that if/when you unlock it, you must wipe the data on the phone - which is for completely legitimate security reasons.
  - gwu78 13y ago
    It might meet some. Does it boot from external media? Can I use my own bootloader? Android or Ubuntu are both Linux. What about something like BSD or Plan9? To be truthful, my "requirements" include first and foremost, a great looking enclosure. There is a reason for that. I want be able to buy the enclosure separately. This is important. In my vision, there would multiple sources for boards that might fit inside. Not every user might want or need the same computing power or peripherals. Imagine, to take an example, if there were multiple RaspberryPi-sized boards. Then you could mix and match different available enclosures[1] with different boards. 1. We are seeing the market respond with many, varied enclosures for the Pi. There are lots of development boards for sale to consumers, and there are dedicated people porting UNIX OS's to run on them. What I don't see, generally, are reasonably-priced and attractive enclosures for these boards. The RaspberryPi may be changing this state of affairs, as the Pi enclosure market continues to grow. Separating out the parts of the device, from the enclosure to the PCB to the OS to the third party software is, you might say, like the UNIX userland philosophy of isolating functions to their own individual utilities. This separation allows more flexibility and more power, in the example of the UNIX userland by allowing the user to filter and redirect output and connect utilities together with pipes. What are the things Apple does well? Enclosures and graphics, in my opinion. (And controlling their users :) UNIX is not on the list. There are better UNIX alternatives than iOS. My opinion. Or, as in the article, you can wait and hope that iOS can be improved to be more like those UNIX alternatives.
ianstallings 13y ago
Although it's not a true "pipe", the best way to handle data transfer between apps on iOS is to use custom URL schemes. I've done this to pass data and launch another application. See "communicating with other apps": https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/AdvancedAppTricks/AdvancedAppTricks.html https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iPhone... In one app framework we built we had a fairly complicated parser and it could handle a pretty wide variety of URL paths and the supplied data. But there in turn lies the problem - each app must have a mechanism to handle the parsing and routing for these URLs.
- rcoh 13y ago
  This is a good start -- http://x-callback-url.com/ http://x-callback-url.com/ is a standard and listing for apps that support it. The biggest problem is that there is a limited amount of data that you can transfer in a URL (about 80KB I believe) so even large PDFs will start to cause problems.
RyanZAG 13y ago
From the footnotes: > Android has intents which are a big step in the right direction. With a few tweaks to user experience they could solve this problem on the platform. What tweaks would 'solve this problem'? As far as I can tell, Android intents work flawlessly for transferring content between apps. I can click an attachment on an email, open it in an editor, make changes, and then share that file back on a social network or another email. Each step taking only two taps. The speed of downloading attachments could do with some work in most cases, but that's just a hardware issue and will probably be far faster in another generation or two of hardware. I have a feeling the author has never really used an Android device much? Or am I missing some key piece missing from intents?
- rcoh 13y ago
  An Android phone is my primary device. A few key issues for me: 1. No app discovery -- I want to find out about apps that can work with my content. 2. Action curation -- I want to see the actions that other people think are most useful when dealing with my content. 3. No "Return" actions -- eg. The context knowledge necessary to reply to the same message, or overwrite an existing file. 4. Cross device and cross OS: If this is done right, there's no reason for the action to be bound to just one device or even one person.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    1. When you initiate any action that would use an intent in Android, you get that selection popup window that let's you choose any app that can handle that intent. So I think there is already app discovery? Unless you mean something like Play Store integration into Android itself, in which you can view applications on Google Play that can handle that intent. That is pretty interesting and should be do-able even without Google's intervention with just a database of Google Play apps... I looked around but didn't find anything. Might be a cool project to try. 2. Each app defines what intents it can handle, so I don't think curation is necessary. The app select popup window is already curating that for you? 3. This context knowledge is provided inside every intent. Not all apps choose to use it, though. In some cases I'd guess the sandbox would get in the way as well. I'm not sure how much practical value this would have anyway? Can you explain it a bit more? 4. There is nothing stopping Apple from adopting Android intents, but obviously they won't. This is a 'pie in the sky' suggestion that won't happen for the same reason there is more than one flavour of Linux. It's like asking why you can't pipe results from your unix system to a Windows system - it just won't happen for political reasons.
ekr 13y ago
All the downfalls mentioned in the article (and many others) are direct consequences of non-free software. Apparently the author is oblivious to this fact, and the nature of free software.
getachew 13y ago
What inkmobility can learn from Unix: open source and live forever.

52 points by ananddass 13y ago

Android has this in the form of intents. Not quite as useful, but still works well. Maybe look at more than just iOS when talking about "the mobile space".

pjmlp 13y ago
And Windows Phone adopted it in the form of contracts as well.

jpinkerton88 13y ago

I would like to see this done well. However, with Apple trying to protect and cater to the "every-day user", I wonder if we will ever see something like this, because of the security implications that come with it.

rcoh 13y ago
We think that the key is to provide a limited and controlled interface between the apps (which is what we're trying to do). We'll see how it goes :-)
kunai 13y ago
It's a fallacy that the every-day user doesn't want or need a filesystem. They do need a filesystem and interoperable components. What they do NOT need is a hierarchical based filesystem that limits you to a directory trees. It's an organizational nightmare, and unless you've ever used git before it's a literal hell for the average user. Instead, a flat filesystem with smart names, tagging, and metadata is the way forward. Subdirectories will be relegated to those who want them. As for security, that excuse is nonexistent when Apple has the final authority to application interoperability and analysis. If an implementation is flawed, they can reject it at will and tell the developers to improve it.
- jpinkerton88 13y ago
  I agree. I was just trying to imagine what Apple's will do since they have been trying for years to eliminate the file system for the every-day user, even on OSX (iTunes, iPhoto, Notes, etc.)

gdubs 13y ago

I've posted this before, but it's relevant to mention AudioBus which is a way to pipe separate music apps together on one iOS device. I've incorporated it into one of my apps and it works really well. According to Michael, it's creator, it uses Mach Ports to communicate between apps. Apple embraced it and included it with GarageBand.

alayne 13y ago
At this point there is JACK, AudioBus, and soon inter-app audio in iOS7.
- swift 13y ago
  Apparently AudioBus has already been updated to be interoperable with inter-app audio: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/09/audiobus-for-ios-7-update-is-already-here/ http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/09/audiobus-for-ios-7-upd...

k_bx 13y ago

> What iOS Can Learn from Unix Having concept of "files" to be able to open pdf you just downloaded from email/browser inside pdf reader?

glhaynes 13y ago
You can totally do that today.
zeckalpha 13y ago
Do you need the concept of files in order for that to happen?
- k_bx 13y ago
  Well, I think yes (mimetypes at least).
  - zeckalpha 13y ago
    Sure, but the user doesn't need to know about the filesystem.
    - k_bx 13y ago
      Yes. He doesn't. He just taps on file he downloaded. Or opens reader app (which scans all pdf's for him).

tuxracer 13y ago

So really this is, "What iOS can learn from a 2008 Android device"? The author is wrong in his footnote. Android intents are both action and file type based or even wildcard URL based. http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1219228/complete-action-android-41-jelly-bean-ss-16-verge-300.jpg http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1219228/complete-action-an...

rcoh 13y ago
Ah, thanks for the heads up. I've updated the footnote.

fournm 13y ago

From a user perspective, intents are more useful and cover almost everything they're talking about. Most people really don't want to think about the how, they just want to share something to Facebook somehow. Having a standard way to just hook the Facebook app for it is what they really need. It is a shame that we can't get more app functionality sharing in place, but really I don't know if we necessarily want to bring that much dependency management into the mobile space at large either.

rcoh 13y ago
Intents are useful, but could be better. A standard way to hook into the Facebook app is fine for Facebook but what about when the space is more fragmented? Should app authors have to integrate with every document viewer or Mail App?
- Navarr 13y ago
  Standard way to hook into the Facebook app is a "Share Intent" which can be picked up by any other social network application; such as Google+, my text messaging app, Google Hangouts, and so many others. Even allowing "copy to clipboard" and "Pin" and whatever else. Almost every Android app creates a Share Intent listener to pull in data. If there's a document viewer, it'll listen in for the file types it supports when you try to open a file (I think its a VIEW intent). It's all very impressive and very, very useful.
  - alayne 13y ago
    Unless they've changed it, you'll have to use the FaceBook SDK to do anything more than post a URL. FB's intent support is bad.
  - rcoh 13y ago
    Ah, yeah. I was talking about iOS in particular. Android intents are pretty sweet -- a couple the missing bits to make them great in my mind are -- App discovery: tell me about apps that can use my content if I don't have any? -- Action curation: What do users think are the best app for this action?

bitwize 13y ago

Small isolated components lead to communication overhead and can cripple performance. They offer certain advantages, too, but this is no different from any other software-engineering tradeoff. There's a reason why the winning kernel is a monolithic kernel, and the winning init system is one large God-daemon that replaces many smaller legacy daemons.

rcoh 13y ago
There's a difference between the performance you want in your kernel and the performance you need sharing to Facebook. It seems like creating monolithic mobile apps is premature optimization.

nraynaud 13y ago

I think they avoid a lot of features because they are immediately used for spam. Like the tray icons for windows, the start menu entry, the desktop icons, the chrome plugins, the menu icons in Mac OS X, the notifications etc. The marketers are a plague, they destroy everything.

residualmind 13y ago

This is why I'm still not able to wrap my head around some developers' fascination or love for iOS. Or actually apple at all, since the Apple ][ tbh. Especially when it is becoming more clear that they target the "consumer" range. Unless it's only for profit. But love? Off topic, sorry. Android intents.

MrScruff 13y ago
I think you're conflating being a software developer and being a power user.

masswerk 13y ago

I think that there's more to it than what's mentioned in the article: Todays mobile OSes (and iOS prominently) have been designed as consumer OSes. Now it is becoming apparent that mobile devices are eventually becoming a platform for work (well, "work" might be a bit exaggerated here) and targeted task-fullfilment too. Time to rethink the mobile OS as a whole.

rcoh 13y ago
Yes. The Ubuntu Phone / OS is a interesting byproduct of this idea.
manojlds 13y ago
Android does this already. Windows 8 (RT) and Windows Phone do too. The article is only about iOS.
- masswerk 13y ago
  Think of Mac OS Automator for mobile devices (let's name it "Task Composer"), letting you assemble whole workflows based on pipes. But this would potentially harm any AppStore interests, so this will never happen, not on any of the current platforms. (Edit: This would also afford to expose system calls to the end user, being the end of consumer haven.)
- earlz 13y ago
  Windows RT does NOT do this.. They have a few very limited APIs for IPC, such as Search.. other than that, it's very tied down. Even so much so that it's impossible to make a universal file browser. You have to declare ahead of time which file extensions your application should be capable of opening
mtts 13y ago
Maybe that's exactly the point - they're consumer OSes. And while Android already does this, with intents, I doubt most consumers are very happy with this feature (if they even know it exists). You want to do something with an image, for example, and you're greeted with a huge list of apps that all claim to handle images. Not only is it hard to find the app you want, most of the ones in the list have nothing to do with the task you're trying to accomplish. Hardly user friendly behavior. FWIW, I personally don't really mind the huge list and can find my way around it, but I'm a heavy Unix user that does most of his work in the terminal already. Most consumers are not.

ratherhost 13y ago

What the author wants is Android. iOS doesn't work that way, and for good reasons.

mimiflynn 13y ago

When I read the headline I thought "isn't iOS based on Darwin?" and then I read the article. Good points, but I feel the headline is a bit off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)

gwu78 13y ago

How about we produce an enclosure that looks about as good as an iPhone or iPad (as some are already doing; hello Samsung). Inside we put cheap electronics, but with no barriers to what software can be run (hello Apple) and no barriers to inspecting each and every line of software code that will be running on our device that we own (hello, Apple). Finally, we install our own open source OS (say, UNIX). That UNIX might be so simple that we could, if desired, compile it ourselves from scratch. Maybe even the compiler itself. No better route to security, if there is such a thing. If iOS is so great and there is demand, Apple can sell us a license to run it on our device. My guess is that few would pay for this. More likely, the market would demand a windowing GUI, not an entire OS (e.g., one borrowed from CMU, FreeBSD and NetBSD; hello again Apple). Could developers respond and deliver one? UNIX can do lots of things well. And well enough. That's probably why iOS relies on UNIX and not some other OS. But iOS won't let you do all the things that UNIX will let you do. Conclusion: iOS is inferior to other, more open, more traditional UNIX alternatives. Apple does make a nice windowing GUI. And some very nice enclosures. Each worth a price, no doubt. But UNIX, the code that does the important stuff, has always been free.

alanctgardner2 13y ago
There is no barrier to what software will run on your nexus device. For example, I could put android, or Ubuntu on my Nexus 4. Doesn't that meet all your requirements? The hardware is even sold near cost, by a well-known manufacturer.
- jordanthoms 13y ago
  Yeah - the only restriction on a Nexus is that if/when you unlock it, you must wipe the data on the phone - which is for completely legitimate security reasons.
- gwu78 13y ago
  It might meet some. Does it boot from external media? Can I use my own bootloader? Android or Ubuntu are both Linux. What about something like BSD or Plan9? To be truthful, my "requirements" include first and foremost, a great looking enclosure. There is a reason for that. I want be able to buy the enclosure separately. This is important. In my vision, there would multiple sources for boards that might fit inside. Not every user might want or need the same computing power or peripherals. Imagine, to take an example, if there were multiple RaspberryPi-sized boards. Then you could mix and match different available enclosures[1] with different boards. 1. We are seeing the market respond with many, varied enclosures for the Pi. There are lots of development boards for sale to consumers, and there are dedicated people porting UNIX OS's to run on them. What I don't see, generally, are reasonably-priced and attractive enclosures for these boards. The RaspberryPi may be changing this state of affairs, as the Pi enclosure market continues to grow. Separating out the parts of the device, from the enclosure to the PCB to the OS to the third party software is, you might say, like the UNIX userland philosophy of isolating functions to their own individual utilities. This separation allows more flexibility and more power, in the example of the UNIX userland by allowing the user to filter and redirect output and connect utilities together with pipes. What are the things Apple does well? Enclosures and graphics, in my opinion. (And controlling their users :) UNIX is not on the list. There are better UNIX alternatives than iOS. My opinion. Or, as in the article, you can wait and hope that iOS can be improved to be more like those UNIX alternatives.

ianstallings 13y ago

Although it's not a true "pipe", the best way to handle data transfer between apps on iOS is to use custom URL schemes. I've done this to pass data and launch another application. See "communicating with other apps": https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/AdvancedAppTricks/AdvancedAppTricks.html https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/iPhone... In one app framework we built we had a fairly complicated parser and it could handle a pretty wide variety of URL paths and the supplied data. But there in turn lies the problem - each app must have a mechanism to handle the parsing and routing for these URLs.

rcoh 13y ago
This is a good start -- http://x-callback-url.com/ http://x-callback-url.com/ is a standard and listing for apps that support it. The biggest problem is that there is a limited amount of data that you can transfer in a URL (about 80KB I believe) so even large PDFs will start to cause problems.

RyanZAG 13y ago

From the footnotes: > Android has intents which are a big step in the right direction. With a few tweaks to user experience they could solve this problem on the platform. What tweaks would 'solve this problem'? As far as I can tell, Android intents work flawlessly for transferring content between apps. I can click an attachment on an email, open it in an editor, make changes, and then share that file back on a social network or another email. Each step taking only two taps. The speed of downloading attachments could do with some work in most cases, but that's just a hardware issue and will probably be far faster in another generation or two of hardware. I have a feeling the author has never really used an Android device much? Or am I missing some key piece missing from intents?

rcoh 13y ago
An Android phone is my primary device. A few key issues for me: 1. No app discovery -- I want to find out about apps that can work with my content. 2. Action curation -- I want to see the actions that other people think are most useful when dealing with my content. 3. No "Return" actions -- eg. The context knowledge necessary to reply to the same message, or overwrite an existing file. 4. Cross device and cross OS: If this is done right, there's no reason for the action to be bound to just one device or even one person.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  1. When you initiate any action that would use an intent in Android, you get that selection popup window that let's you choose any app that can handle that intent. So I think there is already app discovery? Unless you mean something like Play Store integration into Android itself, in which you can view applications on Google Play that can handle that intent. That is pretty interesting and should be do-able even without Google's intervention with just a database of Google Play apps... I looked around but didn't find anything. Might be a cool project to try. 2. Each app defines what intents it can handle, so I don't think curation is necessary. The app select popup window is already curating that for you? 3. This context knowledge is provided inside every intent. Not all apps choose to use it, though. In some cases I'd guess the sandbox would get in the way as well. I'm not sure how much practical value this would have anyway? Can you explain it a bit more? 4. There is nothing stopping Apple from adopting Android intents, but obviously they won't. This is a 'pie in the sky' suggestion that won't happen for the same reason there is more than one flavour of Linux. It's like asking why you can't pipe results from your unix system to a Windows system - it just won't happen for political reasons.

ekr 13y ago

All the downfalls mentioned in the article (and many others) are direct consequences of non-free software. Apparently the author is oblivious to this fact, and the nature of free software.

getachew 13y ago

What inkmobility can learn from Unix: open source and live forever.