Listing Details
| ID: | 1384 |
| Title: | Kartik's Log |
| URL: | http://kartik-log.blogspot.com/ |
| Category: | Computers: Programming |
| Description: | Thoughts on programming, languages, software and computing. |
| "Developing for iOS" Talk - Tue, 15 May 2012 09:12:00 +0000 |
| Slides from my talk on developing for iOS: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B6yeuSRTSAObNUNNaUM0RExmSjg  |
| Flamed-out Fireball - Fri, 04 May 2012 03:11:00 +0000 |
| I first read Daring Fireball (henceforth: DF) in 2005, when I was in college, didn't have a computer of my own, and was forced to use the Fedora Core 1 machines that were in the lab. That was such a frustrating experience that it almost drove to years. John's insightfulpostabout Linux usability (or rather the lack of it at that time) deeply resonated me. It comforted me and assuaged the pain of using Fedora (until I bought my PC), and I was hooked. Here was an insightful person who valued design and craftsmanship, and whose high standards demanded that things work beautifully and intuitively rather than just kind of work. I've since imbibed that spirit as well. I've been reading DF practically every day since then, and for several years considered it the best blog on the web. I had an enormous amount of respect for John. But over the last couple of years, everything that made it great has sadly eroded. The insight gave way to snark and mean-spiritedness and outright insults likethis one: If I wanted to be a dick, I’d suggest that these surveys skew toward Android because Android buyers are more likely to be dumb enough to waste time answering market share surveys. But I don’t want to be a dick, so I won’t.People who choose a different platform than John are dumb? Excuse me, "are more likely to be" dumb. This is just one example of the kind of posts you find on DF nowadays. I can't read this as anything other than the worst kind of mean-spirited, us-against-them fanboyism. In fact, fanboyism may be too oblique. The problem isn't that John is an Apple fanboy — we've known that for a while — but that he's abrasive and more likely to insult than to enlighten, more likely to inflame rather than inform. He's become a troll. Compare the above with John's treatment ofpractically the same thing from 2006. One is a thoughtful, sensitive treatment of a touchy subject, and the other is put-downs and outright name-calling. As I become more emotionally mature, I find that it's not just information that matters, but also the way I feel about things. As Matt describes soeloquently, it's time for me to push this source of negativity away from my life.  |
| Building a better iTunes - Mon, 30 Apr 2012 05:29:00 +0000 |
| iTunes was supposed to make managing your device effortless and automatic, as opposed to manually managing the filesystem. I've had some arguments that that iTunes way was superior than the Android way, but it's important to differentiate between the concept and the implementation (iTunes). It's no great exaggeration to say that iTunes doesn't cut the mustard. To begin with, the iTunes library often gets out of sync with the filesystem, when you add, remove or move media around. When you add songs to your music folder, you should also add it to iTunes, or drag and drop the whole music folder onto iTunes, so that it adds the newly added songs. Similarly, when you move a song into the trash, iTunes still tracks the file in the trash, which is lame. You have to empty trash to really delete the song, losing out on other files that you may want to restore in the future. Even then, iTunes merely displays an exclamation icon next to that song, and you have to manually delete it from your library. And if you just went through your library deleting a lot of stuff, you won't be able to find all the broken links in your library -- you can't sort by the "missing" status. I found an AppleScript that goes through your library and deletes missing stuff. Moving a file is logically equivalent to adding a new one and deleting the old one, so you get both the above forms of entertainment. Having to use a script to get things to work is a screamingly obvious hint that the system is broken. iTunes should automatically scan your media folders and keep itself in sync, like Picasa does. Instead, iTunes as it exists trades off the problem of keeping your device in sync with your computer for the problem of keeping your iTunes library in sync with your filesystem, which is hardly any improvement at all. Then there are the problems of having an iPad synced to another computer, which can easily happen if you upgrade your machine (or reinstall your OS) and forget to back up and restore your iTunes library. In fact, iTunes just told me my new iPad was synced with another iTunes when it wasn't (it wasn't synced with any computer at all). And if you want to sync different content to different devices, that doesn't work very well. You have to use hidden functionality like pressing Option while restarting iTunes (another hint of brokenness), then keep in mind which files have been added to which iTunes library, etc. Then iTunes insisting on backing up iOS apps to your computer, wasting more than a ten GB of space on my 128GB SSD. You can't turn off sync for a particular type of content (like apps) without erasing the apps already on the device. iTunes also has superfluous functionality to sync mail, calendars, contacts, bookmarks, notes, photos, etc, which is better done by syncing to a cloud, like Google or iCloud. When everything in your library doesn't fit on your device, you have to manually decide what to sync, dragging individual items or folders to your device, reducing iTunes to a poor man's filesystem. Instead, iDevices should just mount as a filesystem, perhaps MTP when plugged in using USB, or an SMB/WebDAV/SFTP server when syncing wirelessly. Or they could use a proprietary protocol if that works better for some reason. No matter the protocol, it will mount as a filesystem with folders for music, videos, books, etc. (No apps, mail, contacts, calendars, etc.) iTunes should still exist as a convenient UI to sync that the device's filesystem with your PC. That way, iTunes will help in the simple, common case where you don't want to deal with the filesystem to manually sync directories. I can imagine checking the box in iTunes to sync music, and have iTunes sync the music directory on my iPad from the music directory on my PC. But when that turns out to be a straitjacket, the filesystem is available, without the kludgy, poor man's filesystem that iTunes effectively ends up being. Android's USB mounting is a better base for managing your device than the iTunes model. By all means, build a simpler UI on top of the filesystem for common cases, but don't declare the filesystem out of bonds, because that's broken, as we've seen.  |