Steve Jobs, the iPad, and cultural sugar water
in [Mac Applications]
|
From: AES on 5 Jul 2010 15:26 In article <yobhbkdj386.fsf(a)panix3.panix.com>, BreadWithSpam(a)fractious.net wrote: > > Applications? :-) > > No. The recipient of the document must be an application and no > application other than the App Store app knows how to "receive" > app files or install them. > And this is (with only slight exaggeration or hyerbole) a purely evil limitation.
From: AES on 5 Jul 2010 15:35 In article <timstreater-E5B633.19171105072010(a)news.individual.net>, Tim Streater <timstreater(a)waitrose.com> wrote: > Suppose I'm a web developer, and I have 500 files in my web > app (the asset management system I did for my last employer comes to > mind). Suppose now I want to reorganise how I group the files into > directories - can I do that easily? On a Mac? -- yes, of course. Do that all the time myself, in fact, at least with large numbers of a very wide range of text and image files, in a near unlimited variety of formats, using for example, the superb iView MediaPro file management system. Allows me, right from within a IVMP catalog, to batch rename and renumber files (including a very good Find and Replace capability); resort them on a huge range of sort criteria; transfer them between folders using any of three selected different transfer modes; and so on. And if I needed more, I have no doubt I could do many additional things using AppleScript, which doesn't look all that hard to learn.
From: Jochem Huhmann on 5 Jul 2010 15:58 AES <siegman(a)stanford.edu> writes: > Suppose I'm heading out the door on a short (or long) excursion, during > which I'll only need some of my files and some of iPad's capabilities, > whatever they are. I want to be able to: > > --Transfer any one of the many "topic" folders that are on my desktop > (and that may contain a bewildering variety of file types and formats) > straight over to the USB-connected iPad's icon on the same desktop (or > maybe do this via WiFi) with _one_ single familiar drag and drop > operation; > > --Access a few of those files on the iPad during the excursion, for > reading or viewing or listening, maybe for some light editing, to > whatever extent the iPad can do this; > > --Maybe transfer some of those files (or the whole folder) over to a > colleague, or to a temporarily available computer, during the excursion, > again with nothing more than a USB (or maybe WiFi) connection and a > single drag and drop action; > > --and when I get back home, transfer the whole folder, in one swoop, > back to my home computer in the same single drag-and-drop manner. > > I don't want to even think about having to do any of those transfers > using iTunes, or Dropbox, or whatever, because: > > --It's stupidly unnecessary to have to maintain, fire up, learn to use, > and carry out these transfers via a complex and totally unrelated 200 MB > app like iTunes, when this is exactly what the Finder is for!; > > --And I don't (and can't, ever) trust some that some app like that will > be able to handle every single one of all the files and file types that > may be in my topic folder I'm copying over, and not screw up or bypass > some of those files -- whereas I am willing to trust the Finder; > > --And I don't want to worry about what unknown synching, or copying to > obscure places, or just plain trashing of my files may be done by iTunes > or other apps, based on DRM or whatever, without alerting me or before I > can stop it (happens all the time with iTunes, right?); > > and mostly, because it's just really stupidly unnecessary to have to do > such transfers this way. First, the iPad isn't for you. Second: You seem to enjoy micromanaging in a nearly pathological way. You insist in doing things *your* way, as you're used to do them. You haven't even once in all these paragraphs said what you're actually doing. You just talk about *how* you want to do it. You sound like someone used to horse carriages looking at a motor car and complaining about the absurd thing that you hardly can harness a horse to and it's much too heavy anyway with all the useless metal things under the hood. Third: Dropbox looks as if it would do almost all of what you want to do with no setup, maintenance or learning at all. Nevermind, Jochem -- "A designer knows he has arrived at perfection not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
From: Wes Groleau on 5 Jul 2010 16:05 On 07-05-2010 15:35, AES wrote: > Allows me, right from within a IVMP catalog, to batch rename and > renumber files (including a very good Find and Replace capability); > resort them on a huge range of sort criteria; transfer them between > folders using any of three selected different transfer modes; and so on. I'm not familiar with the application mentioned, but it would be trivial to interpret ..../year/state/county/township/street as five columns in a database table, and display them in any style or sequence on could do with such a table. It would be almost as trivial to reorganize the associated files to have the directory levels in a different order. Gets slightly more complicated if some states don't have townships, but still not bad. But if those are things you want to do, then who needs a filesystem per se? How about one giant database, where an application - decides what the columns are in tables it defines - decides what table definitions will be made public and/or writable by other apps - decides (if the defining app allows), what heirarchy, if any, the columns are in - (finally) whether a particular table includes a column which contains the contents of traditional “files” Such could be implemented within a more traditional filesystem where only the O.S./database program has direct access to the filesystem, and the apps have to use the associated API to get to stuff. When the filesystem is all in flash memory, why not. In fact, a traditional file system is actually such a system where the disk surface is the database and the filesystem is the API. But it's a much less flexible system. There was once an O.S. called “PICK” that was touted as something like this, I think. I never clicked on any of the links posted for it. -- Wes Groleau Some schools are cutting back on homework … http://Ideas.Lang-Learn.us/russell?itemid=1508
From: Wes Groleau on 5 Jul 2010 16:10
On 07-05-2010 15:27, Lloyd Parsons wrote: > Then it is very obvious that the iPad wasn't meant for you at all. No > problem, don't buy and iPad, get a laptop. Or install XCode and write your own Finder-like app I'm told that you don't need app-store approval to put your own apps on your own iP((a\o)d|hone) (iThing for those not fond of geekspeak) -- Wes Groleau Words of the Wild Wes http://Ideas.Lang-Learn.us/WWW |