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💬 Replied to: The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10

“To reach its potential, Apple needs to recognize they have made profound conceptual mistakes in the iPad user interface, mistakes that need to be scrapped and replaced, not polished and refined. I worry that iPadOS 13 suggests the opposite — that Apple is steering the iPad full speed ahead down a blind alley.”

Daring Fireball

This write-up summarises my feelings about the iPad quite well. I love the iPads I’ve owned over the years; at times they’ve been my primary computing device. My mum is still running my “iPad 2”, and my partner has my first generation iPad Mini — both run well enough for most things they want to do (although the Mini is going to need replaced this year). The iPad form-factor – to me – is the natural expression of Personal Computing for Most People.

The software has never quite clicked though, as you say, and it’s always the reason I end up retreating to having another class of device around. The more Apple tries to bring it closer to a “real” computer, the more it breaks down. A lot of the interactions in iPadOS 13 are so unintuitive I regularly forget they are there, or how to initiate them. I’d happlily pay a small charge for Slide Over to be removed completely. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve accidentally triggered it and found myself unable to dismiss the hovering app now getting in my way. During the public beta period I wrote multiple pieces of feedback that drag-and-drop actions triggered far too easily, making tap-and-hold actions needlessly difficult to execute on some interfaces. If anything, it feels like this has got worse as iPadOS 13 has matured.

I wish I had a good answer for where the software should go in the future, to fulfill the iPad’s  potential. Even more, I wish Apple did too.

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An iOS Shortcuts tidbit I figured out yesterday: if you start with a piece of HTML as your input, it will be converted by Shortcuts to its internal “Rich Text” data type by default.

To send that HTML as HTML to another shortcut or an external service (such as a Micropub endpoint) then you need to convert the Rich Text back to HTML using a Documents > Make HTML from Rich Text action. If you don’t do this, your endpoint or whatever that doesn’t natively understand Shortcuts’ Rich Text format will receive the plain text value.

I really need to revisit my IndieWeb iOS Shortcuts article from last year. I’ve added and improved so much about my workflow since then.

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This post has two main purposes in my mind: write an idea down, in case I find myself able to return to it; put the idea “out there,” in case anyone else wants to pick it up and run with it.

About a year ago I had the nebulous idea for a simple directory built around webmention:

  • sites would add themselves by creating a post which sends a webmention to the directory.
  • The directory would retrieve and parse the post to retrieve site name, base url, feed links, etc.
  • Any tags and categories marked with p-category would be used for directory classification and organisation.
  • There would be a simple administrative queue for approvals and data cleanup (parsing errors and the like). Sites wouldn’t appear until they were approved.
  • Site owners could preview what an unapproved directory listing would look like by signing in with IndieAuth. They’d also be able to delist themselves/make changes (also possible through webmention).

I never had a chance to get further than very initial experiments with this, so I’m wondering if I should just let the domain (indieweb.directory) expire in a couple of days, or renew it “just in case.” I can’t see me having any extra free time this year to actually do something with the idea.

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🔖 Bookmarked: Listen To Me And Not Google by an author

“I’ve always been uneasy about Material Design. I understand why Google would want to have their own design system, and I can even appreciate why organizations like Google would want to shout about that system, and how they developed it, as a PR exercise. But Material Design is for you to use. It asks you to design your products as Google would; to make your design work look and feel like Google’s. Why would you want to do that? Then again this is me talking, and I’m the sort of person who refuses to wear a T-shirt with Nike™ emblazoned on it, because I think being a mobile billboard is rather a reductive mode of human existence.”

an author (HeydonWorks)