Monday, October 10, 2016

More is Less, IOS 10 edition

Less was less when Steve Jobs decided on a one-button mouse.  I am having to use one of those with a different Mac that's been assigned to me at work and it's HORRIBLE!  I replace all Apple one-button mouses with 2 button mouses with scroll wheels as quickly as I can.

But that was ancient history.  Nowadays, Apple is encrusting their OS's with more and more, to the point where I can't do anything anymore.  Examples are endless.

It used to be a simple reflexive motion in which I could raise the phone and snap a photo.  Now I raise the phone and before I know it I'm shooting videos or panoramas instead.  I don't even know how to use those features, but the slider that selects them moves too easily and begins choosing options I didn't want, and it takes some two-handed twisting to get back to plain old photos again, and then being extra careful to not press the wrong thing…and then the best moment for the photo is gone, and my photo library is filling up with increasing amounts of accidental junk.

Now I can barely send a text and I end up on some page with hand-written messages on it.  What is this all about?  Just get this stuff out of the way!!!

Back in the 1980's I used to think Apple was a backward looking operation because of their poor implementation of multitasking.  Notably, Amiga computers had nicer multitasking (though, lacking virtual memory, so errant applications could mess up others).

Now I wish I could simply turn off multitasking on my phone--which seems to fill up with more and more still-running applications, some of which actually consume the battery.  Most of the time, when I exit an application, I'm done with it for the foreseeable future, thank you.

It is all very straightforward in the last real OS we created: Unix.  Applications keep running only if you "suspend" from them (with CTRL-Z), either with a normal exit or abort (CTRL-C) they are terminated.