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PureOS is convergent

puri.sm

211–220 of 299 posts

Re: PureOS is convergent

#211
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPad sales in 2018: Q1 2018 13.17 million Q2 2018 9.11 million Q3 2018 11.55 million Q4 2018 9.67 million I think a few people still buy them... So if you spend $2500 on a MacBook Pro, $800 on an iPad, and then $1000 on your iPhone, boom, you're over $4000. $4000 doesn't go very far.

Sure, it doesn't go very far in the Apple ecosystem, but you can get a solid set of equipment for much less. For examine, a Thinkpad will run $500-1500 (depending on the model), a solid tablet can be found for ~$500, and plenty of decent phones are ~$500 (mine was $250). Altogether, that's <$2000 for a solid set of devices.

OK -- but no one specified that, and I'd argue that Apple has the most complete and polished ecosystem available. So I think it's very fair to compare that cost of Apple products.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#212
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some folks, myself included, reel at the conventional wisdom that a small screen necessarily means reduced functionality. While I agree that it can be difficult to design information-dense UIs for small displays or provide navigability to a large feature set, I strongly applaud efforts to unify computing and work through these challenges. I very much want all of my computing devices to be unified. In fact, I want a m…

A 10” screen has a twentieth the screen estate of my workstation screens, and is the difference of a narrow point of attention and spanning my view. It’s bordering on absurdism to try and utilize the same UI between them, and simply doesn’t match the reality of human perception or tool use. There are certainly uses where it makes sense — people who use just a phone and laptop for the internet and documents, for insta…

A 10" screen is 71 inches square. A square foot is 144 inches square. You are saying your working area is about 10 square feet and ergo nobody could possibly want the same applications on a machine with 2 27" monitors as one 10" or even 6" screen despite many tasks being useful on both because SOME tasks are not.

An absolute ton of people use actual computers with 12" - 14" screens including for complex tasks they just switch tasks more which is probably less efficient but hardly impossible.

They may opt to dock their machine at home/work for a larger work area but as it happens many tasks may cross both environments.

For example at home you may have many windows visible at once one of which is a document you are reading or a video you are watching another an editor in which you are writing documentation or code. After you undock you may wish to continue SOME of the tasks on the smaller screen for example watching the video or reading the document but opt to defer others until you have richer input and display options.

Lets go a level deeper. Your device is a general purpose computer. It could in theory run 2 entirely different UI stacks that run on the same OS and access the same files. Its the files that are the vital thing. If you create a video in one stack and merely watch it in another what of it.

Convergence is merely the idea that you will eventually be able to carry a small enough cheap enough computer in your pocket that it wont make much sense for many people to lug around 2 different portable computers.

This seems as inevitable as computers going from buildings to something we lug around in the first place.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#213
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some folks, myself included, reel at the conventional wisdom that a small screen necessarily means reduced functionality. While I agree that it can be difficult to design information-dense UIs for small displays or provide navigability to a large feature set, I strongly applaud efforts to unify computing and work through these challenges. I very much want all of my computing devices to be unified. In fact, I want a m…

I feel like the only computer user in the world who wants his computers to act like computers and mobile devices to act like mobile devices and to maintain a firm line in the sand between them. "Convergence" is a pipe dream because of the differing and mutually exclusive expectations of those different user types, and "one size fits all" programming ends up underserving both segments. The only thing I would change is…

> "one size fits all" programming ends up underserving both segments

citation needed. The majority of applications I need would work just fine on a powerful smartphone.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#214
post #38

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just s…

I have the GPD Win that I bought a couple years ago, which is more or a less a Nintendo-DS-Sized computer running "real" Windows, and I love it. I can do programming on the train, even while standing up, as well as use all the tooling that I like, including Vim actually. The only limitation for me has honestly been Windows, since I'm more of a Unixey guy. Something that has always bothered me is that smartphones are…

Honestly, I cannot imagine how you get anything done. I’ve tried doing programming on my phone, but the time from my head to being able to execute my changes is just too long.

I need a real screen, with a real keyboard to be any kind of efficient.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#215

To be frank, I don’t see the benefit of convergence. Admittedly, one code base is cool and convenient, sure but if one considers the additional cost of design, maintenance and the loss of the optimal user experience, I think convergence is rather a minus. A small touch screen requires a totally different convention of user interactions as a big screen with only mouse and keyboard support. It’s simply the reality. Ins…

> I don’t see the benefit of convergence. To me the benefit is not to have a single application that works both with a touch screen and a mouse/keyboard. Rather, the benefit is to have a single filesystem that I can access with both touch screen apps and mouse/keyboard apps. This way I could for example create a grocery with a mouse/keyboard, then take my phone and check items off with a touchscreen. There are lots o…

I use Syncthing right now to achieve the effect of having a shared file-system across all my devices. It works really well and since it doesn't rely on any sort of cloud or client-server architecture it even works offline if you're on the same network.

https://syncthing.net/

Re: PureOS is convergent

#216
The opportunity here is not just convergence but multi modal. We have bits and pieces in the current world but frankly it's a big stinky mess that is poorly integrated. Most of this stuff is just horribly limited and single vendor walled gardens.

A good positive example or how things should work is spotify. I regularly switch between my desktop, laptop and phone and the spotify instances seem to be aware of each other. I accidentally started playing music at home while at work today because my laptop spotify was still targeting my home desktop. Just works.

What matters here is that spotify is available on multiple platforms; it moves files around for you as you need them. All you do is sign in and it will serve you your music, playlists, etc. In the same way I can continue reading a e-book on my phone that I was reading earlier on my Kindle. Browser state is replicating across platforms as well.

The logical next steps would be devices where after authentication, your apps and data are just available and adapt to the device in a way that makes sense. Right now setting up a new laptop is a chore. You have to worry about installing stuff, configuring stuff. signing into stuff, backing up stuff, etc. Ideally all that goes away and you basically just pick up a device and start using it with zero effort. Or better even, the devices are integrated into the environment and simply adapt to you being there. Some apps won't make sense in all form-factors but many do.

Ever walked into a hotel room and after briefly fiddling with some alien hotel entertainment system simply watched netflix on your laptop? I watched netflix on a recent transatlantic flight and ignored the entertainment system 20 centimeters from my nose it's just better and I charged it using usb-c from my laptop. So, I walked out of the plane with a fully charged phone. What if those devices in hotels, planes, etc. would basically provide you all your stuff after a simple signin? Walk into a hotel and all your digital stuff is already there by the time you walk into the room?

And yes there are all sorts of concerns with privacy, security, etc. All solvable problems.

For device manufacturers this would liberate them from selling only one or a handful of devices per person. You could turn phones into fashion accessories. They pretty much are already but why just have one phone when you could have one to match each pair of shoes? Why fiddle with your phone when you step in your car that these days might have a huge touch screen and plenty of computing power. Convergence is much broader than just your phone + laptop.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#217
post #38

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just s…

I have the GPD Win that I bought a couple years ago, which is more or a less a Nintendo-DS-Sized computer running "real" Windows, and I love it. I can do programming on the train, even while standing up, as well as use all the tooling that I like, including Vim actually. The only limitation for me has honestly been Windows, since I'm more of a Unixey guy. Something that has always bothered me is that smartphones are…

https://planetcom.squarespace.com I have the Gemini. It works. Have saved servers while in the middle of Siberia.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#219
post #121

My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just s…

That ship has already sailed. Google redesigned all their desktop UIs to work with touchscreens in 2012, at the expense of mouse-and-keyboard users. Microsoft's Ribbon UI for Office, and Fluent UI for Windows 10 were both designed for touch first. Hell, even Ubuntu's Unity made huge compromises on Desktop in the name of convergence, even though no significant fraction of users ended up running Ubuntu on phones. The o…

Just as an aside, almost all Google apps have at least a serviceable keyboard control layer that you can find by pressing '?'. This has helped my productivity using say Gmail tremendously.

Re: PureOS is convergent

#220
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the GPD Win that I bought a couple years ago, which is more or a less a Nintendo-DS-Sized computer running "real" Windows, and I love it. I can do programming on the train, even while standing up, as well as use all the tooling that I like, including Vim actually. The only limitation for me has honestly been Windows, since I'm more of a Unixey guy. Something that has always bothered me is that smartphones are…

The Nokia N900 used to fill this spot between phone and PC for me. It has a slider keyboard and came with a Debian based Linux distro (Maemo) installed on it. Typing was much more comfortable than with a touchscreen and with a few changes to the Xorg keyboard config it was even suitable for programming. The padding madness wasn't there yet and even though the screen was very small by today's standards, it was used ve…

Wait, you wrote that Python script? I remember playing around with that!
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