The good thing about Debian is...

January 8, 2013

I really like my (now old) iPhone 4s. It’s about the right size for human hands, has a nice screen, and an ironed out back plate to hide various scratches. I’m not sure I like the iPhone 5 though, plus I usually wear out my phones before thinking of buying new shit.

Anyway, my — even older — iPad is mostly used by the $gf these days since I replaced it with a smaller-faster-cheaper Nexus 7, to read books, mostly.

The $gf likes the iPad a lot (I suspect I can’t claim it’s mine anymore). Because it’s very practical to search stuff while working and allows very few distractions compared to say a laptopanything that can multitask properly. Being limited is the feature here (although, I have another word for it), and it just does its job of being her light browser, or youtube-player, or facebook-gossip-source (as all the cool kids in Mexico are moving to Twitter, this may change, I hope).

Then again, I stumbled on this particular problem this morning:

ipad support

Maybe it happened to you: there’s this USB stick with a bunch of photos on it, and you want them on your tablet. So that you can share them later, it’s a one-time thing for a painting project for example. Don’t you dare trying to drag & drop those files to any Apple device. You’re in the world of Apple, where the designers know better: it means there is probably a simple Apple- approved way, right?

So I tried harder for the sake of it. Usually I remembered, doing things to an iDevice on a Mac requires you to launch iTunes (if for some reason the computer didn’t do it first). That stuff was for playing music, talk about feature creep.

Better now, the iPad shows up next to some music playlists. So now, the Mac has acknowledged that there’s a new device connected to it, and starts synchronizing it. Wait, it’s… no, don’t! stop you f-ing piece of Apple-ware. After a few seconds, the apps installed on my iPhone are now in queue for my old iPad, synchronizing. Nevermind I had those apps in folders on the phone, let’s just throw screenfuls of applications, and start download. Just what I wanted, thanks for asking iTunes.

iTunes did not care a second that I unchecked the “sync those apps” then, it was busy doing his stuff. It did not care much more when I choose a local folder to sync pictures. I guess it wanted to finish the synchronizing I was busy aborting. Never mind trying to “turn it off and on” because iTunes starts from step zero regardless of your previous preferences. Although it gently let me abort out of the whole process. Throwing a bunch of pictures to an Apple device is ridiculously hard these days.

Bizarrely, you know who got that right years ago? Debian, Debian fucking- stable: plug Android tablet, get a desktop icon, throw some files at it, eject device, go back to your morning coffee. Why should there be more to it?