Comments on: Aching for better iOS app integration

By: Robert Sinclair

Robert Sinclair — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 06:30:50 +0000

Not sure it will cover everything you’re looking for, but Apple’s new iPhoto for iPad looks pretty amazing and could help a bit here.

By: Bart

Bart — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:17:50 +0000

Android solves this nicely with it’s Intent system: where any app can register as a service/handler for a specific task (intent) and pass work back and forth. So a image uploader could say to the OS: ‘open the image browser’ and whatever you have selected for that type of intent would handle it.

By: imajez

imajez — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 01:10:15 +0000

I think this illustrates the problem with a lot of Apple products. Rather than making things easier to use, Apple all too often cripples things and reduces functionality, making things simplistic and all too often more difficult to use instead. The single button mouse that Apple insisted on for way too long is a good example of this.

I use my iPhone to listen to my music so I can rate and in theory organise music into playlists whilst out or travelling. But rather than have an add to playlist button on now playing screen, you have to navigate to playlist, then enable edit playlist [or create new one] and then browse back to the track in question [which can be quite fiddly in itself] and finally add song to playlist. It’s such a faff I usually do not bother.

In a similar vein, I quickly gave up on the iOS Photos app as it is so simplistic I had to jump through hoops on my Mac to simply place photos in the order I wanted. Not only that Photos cannot even display non-iPhone shaped photos in a fit to screen manner, so I have to resize almost every image as I move through an album. So to show people portfolio images on my iPhone I use Linkus’s excellent ‘My Photos’ App which improves on Photos in every conceivable way. Confusingly also called ‘Secure my Privacy’
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/secure-my-privacy/id441044210?mt=8

By: markval

markval — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 23:47:20 +0000

Camera360 on the Samsung Note is the best thing I ever had in 10+ years of mobility. No shit

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 22:57:54 +0000

It all comes down to a lack of a decent fully featured user-accessible file system. Even back in the days of Windows CE, the limited open and save dialog boxes effectively crippled the usefulnes of several applications and the platform altogether.

When the iOS platform was designed, Apple didn’t plan to release an SDK for third-party applications and thus there was no big need for a real file system. In the current situation there definitely is. Luckily at least Dropbox is becoming more and more of an inofficial file exchange standard.

The solution to the problem is readily available, but device manufacturers first need to accept the existence of the problem. There is a reason why computers have had file systems for several decades.

Pretending that tablets and phones are not used for content creation is a self-fulfilling prophecy right now. Sure, people don’t write novels on them (well, maybe some even do), but that doesn’t mean they don’t do anything at all.

Complicating things in the name of simplifying things is just plain stupid, and so is never questioning a decision that was made based on completely different facts and conditions. Let’s solve this problem by attacking at the core, not by defining all sorts of exchange standards trying to work around the issue, making things even more complex and complicated in the process.

By: BJ Nicholls

BJ Nicholls — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:21:22 +0000

I hate IOS. My password utility has to include its own damn browser because of each app is its own little island. I hate the Apple SD reader that requires ten minutes of futzing around before I can upload image files. My next tablet won’t be an iPad.

By: Bill

Bill — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:28:09 +0000

Not trying to sound like a fan boy, but Android, with its "intents" mechanism, does exactly what you want... --Bill [I know, and we support intents in PS Express. I've also heard that Windows 8 is ahead in this regard. I'm sure I'm not telling folks at Apple anything they don't know. I just wanted to emphasize the point after having wasted a lot of time due to the lack of a solution here. --J.]