On Tuesday, 8 December 2015 at 23:50:17 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/8/2015 12:47 AM, wobbles wrote:
>> On Monday, 7 December 2015 at 20:42:21 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>>> On Monday, 7 December 2015 at 19:37:11 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>>>> Adam won't be coming ?
>>>
>>> I haven't decided for sure yet, but probably not. I don't like travel at all
>>> and the thought of a trans-atlantic flight strikes me as the worst.
>>
>> Sleeping tablets make long flights much more bearable!
>
> What I've found helps a lot:
>
> 1. If possible, do a long jog before going to the airport. It makes you ready to relax.
> 2. Load up a tablet with lots of books.
> 3. Ear plugs. It's surprising how fatiguing the jet noise is.
> 4. One of those neck pillows can help.
> 5. Booze :-)

for me it is:

1. a good collection of weekly caricature magazines
2. sleep
3. eat
4. watch movies
5. repeat

On Saturday, 12 December 2015 at 08:25:21 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 12/11/2015 10:13 PM, Joakim wrote:
>> Desktop Android's certainly not there yet for everybody, but it is for my
>> admittedly low demands, and soon will be for everybody, as google has said
>> they're working on built-in multi-window for the next version of Android.
>
> One aspect (for me, anyway) is in order to program, I need a big screen, because I have several windows open at once. I've gotten so used to it it is very hard for me to program with a small display. And to think that when I started, 24*80 displays were the norm for a good decade! But then I'd print out a paper listing as a supplement, and spread that out over a big table.

At a desk, it's easy to connect a large monitor to the tablet for people like you, though you'll need some sort of terminal or IDE app that splits the resulting space into much smaller windows, essentially an in-app windowing system of sorts.

On the tablet itself, the Termux app supports opening multiple full-screen terminals with Ctrl-Shift-C, and then paging between them with Ctrl-Shift-1/2/3 and so on.  Unless you're actively reading data from multiple terminals and need to see them all simultaneously, that should suffice.  It does for me: I keep three open, which is partially why I haven't bothered buying and connecting a large monitor.

This type of setup is probably the future for most people, replacing a desktop/laptop with the smartphone/tablet they already have.  I've found that the hardware is more than capable, the software support is just not there yet, but all the major vendors- Google, Microsoft, Apple- are working on providing desktop functionality from their mobile devices.  I'm simply trying it out early because I wanted to see what it's like, and have been pleasantly surprised at how well it has worked for me.

> I also cannot type from a cramped airline seat. I have never successfully done any work on an airplane. But reading a book on a tablet works just ducky.

Yeah, I was just sharing my experience programming with a tablet, not talking about doing it while flying.  I hate traveling, can't imagine getting anything done on a plane, other than just waiting for it to be over.  But maybe frequent flyers get used to it and get stuff done.

> And I have a laptop, a small tablet, and a large tablet.

Same here, never used the large 10" one much because I always felt it was heavy at 1.3 lbs, but I use the smaller and half-as-heavy 8.4" one a lot.  The large one would make an even better display to prop up and use for programming, but it's older and the battery seems to be going.  I get almost 9-10 hours out of the small, year-old tablet while programming, which is amazing and _much_ better than the 3-4 hours I was getting from the three year-old ultrabook, likely because the CPU is much more efficient and the tablet's OLED display turns off most of the pixels when programming in a black fullscreen terminal.

On 12/12/2015 8:00 PM, Joakim wrote:
> This type of setup is probably the future for most people, replacing a
> desktop/laptop with the smartphone/tablet they already have.  I've found that
> the hardware is more than capable, the software support is just not there yet,
> but all the major vendors- Google, Microsoft, Apple- are working on providing
> desktop functionality from their mobile devices.  I'm simply trying it out early
> because I wanted to see what it's like, and have been pleasantly surprised at
> how well it has worked for me.

This will help you get true desktop functionality for your tablet:

http://www.instructables.com/id/USB-Typewriter-Easy-Install-Kit/

and it should make working on an airplane much easier.

On 12/12/2015 01:13 AM, Joakim wrote:
>
> Desktop Android's certainly not there yet for everybody, but it is for
> my admittedly low demands, and soon will be for everybody, as google has
> said they're working on built-in multi-window for the next version of
> Android.

Personally, I would need far more than just multi-window support for Android to be a worthwhile desktop OS for me. A lot of the issues (though not nearly all) relate to software ecosystem.

For example, I can't even find a halfway decent alternative to windows notepad, let alone any better text editor. Basic undo/redo support is rare in Android software, as is saving/loading actual files and sharing user files between different programs on the same machine, which is something desktops had pretty much sorted out decades ago.

The whole backup/restore situation is a mess (there's an article that explains my issues with it better than I can, but my link to it is buried somewhere ATM), PalmOS already had backup/restore sorted out much better over a decade ago. Heck, even same with iOS if you can tolerate iTunes and, well, Apple/iOS.

That's just a few off-the-top-of-my-head examples. There's many others, like the bluetooth keyboard lag/unresponsiveness that you've already mentioned, and I can confirm from experience.

On Monday, 14 December 2015 at 15:01:36 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 12/12/2015 01:13 AM, Joakim wrote:
>>
>> Desktop Android's certainly not there yet for everybody, but it is for
>> my admittedly low demands, and soon will be for everybody, as google has
>> said they're working on built-in multi-window for the next version of
>> Android.
>
> Personally, I would need far more than just multi-window support for Android to be a worthwhile desktop OS for me. A lot of the issues (though not nearly all) relate to software ecosystem.

Yes, even after Android gets multi-window, it will take years for all the software to adapt.  Hell, there still aren't that many Android apps that have a tablet UI, despite Android tablets having been around for years.

Also, this is purely psychological, but I feel claustrophobic when using multi-window that doesn't allow arbitrarily-sized and overlapping windows, even though I don't use that feature most of the time.

> For example, I can't even find a halfway decent alternative to windows notepad, let alone any better text editor.

I find that hard to believe, considering Notepad may be the worst text editor I've ever used. :) I've been using the vim package in Termux, same as I do on every other machine.

> Basic undo/redo support is rare in Android software, as is saving/loading actual files and sharing user files between different programs on the same machine, which is something desktops had pretty much sorted out decades ago.

I don't know about the prevalence of those features, as I uninstall far more apps from any Android device than the few I usually install, but I suspect undo/redo will become more common as Android starts getting used more for productivity and file support has always been there, if not front and center for mobile usability reasons.

> The whole backup/restore situation is a mess (there's an article that explains my issues with it better than I can, but my link to it is buried somewhere ATM), PalmOS already had backup/restore sorted out much better over a decade ago. Heck, even same with iOS if you can tolerate iTunes and, well, Apple/iOS.

I've never restored an OS, so not something I've had to deal with. I usually simply manually backup any files I consider important, and almost never put anything worthwhile in app settings, so don't care about those.  For example, I never bookmark anything in browsers, going from memory and google search instead.

> That's just a few off-the-top-of-my-head examples. There's many others, like the bluetooth keyboard lag/unresponsiveness that you've already mentioned, and I can confirm from experience.

No doubt, it will take a while for mobile OS's to become more productive, as opposed to being used mostly for consumption, like browsing or listening to music. But that is inevitably what's going to happen, just as PCs killed off the more powerful workstations.

My point was simply that if you program and like to do a lot of stuff from the command-line, the recently introduced Termux app actually makes for a surprisingly pleasant experience on an Android device.  And programmers are guinea pigs for what everybody else eventually does.