On Sat, 6 Jul 2013 08:13:49 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> Y'know, I've always found correct-as-you-type features extremely annoying. I encountered it first in MS Word, and it annoyed me so much I crawled back into my Vim cave. :-P  When I upgraded to a smartphone, I decided to give it an honest try ... but after about half a year or so, I'm starting to regret it. I mean, it's nice that once in a while you can just type approximately and it will correctly guess what you intended. But other times, it makes the wrong guesses and completely mangles your text -- but you're so accustomed to it that you don't notice the mistake until it's too late! And yet other times, it will add random nonsense words to your custom dictionary just because you hit the wrong sequence of keys by accident. (Mistype a word, hit space, get the wrong guess, hit backspace, get the mistyped word back, erase a few characters, then accidentally hit space instead of, say, B, and now the *partial* mistyped word is in your dictionary. Wonderful.)
> 
> I'm feeling quite tempted to turn off the feature, right now.
> 

Yea, correct-as-you-type is horrible (at least on smartphones anyway,
haven't seen it as much elsewhere - on PCs it's usually just
auto-*suggest*). I spent most of last year carrying around an
iPhone (long story) and the autocorrect got things wrong literally
around 50% of the time. I think it was about a month or so that I
muddled through with it and then turned it off...which
immediately boosted my accuracy considerably.

Any kind of "smart" feature usually ends up being a big 'ol bag of badly-tuned heuristics (or just simply a stupid, presumptuous idea - like the stereo on the 2011(-ish?) Hyundai Elantra *always* turning on *twice* every time you start the car, whether you want it on or not).

Or as I like to describe "smart" features: It's like some jackass deliberately messing around with everything you're trying to do via a secondary keyboard+mouse. Only you can't reach over and smack him ;)

On Sat, Jul 06, 2013 at 04:26:36PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote: [...]
> Any kind of "smart" feature usually ends up being a big 'ol bag of badly-tuned heuristics (or just simply a stupid, presumptuous idea - like the stereo on the 2011(-ish?) Hyundai Elantra *always* turning on *twice* every time you start the car, whether you want it on or not).
> 
> Or as I like to describe "smart" features: It's like some jackass deliberately messing around with everything you're trying to do via a secondary keyboard+mouse. Only you can't reach over and smack him ;)

I remember the old joke that every time you hear the word "smart" from Microsoft, be on the lookout for something dumb.

I resisted "upgrading" to a "smart"phone for many years (people used to laugh at me for carrying around such a prehistoric antique -- to a point I took pride in showing it off to the kids), until the battery life started to wear out and require charging once a day. Finally I succumbed to my phone company who kept bugging me about upgrading (and of course, I chose an Android instead of an iPhone). Well, it's nice to upgrade, I suppose, but I found that I *still* have to recharge once a day 'cos of the battery drain from all those advanced "features" that were never there in the old phone. Sigh...

At least Android actually has a task manager that lets you kill off misbehaving apps and things that shouldn't be running that are taking up 50MB of RAM for no good reason. On my old iPod, I'd have to hard-reset every few days 'cos some misbehaving app would soak up 100% RAM and 100% CPU and the thing would brick. *And* I can actually write my own apps for Android without needing to buy a Mac just to install the dev tools.

The only thing missing now is a working D dev environment for Android. Once I have *that*, then perhaps the "smart" in "smartphone" will be forgiveable, for once. :-P


T

-- 
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. -- Robert Wilensk

On Sat, 6 Jul 2013 14:08:20 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> I resisted "upgrading" to a "smart"phone for many years (people used to laugh at me for carrying around such a prehistoric antique -- to a point I took pride in showing it off to the kids), until the battery life started to wear out and require charging once a day. Finally I succumbed to my phone company who kept bugging me about upgrading (and of course, I chose an Android instead of an iPhone). Well, it's nice to upgrade, I suppose, but I found that I *still* have to recharge once a day 'cos of the battery drain from all those advanced "features" that were never there in the old phone. Sigh...
> 

Yea. I don't accept that "smartphones" are really phones. They're PDA's with telephony tacked on. Not saying that's necessarily a bad way to go - it's fine if PDA is your primary use-case. But if you're mainly interested in a phone it's not only complete overkill, but also the wrong set of design compromises.

They do, like you say, soak up ridiculous amounts of battery power too. Especially Androids. Maybe it's all the VM/dynamic shit. I did generally get a couple days out of the iPhone (as long as I didn't play Rage), instead of the "just *barely* one day" I got with the Nexus S (even with the cellular stuff disabled). That may not sound too bad to some people, but with the phones, the near-daily recharging got to feel like an enormous ball-and-chain (not to mention *trying* to turn off the damn sound globally every night so the stupid things wouldn't wake me up for notifications and other shit that I don't care about when I'm sleeping). I already have enough shit to do every time I go to bed and wake up, I don't need that added to my daily overhead.

I was *sooo* glad when the project I was doing ended and I got to send back the damn things (they were loaners) to the guy I was working for. Although, I probably will pick up a used WiFi-only Android at some point for development and because an internet-connected PDA does come in handy. I just wish that instead of Google iClone they were running some sort of PalmOS 9 or something (a modern version of the Palm Zire 71 with a multi-tasking wifi-internet-capable version of PalmOS 6 would make me geek out). And with a proper resistive screen and built-in stylus slot, none of that imprecise capacitive shit. And *real* freaking buttons (Even Android's gotten rid of the few buttons they used to have.)


> At least Android actually has a task manager that lets you kill off misbehaving apps and things that shouldn't be running that are taking up 50MB of RAM for no good reason. On my old iPod, I'd have to hard-reset every few days 'cos some misbehaving app would soak up 100% RAM and 100% CPU and the thing would brick.

Yea, that's one of the zillions of things that bug me about iOS/Android: There's no equivalents to the taskbar or "close program" buttons. Sure, they both have something that pretends to be like a taskbar, but on Android it tosses in "recently used" stuff with no indication which ones are actually running. And on iOS - well, it *might* be working like a taskbar, but honestly I never could really tell what the hell its semantics were. I was always just *guessing* that it was the list of running programs...which made me wonder why it would (apparently?) keep freaking *everything* I was done using running in the background (at least, as far as I could tell).

They're too damn opaque.

At least Android actually has a decent task manager. It's just too bad you have to dig so far to get to it, which prevents it from being a real taskbar substitute.


> *And* I can actually
> write my own apps for Android without needing to buy a Mac just to
> install the dev tools.

Amen to that.

BTW, if you don't mind using a proprietary toolkit (Marmalade:
<http://madewithmarmalade.com>), you *can* develop iOS stuff without
ever having to touch a Mac. But to put it on your actual device you
still have to pay Apple's Developer iRansom (well, or better yet
just jailbreak the stupid thing instead). Last I heard you do still
have to use a Mac to submit to the App Store, and again, you have to
use that one particular proprietary toolkit (which also means no D), but
at least it's *possible* to make iOS stuff without putting up with OSX.

> 
> The only thing missing now is a working D dev environment for Android. Once I have *that*, then perhaps the "smart" in "smartphone" will be forgiveable, for once. :-P
> 

Yea, I really look forward to that, too.

On Saturday, 6 July 2013 at 21:09:59 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> but I found that I *still* have to recharge once a day 'cos of
> the battery drain from all those advanced "features" that were never
> there in the old phone. Sigh...

I heard, wifi consumes the lion share of battery charge, try to disable it.

On Sat, 2013-07-06 at 08:13 -0700, H. S. Teoh wrote:
[…]
> Y'know, I've always found correct-as-you-type features extremely annoying. I encountered it first in MS Word, and it annoyed me so much I crawled back into my Vim cave. :-P  When I upgraded to a smartphone, I decided to give it an honest try ... but after about half a year or so, I'm starting to regret it. I mean, it's nice that once in a while you can just type approximately and it will correctly guess what you intended. But other times, it makes the wrong guesses and completely mangles your text -- but you're so accustomed to it that you don't notice the mistake until it's too late! And yet other times, it will add random nonsense words to your custom dictionary just because you hit the wrong sequence of keys by accident. (Mistype a word, hit space, get the wrong guess, hit backspace, get the mistyped word back, erase a few characters, then accidentally hit space instead of, say, B, and now the *partial* mistyped word is in your dictionary. Wonderful.)
> 
> I'm feeling quite tempted to turn off the feature, right now.

On my Android phone, I am finding Swype to be extremely good most of the time. I tried the free tester and was sufficiently happy to pay money. I will be renewing the subscription which is of course the real test of happiness.

Pop-up in IDEs are however another matter, they are so wrong so much of the time that I tend to switch them off or ignore them if I cannot do this – which is surprisingly difficult in some IDEs.


-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

On Sun, 2013-07-07 at 09:38 +0200, Kagamin wrote:
[…]
> I heard, wifi consumes the lion share of battery charge, try to disable it.

WiFi can be a big battery drain, but so is the screen, and (perhaps most
importantly) the mobile aerial. The second of these is perhaps obvious,
the first and third depend on distance to the receiver since the output
signal of the phone is variable, the mobile signal much more than the
WiFi. If a phone is continually searching for a mobile base station
battery power will plummet.

-- 
Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder

Am 07.07.2013 09:49, schrieb Russel Winder:
> On Sun, 2013-07-07 at 09:38 +0200, Kagamin wrote:
> […]
>> I heard, wifi consumes the lion share of battery charge, try to
>> disable it.
>
> WiFi can be a big battery drain, but so is the screen, and (perhaps most
> importantly) the mobile aerial. The second of these is perhaps obvious,
> the first and third depend on distance to the receiver since the output
> signal of the phone is variable, the mobile signal much more than the
> WiFi. If a phone is continually searching for a mobile base station
> battery power will plummet.
>
>

I used to work for a certain Finnish mobile company. There is no if.

The mobiles need to continuously talk with their cells to handle antenna
transitions, network notifications, sms/mms protocol handling among many
many other things.

--
Paulo

On 07/06/2013 02:20 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Fri, 05 Jul 2013 23:48:40 -0700
> Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg@gmx.com> wrote:
>
>> On Saturday, July 06, 2013 08:36:31 Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
>>> Typing replies on a smartphone seems to carry a bit of a cost in
>>> textual accuracy :-(
>>
>> Typing on smartphones is hell. I generally try and avoid it unless I
>> absolutely have to.
>>
>
> +1k. I genuinely miss Palm's Graffiti 1...Thanks, Xerox! (And tactile
> inputs in general, which Apple killed off and everyone else now
> idiotically apes.) I like being able to, for example, switch songs and
> adjust volume while driving or walking without having to bury my head
> in a tiny screen to do so, like some twitter-obsessed social-whore
> Millennial.
>
> Anyway, typing on a mobile device was more or less a solved problem
> until that sack of shit Steve Jobs moronically convinced everyone that
> physical buttons and styluses were bad things (Remember, that was the
> same dumbass who was convinced that Ctrl-Click was "simpler" for
> average users than Right-Click, and that "Hold Up For 5 Seconds" was a
> more sensible way to turn a device off than a power button or switch).
> And so *now* PDAs (erm, I mean "smartphones") are horrible to type on.
>

Please, I still have a physical keyboard on my new smartphone.

Put your money where your mouth is.

On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 17:37:37 UTC, 1100110 wrote:
> Please, I still have a physical keyboard on my new smartphone.
>
> Put your money where your mouth is.

I must admit it becomes increasingly harder to find ones. I am not ware of a single new model that has both physical keyboard and less than 4.5" screen. Any hints?

On Sunday, 7 July 2013 at 17:37:37 UTC, 1100110 wrote:
> On 07/06/2013 02:20 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Anyway, typing on a mobile device was more or less a solved problem
>> until that sack of shit Steve Jobs moronically convinced everyone that
>> physical buttons and styluses were bad things (Remember, that was the
>> same dumbass who was convinced that Ctrl-Click was "simpler" for
>> average users than Right-Click, and that "Hold Up For 5 Seconds" was a
>> more sensible way to turn a device off than a power button or switch).
>> And so *now* PDAs (erm, I mean "smartphones") are horrible to type on.
>>
>
> Please, I still have a physical keyboard on my new smartphone.
>
> Put your money where your mouth is.
Yep, it's out there, well-reviewed too, though you _will_ have to put some money on it:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-BlackBerry-Q10-Smartphone.95264.0.html

Personally, I got my first real smartphone a couple months back and I don't see why anyone would want to type on these things in the first place.  I do a little bit to load some webpages or dial a new phone number occasionally, but that's about it.

I don't understand why one of these mobile apps doesn't do voice messages instead, who the hell wants to type their messages out?  It's a step backwards from voice mail, even considering the shitty voicemail boxes that most telcos provide.

Anyway, everybody uses apps like Whatsapp these days, so you could just record voice messages on the app.  Maybe you can't speak your message out loud occasionally, privacy or sensitive information, so you could add text messages as a fallback, but I don't understand the current fascination with low-bandwidth typing when we have higher-bandwidth voice on all these phones.