Common Fate of Android Tablets, or a Quick 2013 Nexus 7 Review

I'm on my third Android tablet. Or fourth, but who's counting?

My first tablet was a Samsung Galaxy 5 bought in September 2012. This was mis-marketed as an MP3 player, which it did fine, but 5" was a great size for a handheld GPS device walking through cities, and fit easily into most pockets. It included an FM receiver, rear and front facing cameras, etc. I liked it. The big drawbacks were that it was too small for most reading or surfing activities, and it didn't have enough RAM to upgrade past Android 2.3.5. In December I managed to find the one place on Charles Ave where there was a drop-off between the sidewalk and the adjacent turf, stepped wrong, and fell, landing on my shoulder and on the Galaxy that had slipped out of my chest pocket. No Gorilla glass on this one.

I replaced it with a Nexus 10, decided that was too big, and replaced that immediately with a 2012 Nexus 7.

The Nexus 7 was overall fine, but the sound quality of the built-in speakers was terrible and produced insufficient volume to listen to podcasts or streaming radio from just a few feet away or with any background noise. The UI was sluggish. Touch a search area, and wait a few seconds before the keyboard appears. Type a key, and wait a few seconds before the character appears on the screen. No built-in FM receiver, but with TuneIn, this is not usually a big deal. Other than the speakers, the largest deficiency was the lack of a rear-facing camera.  Got QR Droid? You won't be using it on this thing. I also found 16 GB to be slightly restrictive, but of course there is AndFTP's sftp feature, and my home desktop runs an sftp server, so moving stuff back-and-forth was a breeze--a great improvement over plugging in the USB cable and hoping Linux decides to recognize the device. Anyhow, I get around 20Mb/s between my Nexus and desktop via 802.11 (and an Ethernet hop). The one time I had two droids downloading from the server concurrently I got 30Mb/s measured at the server. Not bad.

I liked the size of the Nexus 7: fairly easy to hand-carry, and I picked up a small messenger bag that can carry that and a few other things while I wander about listening to podcasts.

Friday I dropped my Nexus 7. Even though it was in a decent M-Edge cover, the screen cracked, and much of the screen no longer behaves as a touch screen. No Gorilla glass on this one, either.

So I picked up a 2013 Nexus 7. I have not had it long, but my initial impression is that Asus did a great job. The sound quality is okay, but importantly it can kick out enough volume to be easily heard from several feet away. The UI is more responsive than the older Nexus 7. The rear-facing camera is a great addition. 32 GB of flash memory is a big improvement over my past 16 GB--I won't have to juggle among movies on the device.

I'll probably write more about the 2013 Nexus 7 later.

Aside: the guy from the Office Depot (la oficina de la marihuana) really, really wanted to sell me a protection plan for the Nexus. He went so far as to tell me I'd probably want to replace the battery in a year or so. Despite my tendency to break things, I never buy protection plans, as they are usually pure profit for the seller.

LibreOffice Alternatives?

I've been growing increasingly frustrated with LibreOffice's brain-dead behavior regarding current working directory. 

• When I save something, and then want to open something else, it starts over in my home directory rather than remembering the context I'm working in. If I just saved something in a directory, isn't it likely that the next thing I open will be nearby?
• If in the midst of a save-as, if I decide to change the file type, e.g., CSV or XLS to ODS, suddenly it makes me start over from square one choosing the directory to save in.

Yes, this is only two things (okay, here's three: if I have a region selected in the spreadsheet, enter won't take me out of the area--it's necessary to move to the mouse or arrow keys). My impression is that their UI designers are idiots or simply don't care.

Yet Another Annoying New Gmail "Feature"

In the past few days on a number of occasions I've been reading e-mail messages that ended abruptly. They ended at "[Message clipped]  View entire message." This adds steps to reading e-mail: noticing the truncation, clicking on it, and then closing the resulting new tab.

Not helpful. I still wish Google would hire someone with expertise in HCI, user interfaces, user experiences, etc., rather than stumbling along toward a higher entropy state. Their algorithms folks are great, but their UI folks truly suck.

Nice Little Improvement in LibreOffice 3.6.2.2

Now when adding a word to the dictionary, LibreOffice just adds the word, without forcing the user to choose dictionaries. Going back to Star Office, there were usually two dictionaries by default and the choice of which to add a word to seemed arbitrary. Then for the past few years, the default configuration had just one dictionary, but still forced the user to choose the only choice. Now, with just one choice, LibreOffice assumes the only choice is the one the user wants. Yes. Keep the common case fast.

It's still not a very good dictionary application, being hopelessly bad at offering possible corrections. Ispell is very good. No other dictionary comes close.

Why Ubuntu, Unity, Gnome 3, etc., Are Losing Popularity

Several times I've bemoaned the fact that Linux is getting more-and-more like Windows on a year-by-year basis. Of course, now, with Unity and its ilk, we're expected to use an interface that looks like a smart phone on a full-size monitor with an actual keyboard and mouse. Perplexing.

So it looks like I might try Cinnamon again since it appears that one can disable edge-tiling, which I  and apparently several other people find very annoying. The fact of the matter is that with a large monitor, wanting to maximize a window is a much less common operation than is moving a window, and edge-tiling badly violates the keep the common case fast principle. I often move windows to the top of the screen. With edge-tiling, this takes longer, since it is often followed immediately by an unmaximize operation.

Googling about this annoyance, I came across a discussion at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1970815 which is a great example of inability to read coupled with arrogance. One of the posters complained that adding these sorts of features, making them default behavior, and not making it clear how to disable them wastes peoples time. Gerryl: This is dangerously close to operating with MS Windows. How are us mere mortals supposed to find out and address these kinds of issues?

The next posting agrees. I agreed (though without bothering to log in and say so). Then markbl responded

This is unfathomable. markbl knows better than gerryl what gerryl (and presumably me) will think it's a good idea once we get used to it? Maybe riding around in donkey carts would also start to seem like a good idea once one gets used to it. Maybe sitting in this pot of water that keeps getting warmer will someday seem like a good idea (wait, aren't we doing this is a society by continuing to pump carbon into the atmosphere?).

Furthermore, maybe it's been buried somewhere as an option, but once it suddenly becomes default behavior, or someone first encounters it when evaluating environments (as I did in Cinnamon), it's a new and potentially negative experience.

People acclimate to bad things, e.g., new user interfaces for Blogger and Gmail, but that doesn't mean we should be happy about it.

Jesus, Google!

Apparently someone at Google has decided that composing an e-mail is too straightforward, and so they've decided to muck with Gmail yet again. Zoho, anyone?

Opera Address Bar Tip

There is a user interface design flaw in Opera 12.02 where, by default, the full URL of a web site is not shown. Here's an example:

Now suppose I want to select and paste this address, and click at the right edge of the displayed "URL." This is the result:

As can be easily seen in the image, if as user is not careful, a critical portion of the URL is lost. Even an attentive user still must repeat the select operation. Either way, time and effort are wasted.

Fortunately, though this is a bad UI decision, there is an option to force Opera to correctly display the URL correctly. Navigate to Opera|Settings|Advanced|Browsing. The penultimate checkbox under this tab is Show full web address in address field. Check this and the address bar will function correctly:

Similarly, Firefox no longer displays URLs correctly. The fix is here.

Early Impressions of LXDE

I'm using LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) on my laptop. First of all, it seems to be a resurrection of the long dead Unix philosophy: simple tools that do specific things well. Second of all, it makes no sense to use Mint on a laptop until Mint makes whole-disk encryption easier. It's a piece of cake in Lubuntu.

LXDE seems to be missing some very basic things, but it also does some very basic things right. In Mint, there are no themes (okay, maybe if I wanted to spend my life looking through themes designed for 12-year-olds) that provide significant contrast between the window with focus and the other windows. LXDE does this in an attractive fashion. It has panels, rather than the brain-damaged crap the Gnome project is trying to foist on people.

Why am I more willing to spend time adding functionality to LXDE than to figure out how to customize, say, Mate? Mate is a very heavy-weight environment. Overall Mate is well thought-out and well-implemented, and it is available for more secure environments than Mint, but it is yet another attempt to make Linux into a Windows clone.

With a new Mate installation, I have to spend hours uninstall useless crap, disabling useless background daemons, etc. LXDE saves this hassle--I have a machine I can halfway trust before pounding on it for a week.

LXDE is a better idea than Mate, and a much, much better idea than Gnome Shell. It's worth spending time on. Or so I think so far.

Really the Biggest Albatross Crippling Ubuntu and Mint

I'm an old Unix guy. Unix worked. When I saw the opportunity to blow away Windows junk with Linux, I jumped at it thinking it would be a simpler, more reliable OS. In the '90s that was a correct assessment. Now, Linux distros are continuously chasing new features and thus becoming bloated with partly-working software. I'd prefer to find an OS where attention is paid to quality.

In the late '80s I taught intro CS on Macs, and they were utter crap. Cooperative multitasking? One-button mice? Give me a break. A former colleague used to say that a computer user's intelligence is directly proportional to the number of buttons on his mouse. I realize, as did he (I think), that the generalization doesn't hold, but copying and pasting in Windows is really clumsy due to the 2-button mouse limitation, and it's hard to imagine a Mac being any better. Of course, Macs still use one-button mice, and my early-learned disdain for Macs survives, though without any actual Mac usage in the past couple decades.

I've been married more recently than I've spent more than 10 minutes using a Mac.

Is Solaris any better? The word on the street suggests not, especially since Sun got bought out. How about BSD? I want the system to be invisible and let me do my work. I guess I want SunOS 4, but not really...

Audio Working (Today); Maybe Popping Mint & Ubuntu from Active Stack and Pushing them to Used Stack

Audio is working today on my Linux Mint 13 64b system, which is a pleasant surprise. It's been stuttering the last few weeks, and after much Googling it appears to be a known problem with PulseAudio, one of Linux's several albatrosses. As soon as I read speculation that it would be fixed in Mint 14, I spent a little while pondering OSS, but I have work to do, and clearly the Ubuntu/Mint flavors of Linux are not cut out for that. Is it time to go back to Debian? My recollection was that, as of a few years ago, Debian mostly worked. Or do I try out Arch Linux?

The biggest albatrosses around Ubuntu/Mint's indistinguishable necks? Unity and Gnome Shell, and the notion that we're more interested in crippling desktop and laptop computers to look like smart phones than in, again, actually getting our work done.

Mate 1.2 Missing Crucial Scrollbar Functionality in Linux Mint 13

In Mate 1.2 on Linux Mint 13, the arrows at the tops and bottoms of scrollbars are sometimes present, and sometimes not. It seems to vary from application to application, suggesting it could simply be a bug rather than an egregious usability screw-up, but it is probably both. Having had similar problems with recent versions of Gnome, I figured someone had probably figured out how to fix this. Here's the trick (copy and paste as a single line):

sudo aptitude purge liboverlay-scrollbar-0.1-0 liboverlay-scrollbar-0.2-0 liboverlay-scrollbar3-0.2-0 overlay-scrollbar

Clearly overlay-scrollbar is screwed up. Oddly, this was removed from Linux Mint 12, but somehow snuck back into Linux Mint 13.

Thanks to MartinVW and LewRockwellFAN at http://forums.mate-desktop.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=113&p=1422

As an aside, it appears that this scrollbar crap is intentional. The following is from a posting elsewhere on "Ayatana scrollbars":

Overlay Scrollbar – The overlay scrollbar, or the Ayatana Scrollbar, is a feature designed to solve a non-existent problem. According to the official description, it was designed to “improve the user’s ability to focus on content and applications” and to “ensure that scrollbars take up no active screen real-estate” thereby “reducing the waste of space and distracting clutter that a traditional scrollbar entails.” That is pure nonsense. It just creates more problems than it solves. In fact, it does not solve any problem, because as stated earlier, there is no problem to solve, as far the scrollbar is concerned.

Aside from making you “look” for the scrollbar before you can use it, it creates an inconsistency in the system because some applications, like Firefox, will have the traditional scrollbar, while native Ubuntu applications will have the overlay scrollbar.

Google's New Bugger, err, Blogger, No, Bugger Interface Logo

With thanks to Dynamoo.

Why I'm Not Using Cinnamon

I was using Cinnamon on my desktops, and went back to Gnome classic no effects. This with Linux Mint 12.

I installed Linux Mint 13 RC on my laptop, and switched to Mate.

Mate works fine on my laptop. Mate keyboard shortcuts for volume up/down and play/pause do not work on my desktops.

So, why is switching to Cinnamon a bad idea, IMHO?

• Cinnamon has no no grouping of menu items on the panel.
• Bumping a window being dragged against the top panel causes it to maximize--a most annoying bug.
• Nautilus 3.2.1 under Cinnamon shows selected files as pink with no text, or perhaps pink text on a pink background. Sometimes I like to be able to see the name of and related info for a selected file. Really. This is with the list view, which is my preferred default.
• Under Cinnamon, ImageMagick's pan icon is missing window controls (e.g., close) which should be in the upper right.
• [ Added 2012-06-02: Cinnamon removes the ability to move the save file dialog within a web browser. ]

I do like the hot corner, but it doesn't outweigh just the lack of grouping of menu items let alone the other problems I'm seeing with Cinnamon.

Gmail Labs' "Send and Archive" vs. "Undo Send"

I've long found Gmail's Undo Send feature to be very useful. I often send without fully proofreading, and this gives me a chance to retract and correct a message before it really goes out. Nice.

Send and Archive is also a nice feature. When replying to an e-mail, rather than separately sending and archiving, one can send and archive with a single click.

The rub, however, is that send and archive doesn't have an undo control, and so now if I fail to proof a message, tough, it is gone. Ultimately, one has to decide which feature is more important, and I'd rather appear literate than save myself a click now and then (well, several times per day).

New Gmail Interface Sucks

Have a gander at what Google is about to inflict upon its user community:

• At the left center is a left arrow. That, from within a message, indicates return to the containing folder. This isn't new, and is fairly intuitive.
• Next is a box with a plus sign in the middle. We're supposed  to magically intuit that this means archive. Yup, much clearer than using the word "Archive.".
• Then we have a circle (very close inspection makes it out to be an octagon) with an exclamation in it. I don't know about you, but I don't find spam exciting, so never in a million years would I have guessed that this button marks the message as spam. Certainly is clearer and more intuitive than the current button labeled "Spam."
• Next over is a trash can. Fine.
• This is followed by a shape vaguely similar to a manilla file folder. Much clearer than the current button labeled "Move To."
• This is followed by, maybe, a luggage tag, which is supposed to represent "Labels."
• Not shown in the above screenshot the right and left arrow buttons, retained from the prior interface, which move to the previous and next message. Which goes to previous and which to next? Hell if I know--I always guess wrong the first time. Yes, a bad interface feature from the prior Gmail version retained for the next Gmail version.

So Google is screwing up Gmail just like they screwed up docs, though maybe not as bad as they are screwing up the Blogger interface. There's an airhead in a video explaining why they are doing this, but it all comes down to "some illiterate moron thinks pictures are cooler than words."

Enough Already

I have been trying to decide which professional membership to drop, ACM or IEEE-CS. CACM and Computer are, IMHO, of roughly equivalent high quality. It looks as though there are two deciding factors. One is the terrible job IEEE has done placing Spectrum online; they are using qmags.com, who are not content with PDFs, but feel the need to litter the PDFs with navigation controls and other garbage. Why put navigational controls in a document that is viewed in a viewer with fine navigational controls? QMags' garbage is impossible to transfer to a Kindle, making it useless to me as an electronic format. The other is that ACM Computing Surveys remains excellent, and IEEE has nothing comparable.

Further, today I read "Living in a Digital World" by Samuel Greengard, 10/2011 CACM (http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/10/131393-living-in-a-digital-world/fulltext). It reminded me of the excellent idea of the digital sabbath and of the nice work done by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010). The technology surrounding us is dehumanizing and reducing our ability to function, and we need the scientific and engineering communities to continue to remind themselves of this.

ACM 2, IEEE-CS, -1

Google Hates Us

First Google Docs. Now Gmail. Google is trying to push us to unattractive interfaces with the idea that we are basically illiterate, unable to deal with words on the screen, and hoping to switch to obscure pictographs. Gmail's new interface is ugly, with little contrast between the foreground letters and the backgrounds, it spaces things out so that screen real estate is used poorly, it forces us into greater use of frames meaning that the arrow and page up/down keys are less useful, and, other than that, I don't like it.

Google Language Tools Improved

I like a couple of the new features of Google Language tools:

So what does 'Canada' mean?

First note the Spanish keyboard. Nice--this makes it much easier to type Spanish.
Now notice the tabs at the tops of the text areas, allowing one to quickly change the translate from and translate to languages. And the languages are easily changed. Nice.

Also worth noting is that they now support Latin, which was not the case not too long ago. Google is about search, and to a large degree search is about language, so the work'they're putting into this shouldn't be a surprise.

Maryland Charity Campaign

It appears that, except for the fact that they require Internet Explorer, the Maryland Charity Campaign is happy for anyone to sign anyone else up for deductions in any amount to any charity:

The restriction to Internet Explorer suggests that either Andar/360 Fundraising Software is done by a bunch amateur hacks, or they don't want donations from non-Windows users. Okay, I can contact the charities myself.