notes from /dev/null - mobile

Captee 1.1.0 update now available on the App Store

2023-05-22T13:55:00-07:00

There's a big update to Captee (v1.1.0) now available on the App Store. This is a major release for the app, with significant improvements to its user interface and support for converting formatted macOS text to Markdown and Org markup.

If this is your first time hearing about it, hello and welcome! Captee is an app that makes marking up a link (both URL and title) to Markdown or Org a one-step operation straight from the macOS Share menu. Results are stored in the system clipboard for pasting into your favorite editor.

Learn more about Captee at http://yummymelon.com/captee.

How I Personally Use Mobile Computing in 2023

2023-01-23T15:23:00-08:00

Not necessarily profound, but some personal thoughts/checkpoints on how I use “mobile” computing in 2023. Motivated by following up with this post I made back in January 2010.

By far, an iPad with an external keyboard has become my primary and preferred means of communication.

Text messages, email, video, and even voice calls: I do all these things through my iPad nearly all the time. It has been this way for the past four years.
With cloud based messaging services, my bias is to use a mobile phone as a read-only device whenever I'm dealing with text.

Most of my communication writing is done on the iPad using an external keyboard.
Emotionally, I don’t think of a laptop as a “mobile” device anymore.

My 90% use case is to run it as a docked system connected to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. This is the case regardless if I’m at home or at work. It’s basically a desktop (albeit portable) computer to me now.
- That said, the option to run it as a laptop is still a great win for the cases when I need to. I’d still observe that these are exceptions to my day-to-day behavior.
Related to the above, whenever I need mobile access (via iPad or iPhone) to my laptop’s files, I use a terminal emulator.

I got an iPad 2nd generation on the day of its release in 2011, and for most of its life I found it great for consuming media but not much else. It was far from being a system I could do work with which entails a lot of writing, both of software and its documentation, journaling, and project planning. After a couple of years it went into the bookcase, unused.

Around 2018 I refreshed and got a 6th gen iPad. As a media consumption device, it was still great. But I was still concerned that I couldn't use it to create in the ways I was interested in. Then I learned about Blink shell, a terminal emulator that launched in 2017. Running a Blink on an iPad with an attached external keyboard turned it into the best 80’s-style thin client that could never have existed back in the 80’s. Coupled with mosh and tmux, as long as I had an internet connection, I could do work. An aside: I'd also observe that my dependency on Blink shell is co-mingled with using Emacs and in particular emacsclient over the years.

Since then, it’s a rare day that I don’t use my iPad.
Noted with chagrin that with the above, I’ve turned my laptop into a server.
Outside of some file data, most all the data state that I work with is “cloud”-based.

I rarely deal with manual data sync (outside of git repos) across multiple clients (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones). Most all of the data sync I use is automatically managed at the application level.

NeXT is the reason why you have your iPhone.

2011-09-01T02:23:00-07:00

One of the things that I always marvel at in computing is how strong an idea can persist and if the idea is good enough, will find its moment in the Sun.

Back in late 80's, Steve Jobs with a superbly talented team of hardware and software engineers set out to make a computer that would offer a “new kind of computing and software development environment.” That computer would be called NeXT.

NeXT made a point to market themselves to the higher education market and in late-1988 they started making rounds to colleges to pitch their yet-to-ship computer. At that time, I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia and as such got to attend an on-campus presentation of the first NeXT computer. It was gorgeous in all its greyscale beauty. It was also crazy expensive, with the base model listing at $6,500 with no hard drive. While the technology and pricing were competitive with the workstations of its time, NeXT was really priced in the realm of institutional purchasing and not for individuals.

At the presentation there was of course product information, which I took, studied, and then shelved away. The years passed, and through circumstances well documented elsewhere, the operating system built for the NeXT computer would become the basis for OS X and then iOS: the OS driving Macs, iPhones, and iPads today. But it's not only a software story. NeXT and all the other workstation manufacturers of its time (Sun, SGI, Apollo, etc.,…) were really pushing what could be achieved with microprocessor-based computers, shoe-horning in architectural concepts from mainframe and mini-computers to improve performance wherever possible within the economics of the early 1990's.

With Moore's law, scaling has yielded system-on-chip (SoC) devices inheriting from workstation hardware architectures and system software, enabling the nascent ubiquitous computing world we see today.

Back to that product information from 1988, I still have them on my bookshelf. With the recent announcement of Steve Jobs' resignation, it seems as good a time as any to share them with you. They are a fun read: it's marvelous to see how coherent the vision of that talented team building NeXT has held out over the years.

Anticipatory computing is even more important for mobile.

2010-10-25T09:08:00-07:00

In the before time, when people got their tech news via printed paper, there was this guy Bob Metcalfe who had had an essay column in InfoWorld and earlier in life invented this little thing called Ethernet. In his last column post for InfoWorld, he described the notion of “anticipatory computing,” where computers would predict and compute ahead of time what we would eventually want. In Unix parlance, cron jobs for everybody and then some. Now apply that line of thinking to mobile.