(no subject)

[ideological_cuddle]

I have been, as noted elsewhere, been Having Thoughts(TM) about the usefulness to me of a device like the iPad. One might feel inclined to suggest that this is basically just a gadget-freak rationalizing why he's going to buy one, and one might be correct, but I am not in fact planning to buy one just yet.

But I am curious to see how the MUA has evolved, and how well it'll work as an SSH and VNC client. Because I can see that maybe, possibly, a 10" touch-based device might be large enough for me to use for casual shell work, like the sort of thing I'm sometimes stuck sitting around waiting to do at 10PM after the Hong Kong people are done -- that's often just a few commands. I'm sure it'd be big enough for people with normal vision.

To that end my to-do list has had "build an IPSec VPN server" tacked on the end, so I can fool around with the VPN support on my iPhone. If that works adequately, I could work around the lack of support for our cruddy proprietary boutique VPN by VPN'ing to my own box, which is itself VPN'd to the office...

The lack of multitasking may perhaps suck a little too much though: losing one's SSH sessions because one needs to grab some text from an email? Not cool.

Comments

[From: reddragdiva]

screen at the other end?

[From: ideological_cuddle]

For work-fu "email" means either a web thing (OWA), the built-in MTA, or a VNC/RDP session to a Windows box. No IMAP, so screen isn't very helpful for that.

(I use screen all the time, almost everything I run in a shell is under screen.)

[From: reddragdiva]

I use an ssh tunnel and screen at the other end. And Lotus Notes appears able to reach across the hostile intarweb to retrieve my work email. Which sounds like a bad idea to me, but that's IT's problem.

[From: ideological_cuddle]

The problem is that the iPhone OS doesn't allow non-Apple apps to multitask. So one can't switch from an ssh client to a web browser or MUA and then back, because it will have shut down the ssh app.

Otherwise it'd be a complete no-brainer, the builtin MUA will use the corporate OMA server for push email if I really want to go down that road.

[From: thorfinn]

I use TouchTerm, which can be set to automatically run screen, and happily supports keys. So whilst the ssh app has shut down if you switch out, "resuming" the session is quick and trivial, just switch back to TouchTerm and go right back to your session. I already use that to do work on the iPhone today when I'm on call.

TouchTerm would work right now if you had an iPad, and I would expect the author to fix it up to work with the big screen, since that's a fairly trivial bit of code to add.

I currently do actually carry around a laptop everywhere, and that's not actually likely to change, so I don't have a use case for the iPad.

However, if you don't want to carry a laptop everywhere, the iPad would be perfectly viable in that space. Even more so if you get the keyboard dock or a bluetooth keyboard.

People complain about the lack of multi-tasking, but really, I haven't found it to be an issue at all. Super-quick "resume" of wherever you were at is actually in some ways better, especially for an ultra-portable device, and in 90% of cases it acts functionally identically to "real" multitasking.

The only big noticeable points are Mail (which if you're using push is fine), and IM clients (and there are a variety of push-notify IM clients out there).

[From: ideological_cuddle]

I've not been happy with that sort of thing on my iPhone. Partly because it's too small for me to use reasonably (obviously the iPad works around that by being a lot bigger) and partly because it's slow enough to start an app like TouchTerm that it's a real interruption to the workflow.

Fast-resume doesn't help for things like audio streamers or file transfers.

Not a huge fan of the push-notify thing, though that may be more to do with how annoyingly intrusive the notifications are than anything else.

[From: thorfinn]

Talk is that the A4 chip should be a whole lot faster at app switching... The ARM core in the iPhone isn't exactly the gruntiest thing in the universe. Have to wait until the thing comes out and some more anecdata come in before you can be sure though.

And true re the live stuff, but I suspect most people don't need live file transfers on anything in the iP*d range... I'm not sure if the built in iPod app supports live audio streams or not though.

[From: ideological_cuddle]

The iPod app will run in the background and stream audio. For that particular niche "all" they need to provide is a safe API so third-party apps can tell iPod to do the business.

There have been times when I've wished I could background the Facebook app while it uploads photos. It can be quite slow if you're out in the countryside with one bar of reception.

[From: thorfinn]

*ponder* The SDK has a means to play music from the iPod - I'm guessing that means a third-party app could probably play a stream as well... Probably.

And yeah, uploading delays are an issue for that sort of thing. I think there's a bit of predicate assumption that 3G bandwidth will be decent and if not it'll be fixable. Which, out here in the wilderness of .au, it ain't. :-)

[From: ideological_cuddle]

I've not seen any third-party audio-streaming apps that do it, so I suspect it's not an option at present.

I find 3G data to be Just Fine most of the time, but I gave up on trying to use dodgy networks a few months ago. There have been times recently where using Telstra has meant I could in fact do stuff in the middle of nowhere-ish (there is nowhere in regional Victoria I'd really call proper "middle of nowhere", growing up in Broken Hill will do this to a person), it just took a long while.

My American friends have been known to whinge about crappy 3G coverage in the US.

[From: thorfinn]

Tidbits theorising on the future of iP*d multitasking: http://db.tidbits.com/article/10989

I'm just installing the latest iPhone OS SDK, so I'll poke at that re audio-streaming later on. :-)

[From: thorfinn]

Right, I just poked at the iPhone OS SDKs regarding audio selection and playing. :-)

It looks like the media items you can search for don't include "radio" streams - and there appears to be no way to sync radio streams into iPod on the iPhone.

iPhone Safari can play audio streams itself... but that doesn't appear to be via iPod stuff.

So, yes, in short, not available in the SDK, yet. Could be addable in a future API, no doubt.