In the end, using any device is all about doing actions (the simplest being reading/viewing, but also editing etc.) on data. Now the biggest difference between desktop and mobile is that the first one is (was?) file oriented while the second one is software (application) oriented.
Edit a document, listen to a music, on desktop you would historically navigate to where the file is, then open it with the program of your choice. On mobile, you would almost never do that, you would first open the app and from it select the file you want to interact with.
This is changing a lot how you are organizing the way you work. On desktop, it is easy to put related files of different types in the same folder, for example you organize your birthday, you can have the list of the invited people in a excel file with their number, a subfolder with the songs you want to play, some pictures of the venue, a text files with notes and etc. It is not natural at all to organize things like that on mobile. Android and iOS are hiding the files as much as they can. (This is not the case on Ubuntu Touch for example). And it becomes the responsibility of the app to organize the files it can open. This has a big impact on what you expect your desktop manager to done or not. I would personally be very happy if I could organize applications how we can organize files, and simply reopen a work session where I left it (some PDF open, some terminals open, my IDE, my browser...) even weeks after.
To complexify the topic even more, the same thinking can be done in the browser, which is basically an OS now...
"Android and iOS are hiding the files as much as they can."
This is the number one thing that bugs me about all the mobile OS platforms. The most important thing to me is my data not the programs that I use to operate on them.
Anyone can have a copy of the programs I use, but only I have my data.
Leaving the organisation of something so important to some XYZ app doing who knows what is just madness to me.
100%. The other day I needed to record a small snippet of audio so I installed some random audio recorder app from the app marketplace. It worked fine, but I could only see and replay my audio clip from inside the app, so the first thing I did was "share" it to my email which thankfully arrived as an attached .m4a file I could actually work with.
This is precisely the thing that drives me nuts about how mobile platforms treat data. They assume their users don't/shouldn't own anything anymore.
Recently I was trying to put a couple videos on my iPad before a trip. I would think I could just copy the files from a network share to the iPad and be done with it, but that didn't work as I couldn't get those files to be accessible in the apps no matter what I did. Instead I had to use VLC which has a server built in that was able to upload the files into the app. The entire process had me swearing at Apple constantly.
flaburgan · · focus · HN ↗
hidroto · · focus · HN ↗
This is the number one thing that bugs me about all the mobile OS platforms. The most important thing to me is my data not the programs that I use to operate on them.
Anyone can have a copy of the programs I use, but only I have my data.
Leaving the organisation of something so important to some XYZ app doing who knows what is just madness to me.
c22 · · focus · HN ↗
starky · · focus · HN ↗
Recently I was trying to put a couple videos on my iPad before a trip. I would think I could just copy the files from a network share to the iPad and be done with it, but that didn't work as I couldn't get those files to be accessible in the apps no matter what I did. Instead I had to use VLC which has a server built in that was able to upload the files into the app. The entire process had me swearing at Apple constantly.
brokenmachine · · focus · HN ↗
I still don't like the way apps try to hide the filesystem in android but at least I can use a file browser to access the file system directly.
Thank you for confirming my thoughts about Apple.
Unfortunately the incentive of current mobile OSs is to funnel everything towards rent-seeking.
The cloud was a mistake.