I Am Developing Solely on a No-Brand Android 5.1 Tablet | Hacker News Reader

I Am Developing Solely on a No-Brand Android 5.1 Tablet

tbf-rnd.life

40 pointszdw40 comments

What a strange article, going on about the PC history in Sweden, hacking on the Quake2 codebase and VR headsets to one small paragraph that actually discusses the title of the article without really answering the question in any satisfying way.

I am starting out by using what's available so that I can apply the lessons later. As I'm in that phase naturally there are no answers.

Does that make it clearer?

No. The way that you structured this whole article is strange. It doesn't feel as you read through that you are talking about the title nor does it feel like each subsection is connected in either way. Generally a reader expects: introduction to concept, hypothesis/argument based on introduced concepts, supporting arguments for or against the hypothesis, and finally a conclusion. I feel like you are missing the introduction entirely, so a reader has to assume the title is your argument (as sometimes appears in news articles). Given that argument you end up wandering through 3 sections that do not seem related to that title, and at the end I still have no idea what you wanted to say.

There is no conclusion or resolution to what was introduced so I still can't fathom what you are trying to share. It feels like a situation where only half the thoughts hit the page and since we don't know the context we can't fill in the gaps.

Our issues are in the actual writing of the post, not as much what you are trying to say because we can't even get to that.

First I go through steps of computer evolution: desktops -> laptops -> tablets

When desktops became popular in Sweden computers where rare in say South America.

Now computers are not rare in South America, which is good. The bad thing is that they are common in a consumption only format.

The problem is UI in particular text input. The solution use say gloves as input and VR systems which I predict will be cheaper and broadly available.

Until that happens a huge amount of people are stuck with smart devices, so I'd like to improve the situation. To get there I'm doing my work on a tablet to get a good idea on what works and what doesn't. Why? Because I want teenagers in the rest of the world to be able to have fun with computers as I did.

Your "article" reads like four or five separate blog or facebook posts scrunched together with no rhyme or reason. And it has the setup of a clickbait article, luring you in with a question, going on about a bunch of stuff not related to it at all, and then finally approaching the question at the very end but never _really_explaining it. Complete with a link to an unrelated software project and a separate link to donate to you (and we're donating for ... what? A VR input method you didn't really explain and has nothing to do with the headline?)

As a blog post for a random tech friend people follow, sure, that's fine. But I don't understand why this was posted to hacker news, and I don't understand why people voted it up.

I answer the question: to see how hard it is to work on a tablet.

Why: because desktops aren't widely available in the developing world

The "unrelated" link is a suggestion on how to write fast without a keyboard. Something that might come in handy for a non-desktop machine, don't you think?

Although I'm very interested in your "Chorded Typing" article [0], I too admit to being confused by the article listed here on HN. Personally, I've roamed the world with a Galaxy Tab 2 7" (3G version) on rooted Android 4.x. I used a mini USB keyboard, and developed quite a bit of software on it (mainly nodejs at the time, but not exclusively). I upgraded the system in 2013 to a MBA (better battery, bigger screen, prettier OS IMHO, but lost mobile data), & didn't continue with it. Fun times.

[0] http://tbf-rnd.life/blog/2019/06/16/0-learning-curve-chorded...

Thank you. Well what I'd like to do is to make it possible to do it without a bluetooth keyboard.

So I'm looking into alternative ways of doing this.

The chorded input method is interesting in conjunction with say a all in one android VR-headset and haptic glove input, where you have all ten fingers.

What kind of software did you develop was it on a commercial basis or on open source projects?

Didn't mean to be blunt, but I had no idea how the sections fit together and what you were trying to say. Clearly I am missing the context which others seem to have, since it's on the frontpage of HN.

There is barely an answer to the title question:

> So my idea is to follow the principles of universal design, that is that optimizations done on extreme cases translates over the whole spectrum. Also I’m getting valuable qualitative data on current implementations. Let me tell you this, for someone developing / administrating with the lingua Franca of computes i.e. UNIX/shell computing power is not the issue. Here I’m dealing with a 512 mb tablet.

I'm not sure I understand what that means, but that's all the answer we get. (The writing quality is as poor as the reasoning.)

From the quote I think he means that optimizations done on shitty hardware will translate to optimizations on good hardware, and that the computing power of the tablet is plenty for the dev/admin tasks he uses it for(?)

That's what I got, but it seems to clash with his assertion that computing power is not the problem. Whatever — I've already devoted too much time to this post.

In what way?

correct

How can you tell that the reasoning is bad if you can't parse the sentence?

Also had this not been written with two thumbs, maybe the result would've been better. Embarasing as it may seem, it just goes to show the unsuitability of tablets for productive use!

Normally I have spellchecker for times like these but unfortunately she's sick :( Didn't expect to hit HN frontpage before she had time to look at it.

Because, frankly, your article rambled and lacked a coherent point.

That doesn't really answer how you can fail to parse a formulation and still draw a conclusion regarding it's logical validity.

This is definitely what you should be arguing about in defense of your article.

Apparently the article was not written in a way that can be understood by all. I can give you that.

It's good to have feedback and in the future I'll take into account that some people have problems comprehending text.

But to say that you can not parse a sentence and that it's illogical doesn't make sense. That is like saying that you read a book in Greek, didn't understand it and still claim that the content is invalid. Do you follow?

It takes so little Apple to make it possible for iPads to be usable for development work, but they do not. Maybe because it will cannibalize mac sales.

Maybe but Apple tended to (in the past) be a focused company. They decided to not support development in the past so they straight up ran from it, supporting zero parts of it, gaining security benefits. They know the iPad as-is isn't designed for it and have no intent to do it. Now, when they eventually come around, I'm sure it will be in a big, all or nothing, way.

That's kinda the best thing about Apple, they are brutally focused on solving a problem at any cost. Thats why AirPods are so small, the apple watch is so incredibly featured and why they build their own CPUs. Making choices like that sometimes means realizing opportunity cost, you can't have the best of everything.

Meanwhile, in fairness, the Mac is actually a pretty great development platform.

"Meanwhile, in fairness, the Mac is actually a pretty great development platform.

Especially with the Macbook Pro they seem a little confused whether it should be a good dev machine or a super thin high end laptop.

Thin and light is what a portable computer is supposed to be. If you wanted something non-portable you could get an iMac, or a mac mini, but to compromise the products for other use cases would just be poor design.

They already have the Air to be lightweight and thin. Makes sense. But there are plenty of people who need a portable high power laptop so it would make sense to have a Pro that has plenty of connectors, is powerful and doesn't need to be as lightweight.

Oh go away. Can we stop pretending that no one wants thin and light laptops. Almost everyone does.

> they are brutally focused on solving a problem at any cost.

Except replaceable batteries, anything related to right to repair, or even calculator apps that reliably work beyond 1 digit per second

These are among the costs they're happy to pay in pursuit of the vision they prioritize, which seems to usually involve small/light/thin, pretty, and convenient (for certain values of convenient).

Which can be a great experience if/when you fit their priority profile. If you don't, they're permanently frustrating.

*externalized costs

The mac is great but the iPad is smaller, lighter, and better battery. They already have git client apps, file manager apps, and code editor apps (even js and python interpreters). They just all work together very poorly.

I feel like this is missing the point. Why bother with an inferior tablet that only runs a tiny subset of software specifically optimized for it? You can just get a used Thinkpad for $100 and have a decent linux experience without any compromises. You certainly won't have to mess around with stupid gloves to increase your typing speed. If the people you are targeting are so poor they can't even afford to spend $100 on a device that will last at least 5 years then you're solving the wrong problem. They are not suffering from a lack of inferior computing devices, they are suffering from poverty. The OLPC laptop basically already did what you describe in your article, ultra low spec hardware with special software written for it and it was a massive failure and the reason was not a lack of funding. The reason is that just handing out hardware isn't enough. The users still need to be educated. This means either learning English so they can have access to the vast amount of information on the internet or creating learning resources in their native language. Both options are non trivial and require the concentrated effort of thousands of people.

Really the takeaway should be that making things cheaper runs into diminishing returns quickly. Frugality doesn't make you less poor. Using that crappy 500MB RAM tablet might save you only $60 over the Thinkpad with 4GB RAM but it requires an incredible amount of effort compared to simply earning $60 more.

I've given this a serious try a few times, on both phones and tablets, because I am keen for an ultra-portable dev setup. Unfortunately Android falls pretty short, even though Termux is amazing. I've never been able to stick with it long term.

For me, a much better small and cheap dev setup is the Raspberry Pi, particularly the new Raspberry Pi 4. Pair it with a bluetooth keyboard, a portable Monitor, and a battery pack, and it's nearly as good as a laptop, but much more hackable. And you get an actual GNU/Linux development environment.

I've been eyeing the rpi as well. Here's the thing though I'd rather use it with gamepads or haptic glove input and with VR headsets. This would mean that it truly would be mobile, i.e. you could use it on an airplane!

termux (https://termux.com/) is a great way to develop on Android devices.

It works great and brings familiar and powerful tools to your Android devices for development and IT needs.

This is what I am using! Couldn't cope with it. As a wm substitute of sorts I use tmux. VIM really helps out a lot as well.

If I were going to do serious work with Termux, I would invest in Bluetooth keyboard.

oh I have. Initially I used a bluetooth keyboard. Which is an acceptable solution.

Lack of dev tools in chrome and firefox is an issue though.

Also a better window manager would help a lot. Less animated transitions and more i3/fluxbox like functions.

Now I'm "dogfooding" in a sense so that I can hopefully get some input on how to create a better prototype.

I don't expect to be able to make an equivalent of an desktop IDE or whatever but rather to create experimental solutions to whatever problems that might appear.

First of all an autocomplete that works on the input and output of the terminal would be great. Say if you run ifconfig the output would be automatically added to autocomplete.

Key sizes ia a problem as well where it's easy to miss keys. So I'm toying with the idea of a dynamic keyboard (which has draw backs) with sizes in accordance with Fitt's law.

It really isn't. Try developing openjdk based applications on it. It's a mess.

I write code all the time using my iPad, though I'm connecting to a Raspberry Pi over SSH and using a bluetooth keyboard.

I should blog about it.

Server struggling a bit with HN frontpage:

internet archive to the rescue: https://web.archive.org/save/http://tbf-rnd.life/blog/2019/0...

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