Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

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Seriously. The thing that still bites me the most is that "Share" functionality of files continues to be broken in certain apps.

For example, I frequently need to save a PDF from my Google Drive app either to my local Files or the Books app. But both those options are just... missing from the iOS share sheet, even though Acrobat is there. So I have to share to Acrobat, then share to Files or Books from within Acrobat. Bizarre.

The problem is some kind of combination of file type plus application -- Gmail will let me share a PDF straight to Files or Books just fine.

Or sometimes when you open a PDF in Books from another app it saves it to Books as a copy... but in other cases it opens it in-place. So you think you copied a bunch of things into Books to read on the airplane... and then they're not there.

The fact that there's never any indication whether something is being copied or not, and that apps that support a filetype are simply arbitrarily missing from some share sheets (but not all), makes iPadOS just a disaster for any serious work that spans multiple apps.

Unfortunately the terrible file management seems to be spreading to MacOS, rather than vice versa. Now if you have iCloud Drive turned on and navigate to ~/Documents in Finder, if you go up one level you'll find yourself in some kind of virtual folder called iCloud Drive, rather than your home directory.

This is exactly the sort of weird filesystem-tree-concept-breaking thing that made Windows Explorer so annoying to use for me.

You mean "if you have your Desktop and Documents folder synced to iCloud".

iCloud Drive is not a "virtual folder" (I think you mean "shell folder"? Like the one that you see when you navigate up from / in the Finder?) iCloud Drive is a real place in your home directory (it is located at ~/Library/Mobile Documents/). It's equivalent to the root of any other synced-directory service — Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Your Documents and Desktop folders — when iCloud Drive sync for them is enabled — are just regular folders inside that synced folder.

The hacky part is the fact that, while the Documents and Desktop folders are canonically nested inside the Mobile Documents folder, they're also linked from outside of it with weird pseudo-symlinks.

Those pseudo-symlinks are more than just symlinks — they appear as real directories (like Linux bind-mounts), which is helpful to avoid breaking legacy apps that expect to be able to find real directories at ~/Desktop and ~/Documents.

But, like a symlink, the "real" directory these pseudo-symlinks point to only exists in one place, and that place is ~/Library/Mobile Documents/. Presuming `readlink(2)` was called to resolve the file at any point, you can't navigate back "up" from the resulting file, to find yourself back at the directory that contained the symlink. Once you resolve the link, the symlink isn't part of the resulting path any more.

Yes, the file management is absolutely terrible, along with the extremely limited multitasking. These are the two biggest factors keeping the iPad from real desktop usage.

It seems most of the successful "pro" usage is by those who can work entirely within a single app that provides everything they need.

the file management in iPadOS is a POS. It wasn't even closer to MacOS Finder level. It still feel like juiced-up iOS without expanding functionalities.

Apple needs to provide an official way to easily transfer file without using iTune & iCloud. Yes, there is unofficial way (VLC) of doing this but it is cumbersome and iPad Files & other apps will not see those files at all. I understand why Apple does this to prevent jailbreaking. But for pete's sake, tablet are not suppose to have a restricted access in file manager since it is a freaking tablet!

My specific use case but I have my NAS mounted on the iPad files app and use that to transfer files.

a workaround is to create a shortcut that shares its input, you share to the shortcut (which you set to be on the share sheet and accept anything) and from there you can share anywhere

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