The Tablet Problem | Hacker News Reader

The Tablet Problem

lifehacker.com

34 pointsuladzislau41 comments

Home computers are pretty crappy at the "multiple user" problem as it exists at home.

iTunes and Windows Media Player both assume, by default, that every user wants to have a private collection of music. Maybe when my son is 17 that will be the case, but now that he's 10, a shared pool is what we want. Neither of those programs makes managing a shared pool effortless.

Having to log out and log in (dump my son's game on the floor) so my wife can check email is just lame. (Switch users isn't much better)

Laptops today all come with cameras and face recognition technology is pretty good, so in a family situation the system should always know who's sitting in front of it.

And yeah, autocompletion on your web browser should NEVER turn up a porn site...

Having a shared pool for Windows Media Player isn't a big deal at all: on Windows 7, you can store any shared music in /Users/Public/Public Music, and Windows Media Player should index it automatically, or you can add it to the list.

But it's not just shared media, I also want shared metadata including ratings and play counts.

> And yeah, autocompletion on your web browser should NEVER turn up a porn site...

Was visiting reddit with a friend on his computer. Autocomplete kicked in at "red". Got uncomfortable there for a few seconds.

This is what incognito mode is for.

Still, Google has SafeSearch, they have some conception of what one might not want to pop up unexpectedly. I know that that particular autocomplete was probably generated from history, but the browser could be more noob-friendly ... everybody starts from ignorance.

IIRC, incognito mode still picks up stuff that was done in the wide open - ie, the scenario from the comment above would still happen if the author went into incognito.

In addition to incognito mode, a "guest" mode that didn't pick up "regular" URL history would be useful for scenarios such as this.

I appreciate that incognito won't give someone my FB cookie, but I don't need them to know what sites I do visit.

I think he meant that his friend should use incognito mode when visiting "red..." site(s) ... Not that he should use incognito mode for his guests.

Android browser seems pretty bad for this. Even if you clear history/cookies/offline files you can still hit the back button and traverse the history that way.

Just put all the MP3 files in a folder with permissions set so that it is visible to all accounts, then use Winamp or VLC with a shared playlist file?

To the browser, unless you have a pre-populated list, the autocomplete URLs are just a list of strings. How should it know if penisland.com is a website that sells pens or otherwise? Also, where do draw the line really? therapistfinder.com? expertsexchange.com?

Autocomplete URLS don't have to be just lists of strings. Many sites already send down metadata to indicate that they are serving up adult content.

That "honor system" approach, coupled with a pre-populated list that gets updated with regular browser updates, could catch the vast majority of embarrassing situations, like the time I found "handcuffedlesbians.com" in the URL bar at a client's site.

Google already classifies sites as porn or not-porn. They could make a simple API or data file available and the browsers could use it.

You want to tell google each time you visit a porn site?

(not that they don't know already since the site probably uses google analytics)

I think Bloom filters would allow offline checking, without pinging Google for each request. They already do this for antimalware notices, iirc.

Google developed porn filters during a crisis in 2001. It's a very valuable technology that they're not going to let just anybody share

> Home computers are pretty crappy at the "multiple user" problem as it exists at home.

Really? My iMac was great at it and my Macbook still is. (Fast User Switching from a menu at the top-right.)

The lack of "Fast User Switching" type functionality and the privacy separation that it provides is one of the things that has held me back from purchasing a tablet for so long.

I think the day is coming where the purchase of a tablet will make life simpler in our household but I think there is going to be a fight over who's cloud account it gets associated with and possibly some kind of continual flickering between user accounts by wipe and re-install depending on who is the primary user this month.

Oh for multi-user/multi-cloud support to come natively to a tablet.

My exact problem with my new Nexus 7. The google apps do a great job of "convenience" switching (for me and my wife - gmail, gtalk...) but "privacy" switching isn't available. Some apps (Flick Note) also have multiple login "convenience" switching, but again not much in the way of privacy switching for visitors.

Using someone else's smartphone or computer feels a little bit like wearing their underwear.

Try using the SwitchMe app described in the article. I use it to share my Nexus 7 with my wife. It requires root, but you have a Nexus tablet, it's made to be rooted. It also requires a reboot to switch users, but the Nexus 7 is fast enough it isn't much of a problem.

Hopefully the next Android release will complete the built in account switching.

> Hopefully the next Android release will complete the built in account switching.

This is definitely coming up: http://phandroid.com/2012/08/02/androids-multiple-user-accou...

Although, that means a 6 month wait at best :-(

I've been using SwitchMe on my tablet for my wife and I(it's free to set up two partitions, and cheap if you want more). It works pretty well and even lets you see how much space a user's account is taking up. The only real downside is that the tablet has to reboot to switch users which can take a few minutes depending on the device.

Hey, this looks really interesting. Does it need root access?

EDIT - Nevermind, it does. Dang.

I was just talking about this with my roommate last week. I picked up a Nexus 7 when it launched and I leave it out for anyone to play around with when they're over, and my roommate uses it to check his facebook and stuff too. Our solution is that I use the native twitter, facebook, etc apps and he just logs in through chrome (it's a shitty solution really).

I would love the option to login as myself and have basically just my account keychain applied to all installed apps. I can't imagine that would really be that hard for Apple or Google to do, and it would really take Tablets to a better spot in the market as they aren't really phones at all.

This is the only solution atm and it sucks. It might work with a few trustworthy friends but leave your device open at a party as music station and it's way to convenient for someone to "accidentally" open the email-app and instantly see all your private emails.

All that's needed is an app-lock and you could use this workaround. You make all your private apps password protected and guests can only use the browser.

My simple solution on the iPad has been to install the Google Search application and get my wife to use that for web browsing and email. That way she gets her own set of cookies so she can sign in to things separately from me (I use Safari), plus she can access gmail through it as well. It even works well for her way of using the internet, which pretty much always starts off with a Google search.

I thought the lack of user accounts would be a problem before I bought the iPad, but in practice this has been good enough and much less of an administrative overhead than proper user accounts would probably be.

There's also a lot of other browsers on iPad you can use for this too, notably Chrome.

There is no way Apple will pass on the revenue opportunity of making you buy more than one iPad per household buy not letting you have privacy with multiple accounts.

They could also hardcode OSX for one user account too in that case.

I doubt it would cost sales, especially when any iPad owner could have bought 3 small Android tablets for the same price.

1 Android tablet, 1 iPad might be a solution for a couple that includes a cross-platform mobile developer.

I bought my girlfriend her own iPad. Unfortunately, we are a sleep-over couple, and she always leaves her iPad home and commandeers mine, leaving me to squint at my iPhone. (Which fortunately is a Retina one.)

It'd be neat if she could connect them and use your iPad as a dumb terminal for the phone.

Actually, that's exactly the sort of thing she'd like and would do!

This is similar to the problem Windows had in the 90s. Except back then the only user account they had was Administrator. So this "tablet problem" is more secure in a malware sense if not privacy.

Still, multiple users has been a solved problem since the early versions of Unix. Why companies continue to ignore it is beyond me.

> Still, multiple users has been a solved problem since the early versions of Unix. Why companies continue to ignore it is beyond me.

Prioritizing the 1st day UX over the 3rd week UX. It's the same thing as programming languages making "Hello World" easy.

Isn't Key Lime Pie supposed to have multiple account support baked in?

I think Windows RT/Windows 8 tablets have proper user accounts. Hopefully they will come with a guest account as well. Not sure if the new apps know how to deal with multiple users and their data.

Windows really has the potential to shine in this department. Not quite a killer feature but it's definitely something they're capable of getting right.

It will only shine if the lag isn't interminable. Lag kills UX.

Not only that, but the user accounts can optionally live "in the cloud", such that a user - who would otherwise be a guest - can use another's device and keep their preferences by having them synced up automatically.

Yes on all three counts, so far at least.

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