Can you expand a bit more on this? What makes it not an interface?
I am an android and windows person (would switch to Linux in a heartbeat if my CAD worked on there) and pretty tech savvy, even run my own servers. So I hate the fact that things are getting so dumbed down but I can’t understand why it’s just an interface would be not true.
I’ll take a swing at this one.
A good interface has well defined inputs and outputs. A lot of interactions with iOS/MacOS software/applications have decently defined inputs via their UIs, but finding the outputs of those UIs can be a Sysiphysian effort. Figuring out where those outputs are beyond the defaults like “downloads from a browser end up in the Downloads folder” or “documents saved in the Pages app end up in the Documents” folder is frequently non-trivial.
It ends up being that the easiest way to find a file is to just open the original app you created it in, and find it in it’s history or whatever. To a non-technical person, this creates the impression that the only way to interact with those files is with the original app it was created in, which ends up limiting what people think they can do with their devices, and creates a bit of a walled garden effect.
So I suppose that the blanket statement of “it’s not an interface” isn’t completely fair. What is fair though, is to say that “it’s a bad interface”, if the average user can’t readily find said interface’s output.
I think I understand what you mean now, if it was an interface then it should be possible to use a separate but similar interface to access the output but here there is only one non-PITA way. Eg. If there was a competing galleries app on iOS it should be able to see all the photos. Is that roughly the thinking? Makes sense to me and thanks for taking the time to type that out.
yep, zalgotext basically did it for me. One other thing is that when you try to access files on an ipod through a non apple computer, it still uses tree based file structures, but the individual files, names, and locations are all garbled (eg : your Rancid album track 3 is in the same folder as your rush 2112 overture, but the rest of those albums are fuck knows where).
I had a joke that the original iphone wasn’t turing complete because you couldn’t run programs on it not from the istore.
