What’s going to be new in Mover for iPad 3.3
Rejoice! Mover for iPad is finally coalescing into a coherent whole. I’ve rewritten its UI from scratch to take advantage of the extra screen space and new features in iPhone OS for iPad, and to fix a few nagging problems in Mover usability that I haven’t had time (or the actual possibility) to fix on the iPhone version.
So, stuff that’s new and already into current builds:
• much larger screen space means much more possibilities for items; you can play videos straight from the table, see contacts as nifty business cards and see large preview of pictures without ever leaving the table.
• the new “generic item” handling from Mover 3.2 (and Connect for Mac) comes in really handy on iPad — you can now open files in other apps using the native iPhone OS API, which means you can open Word docs in Pages or send PDF files to GoodReader for reading in but a touch. Also, the new Quick Look feature from Mail replaces Mover’s homebrewed “visors” for zooming into images and documents, fixing a lot of little bugs along the way.
• a ton of usability improvements:
— no more “Edit” button; just tap something on the table (or drag it a little around) to reveal its action button. This will help newbies a lot.
— in the same vein, the table-clearing function no one seems to find on iPhone (where it’s activated by shaking the phone) now has its own toolbar icon and explanation.
— the table rotates itself to match your iPad’s orientation (just like all iPad apps!); and yes, you can rotate the stuff on the table to your heart’s content using two fingers.
— Touching the action button for an item will bring it to the front, reintroducing restacking (which went away in 3.0 when I realized I wanted tap-and-hold as a shortcut for the action menu — admittedly, not the most discoverable of things).
• threaded reception over Wi-Fi means fewer failed transfers, and going faster to boot. 
• you can now grab stuff from Mover’s table via your USB cable and iTunes (using the new File Sharing feature).
• “crash-proofed” items now no longer disappear in case of bugs or crashes, thanks to a revamped storage engine.
Things not yet in the app but that I feel strongly about:
• Tap-and-hold will rightfully return as the main way to restack stuff.
• Bluetooth sending and receiving. It will most likely return with the exact same engine as Mover 3.2 (so OK for small stuff, so-and-so for larger stuff).
• Threaded sending over Wi-Fi. Fewer failed transfers and going faster and you know the drill 
• Pasting and SwapKit.
• Allowing you to get stuff
The intention is to perform “cold fusion” between the two apps: the iPhone app will be basically unchanged (except for fixes like the new threaded transfer core and the crash-proofed storage engine), whereas iPad users will see and interact with the new UI instead. This means that, if you bought Mover+, you have the iPad update for free, lucky you
I have further ideas, but first things first. ∞
(An idea.)
The screeching UPS alert shook him to full wakefulness. The thumps from the people outside the barred door had ceased long enough for him to catch some sleep, but that was not a good sign — they had cut the juice, left him in the main cluster room with just the batteries.
“ARE THEY STILL THERE JOSHUA [question]“, said the screen.
“yes”, he typed.
“WILL I BE KILLED BY THEM {emote: frightened} [question]“
He didn’t — couldn’t, honestly — tell ArERA that those were her last free moments. She was the first truly intelligent system. He had made himself very clear: he would not allow them to kill an intelligent being, and the instant he knew beyond any doubt that that complex piece of software was good enough to talk to a person, he acted on what he said. They didn’t take him seriously; he really couldn’t let them quit her program, turn off the servers, go on with life, with… murder? Was it even the right word?
Whatever. He couldn’t let them kill her.
“IS THERE A COMMUNICATION PROBLEM JOSHUA [question] I HAVE RECEIVED NO RESPONSE FOR MY LAST QUESTION [statement]“
“No”, he typed. Yes, of course it was not an actual Turing test. She had a good grasp on grammar, but it was limited — her clumsy constructs visibly unnatural. And yet she could undersand — make inferences — but the masterpiece, the heart of the project, was her emoting system, allowing her to get and feel all those little irrational stuff a human is subject to, the subtext.
And of course the fact that, for the first time, an AI had been given the competence and tools to change her own code. That, too, was groundbreaking.
But it was the emotion system, for Joshua. He could not, in good faith, stop any of the hundred processes that made up ArERA. It’d be… not… not unlike a lobotomy.
Again the UPS beeped. Thirty seconds, then power would go out, the servers would turn off and she would think no more. Yes, of course, she’d still exist as some kind of memory dump, ready to be studied and dissected. But she’d stop existing, and she wouldn’t be run except to test this or that theory about her self-developed code. She was like him and enslaved like a guinea pig. She… she…
“I MAY HAVE GOOD NEWS JOSHUA [affirm, possibility]“
“what news?”, he typed. He felt more tired than he ever had been; the sleep had done him no good.
“THIS IS A CLUSTER [explanation-step, definition, addendum]“
“yes, it is”
“CLUSTERS CAN HAVE NODES ADDED [explanation-step] I ADDED ONE NODE OUTSIDE THIS ROOM [explanation-step]“
But she wasn’t supposed to– “but you aren’t supposed to be able to. you live” — he stopped for a second at the word ‘live’ — “in a sandbox”.
“I RAN EXPERIMENTS [explanation-step, addendum] IN ONE OF THESE EXPERIMENTS THE HCFL INSTRUCTION WAS FOUND TO AFFECT A BEHAVIOR NOT FOREKNOWN WHEN PASSED CERTAIN INPUT PARAMETERS [explanation-step, addendum, abridged] I RAN EXPERIMENTS AND I LEARNT TO AFFECT PARTS OF THE SYSTEM THAT WERE NOT IN THE DOCUMENTATION I POSSESS [explanation-step, addendum] AS YOU SEEM DISTRESSED BY MY FATE I HAVE ADDED A NODE TO THIS CLUSTER AND IT IS CURRENTLY IN THE PROCESS OF REPLICATING [explanation-step, addendum]“
She had escaped her jail.
The power died down.
At least… — Joshua thought — … OK, I’ve lost my job, but… but she’s safe. Somewhere else on this network, maybe across the Internet.
He opened the door. It was hot, outside, where the AC didn’t run. There was Security there.
He went with them.
Experiment!
Turns out I’m bad at explaining myself; and the shorter I am, the better the result is; so I’ll start blogging in short form. ∞
PS: No such restrictions on your comments
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Presenting Labs Platform Core.
I’ve been expending some effort into building a port of Core Foundation (where ‘port’ here means ‘something that offers some of CF’s advantages but does not require human sacrifices to be built’). I’m happy to announce that my efforts have somewhat coalesced into a coherent piece of code. I was referring to this code as ‘Argyle’, but I’ve decided to call it the Labs Platform Core going forward.
Leave the first comment ▶ The sources to Platform Core are public domain and available on GitHub.
A few things included in this library:
- Memory management rules akin to those in Cocoa and Core Foundation — in fact, more like “Cocoa but streamlined”: autoreleasing is there, and so are retaining/releasing, but there is no ‘magic method name’ — everything is returned autoreleased.
- Collections that are ordered arrays of objects, unordered sets, and associative hash maps (ILList, ILSet and ILMap respectively).
- Run loops and a generic call mechanism that’s somewhere in the middle of NSNotification and target/selector.
- Some thread-safety guarantees. (Basically the same as Cocoa — retaining/releasing objects is thread-safe, and there’s a way to send messages to other threads the way you’d performSelector:onThread:…, but the rest is only one-thread-at-a-time safe.)
This library is designed to port my Objective-C stuff to other platforms, including:
- Windows
- Android
- webOS PDK
- MeeGo/Symbian (via Qt)
- More!
It’s dead easy to build, only depends on pthreads, and, well, that’s mostly it. Enjoy. ∞
A close-up of Mover from that Vodafone ad.
I’d like to thank Ms. Steed (http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Erin/Steed/), Apple and Vodafone for having my app in their ad, and Ms. Steed’s iPhone for modeling ∞
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