The most awesome thing about Airdrop is when you can find the other device, and even more magical if you can do that on the first try: you can send files without being on the same network or heck, you don't even need to be connected to the Internet at all. That is neat.
9/10 times they haven't set the permissions to receive files through airdrop. It used to be open, but that was a huge security vuln. People could just airdrop whatever picture they wanted to all the iPhones on an airplane for example
There was also a certain amount of regulatory pressure brought to bear; Hong Kongers were using AirDrop to great effect in outwitting the authorities during the 2019-2020 protests
That's 0/10 for me: I know I have the correct permissions set up with my friends (because we can usually Airdrop each other), but sometimes it just spuriously does not work.
One thing I've noticed when AirDropping pictures to my wife is that the recipient needs to have their phone _unlocked_. That was definitely somewhat confusing when I first started using the feature.
Had this exact thing happen tonight. I wanted to airdrop some photos to my MacBook, worked from my partners phone but my phone just wouldn’t send them. My phone and laptop could see each other in airdrop but they refused to send / accept the photos. Ended up texting it to myself in iMessage and opening that on the MacBook.
Universal clipboard is pretty great too. It's another thing I wish was just an open standard that all the things supported, not just the Apple ecosystem.
I get a lot usage out of related cousin feature Universal Control, which is the best KB/mouse sharing implementation I’ve used. It manages to feel almost identical to a physical connection even over WiFi, which nothing third party has been able to swing… Synergy, Sharemouse, etc need all involved machines to be connected to the network via Ethernet to pull that off.
Interestingly, it seems to present shared KBs and mice as physically connected devices. Any time I use Universal Control on a Mac I haven’t before the little keyboard identification assistant that opens when you directly plug in a keyboard pops up.
I'd never reflected on the irony of these features being called Universal when they only work on Apple devices, but the 'just works' nature really does feel good.
I sometimes need to work on mobile development, so on advice from a sibling comment I installed KDE Connect, and it's actually pretty great and does copy/paste and remote mouse/keyboard pretty well, but you do have to a) enter the app, b) select the device, c) then finally choose the thing you want to do. They've made it about as frictionless as possible, but it won't be the same as first-class OS-level support. e.g., I can just copy some text on my Mac, and paste it a second later on my iPhone, without any manual orchestration
I hadn’t encountered KDE Connect before, I might check that out for MacOS to Android. It looks like they’ve done the best they can on iOS, I’m spite of how locked down it is
There could be a standard protocol describing how to authenticate and talk to a server, and get notified. It's not that different from chat protocols.
And operating systems could allow user to select their preferred server, although I wouldn't expect Apple to allow something advanced and anti-vendor-locking like that.
I once had a specific device that wouldn’t airdrop to anything. Beyond that one device, it has always, just worked. Instantly. First try.
I wish everything were as simple to use.
Documents is the other app I use for sending files to and from iOS (primarily iPad, from Linux laptops). But I’ve run into a lot more bugs with that, and the transfer setup process requires generating and entering codes. It’s a pretty good UX, but it always reminds you how effortless airdrop is.
I love the idea of a cross platform, open source, airdrop. It’s a lofty, but worthwhile goal.
Airdrop is very nice when it works. Modern apple hardware has a second wifi modem for an ad-hoc connection so it can be faster than normal wifi as well.
But Apple only.. makes it much less useful, even for “Apple people”.
Technically yes, it's a virtual device, but not all wifi hardware is capable of running two networks at the same time, Apple carefully selected the "usual" hardware to support this.
Almost all Wi-Fi chipsets released in the last couple of years support this.
Many Windows and Android devices have been able to share a Wi-Fi network with other devices over another SSID, for example.
The only thing that's complicated is if a device needs to be a 802.11 station on one frequency/channel, and a host or P2P device on another, but that's almost always avoidable.
Everything else can be done purely in firmware or software.
Has it ever been reverse engineered and reimplemented?
I use apple's IP audio streaming protocol (forget what it's called, air-something) to play music over a couple of edifier-brand speakers from a Linux desktop which is running pipewire's FOSS implementation of the protocol. I don't even buy apple products but i ended up using it because there's no way to just netcat samples onto these things.
But Airdrop for me has been a hit and miss. When it works, it's awesome. But when it doesn't work, there's literally not much I can fiddle with to make it work.
Absolutely. My wife stopped sending me stuff over AirDrop because she can't see my phone half the time. So she just sends me stuff via iMessage. We both have the latest iPhones with the latest iOS.
I’m noticing that a lot of the times my airdrop between my new iPhone and iPad isn’t working anymore. I blame iOS/iPadOS 17. Maybe will be fixed in 17.1 ??
Phone-to-phone airdrop is slow. Unless sending video, the messages app will typically outperform the UX and delivery speed of Airdrop for the person sending the file, which is really the only one that matters.
Airdrop Discovery is slow. Notification of an incoming file is slow. File transfer startup is slow. File transfer completion is slow.
You have to wait at every step and you cannot stop watching it, lest the transfer fail.
The UI for iOS isn't very good either. It floats on top of everything. It's easy to dismiss and impossible to bring back without starting over.
It's a great idea with bad UX, but still better than nothing at all.
What I'm looking for is more of a solution to save a webpage as it is. Kind of like Internet Archive but better for individual pages. The thing with Internet archive is some things stop working, like mobile view etc
Perhaps ArchiveBox[0] will work for you? A self-hosted archiver to save websites in various formats. Has a section on that page for alternatives as well that might work too.
Singlefile [1] works pretty well for me for that use case.
It has the added advantage that the file format is just plain HTML, and together with “reader mode” in most browsers, it’s a great way to save long-form text or other mostly static pages for later reference.
It obviously doesn’t work for very dynamic pages, let alone web apps.
You can also use Zotero paired with the Zotero Connector Chrome/Firefox extension for this, I use Zotero as my document archival in addition to my academic citation manager. The Zotero Connector saves any PDF or web page opened in your browser to a local PDF/HTML file, and for HTML under the hood is uses the SingleFile extension to package the whole web page, images and all, into just one file.
It works well - now I'm just looking for a good way to annotate/highlight the local HTML/PDF/ePUB files cross-OS cross-platform. KOReader (https://github.com/koreader/koreader) works pretty well for this with its new hash-based storage option.
In addition to the various tools mentioned elsewhere sometimes saving the page as markdown in Joplin with their page saving tool is the best way for further use
In addition to archivebox and singlefile/singlefilez, I'd recommend scoop[0] and archiveweb/webrecorder[1]. Both create WACZ format archives using a browser which has slightly better fidelity than the way archivebox creates WARCs (using wget). There's also Save Page WE[2][3] which does something similar to singlefile.
In Germany about 20 years ago people were still doing dial-up using a broadband (DSL) modem. The provider wouldn't give you a routing device but only a bare-bones giant modem. When still living with my parents I remember rolling off an ethernet cable across the apartment every night connecting my PC with the broadband modem and then invoking a bash script initiating a PPPoE (point-to-point over ethernet) dial up connection to the service provider. That was before WiFi and even before home routers were a thing. Probably back until 2002 or 2003.
Docker with WSL2 runs fine and I use it for my light dev needs on my personal windows machine. Running K8s is the issue.
WSL just had lots of instability issues in my experience when I had to run a handful of services for debugging stuff locally. I tried all sorts of configs to get it to work but it was inconsistent at best. Tons of wasted time. Enough so that our teams got work to get us macs instead (we were a windows shop spinning up a new cloud product - so windows didn’t really make sense as our daily driver anymore anyways). This was about 2 years ago. Maybe things are better now but 6 months of dealing with that instability was enough to sour me.
No kidding. If I can get same battery life as macOS on my MacBook, trackpad gestures, OS-wide Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts and Microsoft office I'm not going back. Proton has made it possible to run previously Windows-only games.
