[Athen] iOS frustrations -- what are your thoughts?

[Doug Hayman]

Good points here.  I find with my iPhone and iPad I tend to save my HTML
articles like this

Open article in Safari (including ones originally seen in Facebook) then
pick the Reader view to strip out extraneous junk.  I then save to
Instapaper.  And before I leave home on my long (2-hours each direction)
commute, I open Instapaper so it downloads/updates articles (I do this on
each device.)

Then when commuting, I'll bring up an article in Instapaper then do the
2-finger gesture from top of the screen down to load that article in read
mode.  It does glitch out occasionally when it sees italicized words or
other issues like reading a quote sign as "to the power of" but generally
works well.

I think with iOS 13 release you can now choose to see/hide your preferred
"send to" menu choices per app making that process more streamlined.

As for .mp3 files, perhaps saving those to iTunes in a favorites playlist
would be a streamlined way to go?

Doug

On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 9:20 AM Deborah Armstrong <armstrongdeborah at fhda.edu>
wrote:


> I always suggest to print-impaired students that reading things on their

> iPHONE or iPAD during their commute is a good use of time. But showing them

> how is a different matter entirely.

>

>

>

> I myself have found it terribly inconvenient to transfer common formats,

> MP3, html, rtf etc. to my phone. For example, if I save a file to

> one-drive, and then locate it in either the Files app or the one-drive

> native app, I often can’t just start it “playing”. I have to pick “share”

> and then I get what seems to be a random list of apps, some of which don’t

> even open my file.

>

>

>

> For example, I had a web page that I wanted to read offline. I saved it to

> my hard disk, and made sure I could open the offline file in my browser. I

> then moved the HTML over to One-Drive. But later when I tried to open it,

> iOS wanted to run a podcasting app that didn’t even show the HTML file.

>

>

>

> I’d like to tell iOS to make VoiceDream reader the default for epub and

> RTF files; I’d like safari to be the default for html and I’d like the

> native iOS audiobook player to be the default for MP3.

>

>

>

> If I pick an Mp3 off the web, the phone will start streaming it

> immediately. But if it’s in cloud storage, that doesn’t happen. If I save

> an MP3 in dropbox, I can play it by tapping on it, but if I save it in

> Google drive I cannot, in both cases using each cloud storage’s  native

> app. Even the “open in” list for each app is a bit different; is their no

> way I can standardize an “open in” list so that it is app-independent?

>

>

>

> And different disabilities will have different defaults they want to use

> for reading different file types. Yet, iOS seems to not always show on the

> share sheet everything that’s available or even put them in order by which

> filetypes they handle best.

>

>

>

> As a Windows user, maybe there’s just something basic I don’t understand

> about the iOS paradigm. On my Windows PC, I can choose which app will open

> a file and it just happens after that. No sharing, no list of random apps

> that are unrelated.

>

>

>

> Thoughts?

>

>

>

> --Debee

>

>

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>



-- 
Doug Hayman <dhayman at u <dhayman at u.washington.edu>w.edu>
Senior Computer Specialist
DO-IT Program (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, Technology)
UW Technology Services
Box 354842
Seattle, WA 98195
(206) 221-4165
http://www.washington.edu/doit
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