Just thought I’d post an update. (And probably rant a bit!)
So after all the posts I decided I should really see if I couldn’t make this work without a laptop. I’ve got a nice iPad Pro with a decent sized screen so it should be doable. I’m connecting to a Trackman 4 which is a device that tracks your swing and the flight of your golfball. It has apps that do this for you, but I need the raw data, and that is only available through their debugging tool. To access that I launch a browser and open a web page. The trackman and the browser open a socket and then the trackman starts streaming JSON data. It takes only a dozen shots to get to about 10-20k lines of JSON.
I went today to the range and I was able to easily get the data into the browser. Now here’s the incredible rub. iPad browsers don’t support select all. The only way to select all the text was to highlight a word, then move the little blue ball to enlarge the selection. It takes over a minute to scroll all the way up and down to get the data for about 8 shots! I find this incomprehensible. Why in God’s name did the designers of the iPad browsers, (I tried Safari, Firefox, and Google Chrome) feel that they should not support select all? Other iPad apps have select all, so why not the browsers?
Once I’ve managed to select all, it’s not too bad to copy and paste to my text editor (textastic) which I can get the files off later with out too much trouble. (Although this weird invention called a file system would probably make it much easier, but I guess that’s too advanced for iPad.)
However, I’ve got to say. It’s absolutely dumbfounding to me that the designers of these systems have decided to abandon support for basic computer operations like, select all, copy, paste. I guess that’s my real problem with these devices (tablets, smartphones, etc) if you are facebooking, taking selfies and sending to friends, or twitting, I guess it’s all great. But if you want to do any real work, to actually be productive… forget about it!
At any rate, I realized after I struggled for so long trying to select all that I do have a bluetooth keyboard for my iPad, but I hadn’t brought it to the driving range. Tomorrow or the next day I’ll take that with my iPad and Trackman and see if it goes better. (The keyboard does allow me to hit cntrl-A to select all.) If it still is an awkward pain, I’ll look into a low cost laptop.
