

The Tablet Problem - uladzislau
http://lifehacker.com/5934539/the-tablet-problem

======
PaulHoule
Home computers are pretty crappy at the "multiple user" problem as it exists
at home.

iTunes and Windows Media Player both assume, by default, that every user wants
to have a private collection of music. Maybe when my son is 17 that will be
the case, but now that he's 10, a shared pool is what we want. Neither of
those programs makes managing a shared pool effortless.

Having to log out and log in (dump my son's game on the floor) so my wife can
check email is just lame. (Switch users isn't much better)

Laptops today all come with cameras and face recognition technology is pretty
good, so in a family situation the system should always know who's sitting in
front of it.

And yeah, autocompletion on your web browser should NEVER turn up a porn
site...

~~~
sigkill
To the browser, unless you have a pre-populated list, the autocomplete URLs
are just a list of strings. How should it know if penisland.com is a website
that sells pens or otherwise? Also, where do draw the line really?
therapistfinder.com? expertsexchange.com?

~~~
robfig
Google already classifies sites as porn or not-porn. They could make a simple
API or data file available and the browsers could use it.

~~~
Too
You want to tell google each time you visit a porn site?

(not that they don't know already since the site probably uses google
analytics)

~~~
pronoiac
I think Bloom filters would allow offline checking, without pinging Google for
each request. They already do this for antimalware notices, iirc.

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westi
The lack of "Fast User Switching" type functionality and the privacy
separation that it provides is one of the things that has held me back from
purchasing a tablet for so long.

I think the day is coming where the purchase of a tablet will make life
simpler in our household but I think there is going to be a fight over who's
cloud account it gets associated with and possibly some kind of continual
flickering between user accounts by wipe and re-install depending on who is
the primary user this month.

Oh for multi-user/multi-cloud support to come natively to a tablet.

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brittohalloran
My exact problem with my new Nexus 7. The google apps do a great job of
"convenience" switching (for me and my wife - gmail, gtalk...) but "privacy"
switching isn't available. Some apps (Flick Note) also have multiple login
"convenience" switching, but again not much in the way of privacy switching
for visitors.

Using someone else's smartphone or computer feels a little bit like wearing
their underwear.

~~~
ChrisClark
Try using the SwitchMe app described in the article. I use it to share my
Nexus 7 with my wife. It requires root, but you have a Nexus tablet, it's made
to be rooted. It also requires a reboot to switch users, but the Nexus 7 is
fast enough it isn't much of a problem.

Hopefully the next Android release will complete the built in account
switching.

~~~
king_jester
> Hopefully the next Android release will complete the built in account
> switching.

This is definitely coming up: [http://phandroid.com/2012/08/02/androids-
multiple-user-accou...](http://phandroid.com/2012/08/02/androids-multiple-
user-accounts-shown-off-on-video-all-but-confirmed-for-future-versions-of-
android/)

Although, that means a 6 month wait at best :-(

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gagege
I've been using SwitchMe on my tablet for my wife and I(it's free to set up
two partitions, and cheap if you want more). It works pretty well and even
lets you see how much space a user's account is taking up. The only real
downside is that the tablet has to reboot to switch users which can take a few
minutes depending on the device.

~~~
sigkill
Hey, this looks really interesting. Does it need root access?

EDIT - Nevermind, it does. Dang.

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dchuk
I was just talking about this with my roommate last week. I picked up a Nexus
7 when it launched and I leave it out for anyone to play around with when
they're over, and my roommate uses it to check his facebook and stuff too. Our
solution is that I use the native twitter, facebook, etc apps and he just logs
in through chrome (it's a shitty solution really).

I would love the option to login as myself and have basically just my account
keychain applied to all installed apps. I can't imagine that would really be
that hard for Apple or Google to do, and it would really take Tablets to a
better spot in the market as they aren't really phones at all.

~~~
Too
This is the only solution atm and it sucks. It might work with a few
trustworthy friends but leave your device open at a party as music station and
it's way to convenient for someone to "accidentally" open the email-app and
instantly see all your private emails.

All that's needed is an app-lock and you could use this workaround. You make
all your private apps password protected and guests can only use the browser.

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mhw
My simple solution on the iPad has been to install the Google Search
application and get my wife to use that for web browsing and email. That way
she gets her own set of cookies so she can sign in to things separately from
me (I use Safari), plus she can access gmail through it as well. It even works
well for her way of using the internet, which pretty much always starts off
with a Google search.

I thought the lack of user accounts would be a problem before I bought the
iPad, but in practice this has been good enough and much less of an
administrative overhead than proper user accounts would probably be.

~~~
mmahemoff
There's also a lot of other browsers on iPad you can use for this too, notably
Chrome.

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nvk
There is no way Apple will pass on the revenue opportunity of making you buy
more than one iPad per household buy not letting you have privacy with
multiple accounts.

~~~
mmahemoff
They could also hardcode OSX for one user account too in that case.

I doubt it would cost sales, especially when any iPad owner could have bought
3 small Android tablets for the same price.

~~~
stcredzero
1 Android tablet, 1 iPad might be a solution for a couple that includes a
cross-platform mobile developer.

I bought my girlfriend her own iPad. Unfortunately, we are a sleep-over
couple, and she always leaves her iPad home and commandeers mine, leaving me
to squint at my iPhone. (Which fortunately is a Retina one.)

~~~
mmahemoff
It'd be neat if she could connect them and use your iPad as a dumb terminal
for the phone.

~~~
stcredzero
Actually, that's exactly the sort of thing she'd like and would do!

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drcube
This is similar to the problem Windows had in the 90s. Except back then the
only user account they had was Administrator. So this "tablet problem" is more
secure in a malware sense if not privacy.

Still, multiple users has been a solved problem since the early versions of
Unix. Why companies continue to ignore it is beyond me.

~~~
stcredzero
_> Still, multiple users has been a solved problem since the early versions of
Unix. Why companies continue to ignore it is beyond me._

Prioritizing the 1st day UX over the 3rd week UX. It's the same thing as
programming languages making "Hello World" easy.

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bitwize
Isn't Key Lime Pie supposed to have multiple account support baked in?

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cooldeal
I think Windows RT/Windows 8 tablets have proper user accounts. Hopefully they
will come with a guest account as well. Not sure if the new apps know how to
deal with multiple users and their data.

~~~
rnernento
Windows really has the potential to shine in this department. Not quite a
killer feature but it's definitely something they're capable of getting right.

~~~
stcredzero
It will only shine if the lag isn't interminable. Lag kills UX.

