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i finally broke down and bought pythonista 3. i cut my teeth in editorial python console and got an amazing amount done.

something that pisses me off about iOS is how locked down all user data is. by that i mean most user data is intimately tied to a give applictation. like ibooks for example. i copied my own private pdfs to it using another awful apple mess called itunes. now that my pdfs are in ibooks, i can't get them out to be used in other applications.. they're locked in to ibooks.

oh wait.. apple did give me the ability to email myself a copy of the pdf.. through some jackass share sheet clickthrough.. thanks apple i really appreciate that but lets say i think ibooks sucks and i just want to use a different reader now. i'm on the road and have been for 11 months. i don't have access to my computer to use as an intermediary out here.

so what i want to do is find a way to reach back to my ibooks pdfs in teh file system using python and MASS copy / move them to somewhere else my other apps can get to them. none of this one by one 10 clicks and mails to send myself a pdf file. it shouldn't be that difficult.

so here's the questions:

1) is it generally accepted that with pythonista i can get to any app's content / media directory?

i'm using ibooks as an example but i've run into the same issue in just about every major app on my device whether it's music player, podcasts, nook, whatever..

2) though i might be able to see the data by navigating to it in #1, will i actually be allowed to move / copy it somewhere else?

3) once it's somewhere else, will the permissions be ok for the other / new app to use the content without doing anything? or must i change them to stg else or am i just screwed?

and before y'all tell me to use icloud, dropbox, etc.. i've tried them out here and icloud plain sucks and is completely locked down.. you might be able to put apps under it's control but once the data is under an apps control it gets one folder and that's it.. nothing gets in or out and it's extremely hard to move somewhere else to share it. if you have access to a computer, you can then use it as an intermediary once you sync back to a computer and then copy out to somewhere else. but when you're a road warrior you're screwed without the computer.. i can believe how bad it is.

i'm also finding tons of inconsistencies and restrictions with dropbox as well.. and other cloud services..

which means i'm looking to get messy with iOS if i must to get what i want.

I know that feeling :) Sadly the way iOS locks down apps in their sandboxes with almost no way of communicating with each other really limits being productive with multiple apps.

There's not a lot that Pythonista can do about this. The sandboxing is enforced at the operating system level, which means that Pythonista really can only access the files that iOS allows it to access. This means read-write access to its own "home directory" (where your scripts are located), and read-only access to its app bundle (where the Pythonista executable, the Python runtime, standard library, and the images and sounds are located) and some system files (mostly libraries and frameworks that iOS apps need to run).

Yes, iCloud Drive is REALLY limited and not what I hoped it would be either. But since apps cannot even read each other's files, the best way to copy files from one app to another is by using the share sheet or iCloud Drive. The nice thing is that once a file is somewhere where you can share it using the iOS share sheet, you can send it to the Pythonista app extension, copy it into Pythonista using that, and then you can do whatever you want with the file. And since you can share files from the iCloud Drive app, iCloud Drive is ironically one of the best ways to get files from elsewhere into Pythonista.

thx dgel
i guess i'm a late comer to the iOS party but this pita sharing don't make for much fun at the party ;) i'm not sure how iOS gadgets became so popular with such limitations.. you pay a premium for the hardware and imho don't get much useful funtionality. i don't care what my gadget looks like. i care that it's useful and allows me to be productive :)

also.. i'm not so much concerned about getting the files into pythonista though maybe i will at some point in the future :).. i'm more or less just concerned if pythonista could be used as a broker to get files from one app to another but it looks like iOS is going to block that maybe. anybody else care to elaborate if i'm boned here?

@robopu said:

i guess i'm a late comer to the iOS party but this pita sharing don't make for much fun at the party ;) i'm not sure how iOS gadgets became so popular with such limitations.. you pay a premium for the hardware and imho don't get much useful funtionality. i don't care what my gadget looks like. i care that it's useful and allows me to be productive :)

For most people that prefer iOS over other mobile OSes, I think the main things are increased security and ease of use. Yes, Apple's devices are locked probably a bit too much, but this shouldn't be a problem for normal users. In my opinion, iOS is much easier to figure out how to use than Android, and things normally "just work." And you ask why iOS gadgets originally got so popular? The iPhone and the iPad revolutionized the mobile device market. The first iPhone was them first of it's kind; most smartphones of today derive a lot from it. And compare the iPhone 6 to the Galaxy S6.

The simplicity is important as well. There are hundreds of different Android phones and oftentimes it takes many months for certain phones to get the latest version of Android. With iOS, there is a streamlined user experience across all platforms, and, because all the devices are made by Apple, the software updates are available to all at once. I can't imagine developing an app for all those Android screen sizes...

I'd usually be with you re: Apple, but I haven't seen anything on Android that can do what Pythonista does (even on rooted phones). Which isn't to say it wouldn't be great to have more control...

@robopu said:

something that pisses me off about iOS is how locked down all user data is. by that i mean most user data is intimately tied to a give applictation. like ibooks for example. i copied my own private pdfs to it using another awful apple mess called itunes. now that my pdfs are in ibooks, i can't get them out to be used in other applications.. they're locked in to ibooks.

That's actually a function of iBooks being limited more than iOS.

iOS's security and sandboxing model is built on the idea that apps push data to other apps, rather than a pull approach. It's up to individual apps how far they wish to support sharing. As an example, Microsoft's Office suite goes out of its way to make for a hellish experience for users not wishing to use OneDrive. By contrast, TexTastic seems to talk to just about anything that understands text files.

iBooks is not really meant to be a PDF viewer, it just offers that as a stopgap because Apple for reasons I can't fathom, have never bothered to port Preview to iOS. This advice comes too late for you now, but get a better PDF viewer app.

3) once it's somewhere else, will the permissions be ok for the other / new app to use the content without doing anything? or must i change them to stg else or am i just screwed?

Sharing is either by copy or by value, but in either case typically the receiver can go to town on the data. In the case of copying of course, the sender does not necessarily remain in sync.

and before y'all tell me to use icloud, dropbox, etc.. i've tried them out here and icloud plain sucks and is completely locked down.. you might be able to put apps under it's control but once the data is under an apps control it gets one folder and that's it.. nothing gets in or out and it's extremely hard to move somewhere else to share it. if you have access to a computer, you can then use it as an intermediary once you sync back to a computer and then copy out to somewhere else. but when you're a road warrior you're screwed without the computer.. i can believe how bad it is.

DropBox typically works well on iOS, as do the SanDisk Lightning Flash drives (iExtreme IIRC). iCloud is fine for some things, but again, the iCloud app is built with very much a document focus, and is pretty ugly if you need to deal with a bunch of files.

Long story short, unless you're using apps that fully adhere to the sharing features that came with iOS8 and 9 (which many of Apple's 1st party apps don't) iOS can seem pretty limited. Using the right apps, and most things are doable without much effort.

In the mean time, you'll probably need to manually move files from iBooks to a regular iCloud or DropBox folder, then go from there.

@valley iOS already has a built-in PDF viewer when you "quick look" a PDF file. An extra app like iBooks is not required for that, though of course the quick look view does not allow any kind of PDF editing or annotating, and does not store the PDF file in a central location. The reason why iBooks supports PDFs is probably so you can read eBooks that are PDFs in iBooks.