I bought a tablet back in the day thinking it would be great. Aside from playing poker on it, I don't use it. The battery died several years ago from disuse.
A tablet needs a power cable or it runs out of batteries at the wrong time.
When you put your finger on a tablet as a "pointer" a bunch of shit pops up. When you pick it up , you touch the screen and a bunch of shit pops up. Or you lose your page. Or you open up angry bird.
To use bookmarks/search, apparently people these days like to use Alt F and Alt tab and a bunch of other shortcuts. Which means you are using a keyboard or tapping on the screen. Or a bunch of swiping back and forth. Or doubletapping. Or some confuscating combos of the above.
This doesn't work for me. I tried it and I don't like it. To setup peripheral on a microcontroller can involve multiple registers, setting up prescaler, and a whole shitton of completely arbitrary 1's and 0's in arbitrary places. And using other peripherals, some of these are interrelated. I do this better with a book.
To anyone who prefers PDF, I wonder if they also prefer to use USB scope over separate device? Just a few more clicks here and there. A few more mouse movements. Or perhaps even touchscreen gestures for the truly proficient at incorporating the abstract and arbitrary into the reading of a datasheet in order to try to understand the controls for a device, which are themselves abstract and arbitrary.
I don't even like a mouse. I am on my third fifth "refurb" trackball, cuz no one makes a decent real trackball anymore. Fingerball.... thumball... what the $@%@ is this shit? I play with microcontrollers and electronics, because I'm old school dinosaur. If I was a cool kid I would be coding on a complete workstation on thumbstick sized pcb, in python, on Virtual Windows emulator, over Linux. But I wouldn't even be coding on it, directly. I'd be doing it virtually, in an simulator, and I'd have finished product without even touching a wire.
But I'm not that guy. By the time I'm done clicking this, swiping that, I have forgotten what I was doing in the first place. I need to break out the white board to even hold a few ones or zeros, else they fall out of my head by the time I close page/book. Sometimes I have to even draw things out to understand the hierarchy, structure, interaction, order. The printed datasheet just works better. I get better feel for the structure of the datasheet, itself. I can see/feel where I am in the datasheet. Without looking at a page number and having to process that and try to actively associate it with something. Just being passively aware of the physical location in the thickness of the datasheet I'm reading, rather than any place where "timer0" happens to pop and click "next, next next," I have frame of reference in which to put this information. Also, if I alt +F... do I need to write "timer0" "TMR0" "timer 0"? I dunno. If I'm looking at an index, I will find any of the above and I'll also see other significant entries in the index which are going to jog/mesh/click some synapses in my overall understanding of the device. For example, I might see "TMR2/4/6," which reinforces the other available timers, and also I know that 2,4, and 6 are mirror images of each other, but timer 0 (TMR0?) is different. Oftentimes we use a small fraction of what a device can do. Reminders of all the other stuff and where/how the device is structured are all the better. Moving from PIC to AVR, for instance, I have no clue what to even search. Names/acronyms/abbreviations for things will be different. Memory structure is different. I need to learn the language of the datasheet to know what to look for. Browsing, skimming, reading a real datasheet will work much better for me.
Alt+F is like going to a restaurant and the waiter says: "Tell me exactly what you want, and I'll tell you if we have it... provided you spell it the same way our technical writing department does." Maybe you will ask for a menu?
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