dbpatterson:

When I was first learning about UNIX, and learning to use Linux, the most immediately powerful tool that I found was the shell’s pipe operator, ‘|’. Using the commandline (because at that point, linux GUI’s were not so well developed, and the few distros that tried to allow strictly graphical…

it’s a bit sensationalist (but not strictly untrue) to peg this on iOS. It’s true of anything that’s *not* a unix command line app. Office? Paint? Outlook?

At least with iOS you can (by manually opening them) pass, say pictures from one app to another. Yes, it doesn’t have a workflow, but then, what does? Some GUI apps integrate with those by the same vendor, but you can’t, pipe from, say, Aperture to a flickr uploader on the desktop anyway.

Does that mean I use my desktop apps, or my iPhone any less? Does that mean the experience of using these devices is greatly diminished? No.

If you need to pipe stuff around, use things that let you pipe stuff around. There’s a wealth of tools out there which let you do so.