The other side of the moon

Just got a Nexus 4. Started it up, and tried to sign in to my gmail account. I have two-factor auth set up for extra security, and you'd expect a google device to work well with google auth, but here's a list of bugs I've found within minutes of opening the package.

1. It first asks you to sign in to your gmail account. Type in your username and password.
2. It then tells you you need to sign in on the web to continue, so it opens the browser for you to sign in.
3. Focus is on the username field, but there's no keyboard available. You need to tap on the username field (which already has focus) to bring up the keyboard. This is counter-intuitive.
4. Type in your username and password and submit. It then takes you to the 2FA page (at least in my case) where you enter your security code.
5. Again, tap on the field to bring up the keyboard. This field is a numeric field, but the keyboard starts out in alphabetic mode. This is probably a bug with all mobile devices, but you'd think that something this new would have fixed it.
6. Type in the code, and now try to click on the checkbox that says "Remember this device". Except the keyboard goes away and you now end up clicking a link that explains what 2FA is.
7. Ok, cool, I just want to go back and hit submit... except there's no back button on this browser. There's no toolbar that normally pops up at the bottom of the browser. No, this is a special browser that does not allow you to navigate through the browser history. FAIL.
8. The only way forward is to shut down the phone and then start it up again. Except at this point you start from scratch, including selecting your language.

A few other things I've noticed...

• The timezone by default appears to be UTC. You'd think that it'd localise this based on my location, which it knows and is configured to use.
• If a transient alert message pops up, and you try to tap on it, you'll actually tap on the item below the message.
• The icons are a bit too small for someone with normal sized fingers like me. It's easy to tap on the wrong item.
• The position of the power button and volume control buttons means that when you press the power button with your thumb, your forefinger will inadvertently hit the volume control (or vice-versa). This happens because of Newton's third law of motion. Google/LG engineers should know this since it's a 300 year old basic law of motion.
• You cannot move a widget from one screen to another by dragging it. You have to remove it from the old screen and then go through the process of adding and configuring it again for the new screen.
• When you select punctuation on the keyboard, entering an apostrophe should switch back to alphabetic mode. It doesn't.
• It just reboots at times.

Will post more as I use it.

So after WebPerfDays today, a bunch of us ended up at a Pizza place in Mountain View. Naturally the first thing we all did was search for wifi in the area and try to get on to a network from our mobile devices.

Now Mountain View has Google Wifi, and it appears as if they now require you to sign in with your Gmail account, and that's where the problem comes in... for me at least. I have two factor auth turned on for my google accounts, which means that after I type in my username and password, I get to a second screen to enter my second authentication token. This token comes from an app on my iOS device... the same device I was trying to log in with.

I switched to the app to get the token number, but as soon as I did that, iOS decided that I didn't actually want to sign in to the wireless network, and disassociated itself from the Access Point (AP).

Once I'd got the number, I switched back to the settings app and it initiated login again, which means I had to enter my username and password again, and by the time I'd reached the token screen, the token had expired.

This is what the token screen looks like:

It was rather annoying.

It then hit me that I could copy the token to the clipboard, and then paste it into the token text field, which should shave a few seconds off and maybe let me through.

That worked, but it was still annoying.

We started talking about how this interface could be improved. There are a few reasons why this is a problem, and I think they're mostly Apple's fault.

When you connect to a wireless network, iOS attempts to connect to www.apple.com. If it gets redirected somewhere else, it assumes that it's being asked to authenticate, and displays whatever page it gets redirected to in a browser like window.

The problem is that if you do anything other than interact with the content in this window, iOS treats it exactly the same as hitting the "Cancel" button (top right of the screenshot), terminates the login and dissociates from the AP.

This means that you cannot switch to the Authenticator App (second app at the bottom of the screenshot) to get your token.

Can Apple fix this?

Yes, just don't cancel sign in unless I explicitly click cancel

Can Google fix this?

Maybe, if they could provide a link or something that would open the Authenticator app right from that page and let me pull the number out of it (I don't know enough about iOS to know if this is possible).

Do any Apple/Google engineers want to take this up?