I think the more likely interpretation is that they're "betting on the future"; i.e. that tablet and other "portable" devices will continually get more powerful and that letting services and applications run in the background will continually become less and less of a problem. Seems like a pretty safe bet to me.
Metro
61–70 of 163 posts
Re: Metro
#62[deleted]
Re: Metro
#63If I'm reading this right, Gruber's effectively saying, "Metro, and Metro alone (i.e., no desktop), is a good competitor to the iPad." That's wonderful; a real iPad competitor. But what about all the rest of the computers? You know, those big things on your desktop? We all know just how smart most users are when it comes to figuring out how to use stuff on a computer. Its taken years to get to the point where your ty…
I suspect we'll be seeing a more and more pronounced split in computing and, therefore, interfaces. On one side (the majority) will be "consumers": web, email, Facebook, maybe some light photo editing. On the other side will be the "producers": people who use Photoshop, or Matlab, or AutoCAD. Office falls somewhere in the middle... Office itself may eventually be divided along those lines, with a lightweight, tablet-…
That seems to be in line with Steve Jobs' vision of the future, in which PCs become "trucks" while average people drive "cars." I do see early but pronounced signs of that split.
Re: Metro
#64Finally a Gruber post I haven't felt forced to flag. A pretty good analysis, excellent (as usual writing), interesting testable predictions plus just enough Apple flag-waving so you don't forget which religion he follows. edit reading through the comments shows a commensurate level of better discussion than the usual Gruber response as well.
Err, he's wrong on ARM PCs not running desktop Windows, I don't see why this wrong post needs to be on top of HN. It's like there's like zombies that seem to have a need to auto upvote any post by Gruber. Maybe they're similarly misinformed.
Yes. Clearly someone is a zombie if they upvote a John Gruber article that contains one false speculation. It can't be that they found the rest of the article appealing.
Re: Metro
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect we'll be seeing a more and more pronounced split in computing and, therefore, interfaces. On one side (the majority) will be "consumers": web, email, Facebook, maybe some light photo editing. On the other side will be the "producers": people who use Photoshop, or Matlab, or AutoCAD. Office falls somewhere in the middle... Office itself may eventually be divided along those lines, with a lightweight, tablet-…
That seems to be in line with Steve Jobs' vision of the future, in which PCs become "trucks" while average people drive "cars." I do see early but pronounced signs of that split.
And Windows 8 is trying to be the SUV here.
Re: Metro
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall a story (maybe an urban myth) about Steve Jobs visiting Xerox's labs and seeing their UI in action and thinking "we've got to have that". He went back to tell Woz all about it, telling him that Xerox's UI supported overlapping windows and that Apple needed to do the same. Woz was amazed that it was possible to have overlapping windows on such a resource constrained machine. But if Xerox engineers could do it…
It's a good story. According to the Apple stories I've read, Wozniak had little to no involvement with the creation of Macintosh. He was in a plane crash in 1981. When he came back to the company in 1983 he was mostly involved with the (increasingly sidelined) Apple II team. But overlapping windows first came to Apple with the Lisa, anyhow. Some of Bill Atkinson's photos here show them from December 1979 or early 198…
Indeed, and due to various miracles, the source for QuickDraw and MacPaint is at:
Re: Metro
#67If I'm reading this right, Gruber's effectively saying, "Metro, and Metro alone (i.e., no desktop), is a good competitor to the iPad." That's wonderful; a real iPad competitor. But what about all the rest of the computers? You know, those big things on your desktop? We all know just how smart most users are when it comes to figuring out how to use stuff on a computer. Its taken years to get to the point where your ty…
That's right, photoshop isn't going to be going Metro anytime soon, and neither is Matlab, or Autocad, or Excel, or video editing software, or any "Pro" program (for lack of a better word). I'd actually be surprised if there isn't a fully staffed team working on a Metro version of the Office suite.
But what would it look like? Consider Powerpoint. There needs to be a way to switch slide layout, add elements to the slide, work with animations & transitions, reorder slides, etc. And that's just some of the things that users will want to do all the time, on almost every slide. There's just no way to have that sort of rich interface in Metro. Heck, there's not even a menubar.
Remember, we're talking about regular users, here... these people (broadly speaking) never use keyboard shortcuts. Everything needs to be clickable (touchable) with the mouse (finger).
Re: Metro
#68From the article: "you can’t give iOS apps even the option to run continuously in the background without sacrificing battery life and foreground app performance. But that’s how Microsoft has positioned Metro for tablets — a modern touch interface that carries the full CPU and RAM consumption of Windows as we know it. That have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too attitude is what I didn’t get with Microsoft’s positioning Metro a…
Does that apply to everything including Office and all that stuff?
Re: Metro
#69>You can’t ... remotely log into an iPad.
Tell that to Aaron Barr. I know the iPad wiping story isn't confirmed, but it would be pretty easy to refute were such a thing impossible.
Re: Metro
#70It will only be a matter of time before mobile phones start replacing laptops for desktop-like use cases. People will likely use their phones as if they were laptops with wirelessly-connected keyboard, mouse, and screen. I can totally see businesses start buying Windows-ready phones for their employees than the alternatives.
Eric Raymond describes this sort of transition here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1759