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Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

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Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

#621

Post by specialist »

inoop wrote: post #595
mtgx wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the iPad, Microsoft was using the "PC interface", to the disadvantage of the tablets they were putting it on. Now they are doing the reverse: making a tablet interface to the disadvantage of the PC. The "all-in-one" interface for all types of devices and form factors will never work, because at best it's optimized only for one of them, and mediocre or poor for most of the others.

If I read you correctly, you're basically saying that the desktop and slate/phone should have different user interfaces. Well, that's exactly what win8 delivers. When you're building a piece of software you can choose to give it a metro-style UI, a classical desktop UI, or both. That way, your application works across desktops, slates, and WP8 phones. IE10 for example can be run as a full-screen metro app, or as a 'c…

Hmmm. So is Windows 8 a horse? Or a duck?

I like Metro quite a bit.

Alas, I can't suspend disbelief and trust that this time Microsoft will remain committed to their latest greatest new thing, not lose interest and wander off in a few years, and not screw all the developers who bought into the latest pyramid scheme.

I think a lot of other people like Metro too.

I just attended an designer graduate student thesis project gallery exhibit whatever. 2/3rds of the UIs were strongly Metro-esque. Some very cool designs. I have no doubt Metro will spawn copycats.

Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

#622

Post by lifeformed »

prezjordan wrote: post #264
steverb wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is actually true, then you do not have a high quality workstation.

See, I always get this response, but no one has yet to prove to me that VS can open and be ready to use in less than a minute. I'd like to see video, until then I'll keep believing VS users are incapable of keeping time.

Sounds like you need to get a SSD!

Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

#623

Post by dpark »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #587
jpadkins wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you show us some examples of your work that put this site to shame?

That is an unfair question: one individual cannot be expected to produce sites which compete with an entire international company's output. It would be a lot more reasonable to ask him to show competitors within a similar industry who have produced a better launch site.

It's entirely fair when it's in response to a claim like this: "It looks like something I did in high school, in one weekend."

Personally, I think the site is fine except that I'm getting some pixelation on some of the images (especially the main one, which is scaled to match the screen size). But then, I work for Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

#624

Post by dcat247 »

The good: 1. the magnesium body is tough and very weather resistant. Similar to Nikons current camera line. 2. stand and keyboard built in make this a machine you can do very serious work on 3. 600 dpi sample rate for drawing means serious design work can be done as well. 4. Like the Xbox, Zune HD, natural keyboard, arc mouse, and their live cams: When Microsoft decides to design it usually is awesome.

the bad: 1. They said how much they believe in their partners yet only one application was shown off (lightroom). No special hardware or software partnerships. 2. No discussion on ports, actual cpu speed, ram, bus speed, or video capability. 3. no discussion of pricing. 4. The names are confusing for consumers: windows rt, surface, etc. they should have just said its all windows 8. Windows 8 for arm and windows 8 for intel. easy. 5. It was not available the day of the anouncement.

The BIGGEST problem: They did not show how this device is worth buying as part of your Micosoft ecosystem of experience and devices. How does it work with windows phone? they did not show it doing tricks with xbox and smartglass. They did not show how this device should be important to you.

Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

#625

Post by sjwright »

nitid_name wrote: post #610
masklinn wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simulator is not one. It's really a cross-compiling trick. Uh? No, that's the exact opposite, the simulator is exactly a simulator. What it's not is an emulator : it does not emulate an ARM device, it simulates an iPhone by running iOS/x86.

Possibly a naive question: what's the difference between a simulator and an emulator? Presumably an emulator copies the actual instruction set, while a simulator... only pretends to copy the instruction set?

An emulator does exactly as it says: it emulates. It creates an environment that appears to a running program to be identical to the real thing. This is done by emulating the hardware (e.g. BSNES), emulating the runtime environment for a native binary (e.g. VMware), or most commonly, a mixture of both.

A simulator -- at least in the world of Apple iOS development -- does not attempt to emulate iOS hardware, or even the iOS operating system. All the simulator does is provide a virtual display and launches an instance of Launchpad.app. Your app then runs within that virtual display, and talks with natively compiled copies of the iOS APIs, but otherwise it's a normal Mac OS X process that can be viewed and poked with Activity Monitor, or top, or whatever.

The simulator doesn't need to "boot up". There are no virtual drivers. There's no memory management. There's no emulated silicon whatsoever.

The only downside to this approach I can see is that the simulator can't be used to test some things like resource limits, and some things behave very differently, like OpenGL. But you have to test on real hardware anyway, and Apple have made native testing just as easy as simulated.

Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

#626

Post by KeyBoardG »

calinet6 wrote: post #380
lunchbox wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Successful companies have learned that a (shockingly) large proportion of consumers form impressions and make decisions on a primarily emotional , rather than rational or practical, basis. That's what this video is designed for. It inaugurates the brand, piques the viewer's interest, and plants the seeds of desire. Trust me, there will be plenty of time in the coming months for in-depth product reviews, spec comparis…

You can say all that, and you might be right. But the entire site is crap. And I'll admit I'm saying that on a primarily emotional, rather than rational or practical, basis. The images are just straight links, the renderings are poor half-assed CAD drawings, and the colors make it seem like a play-dough ad. I'm sorry, but this is not professional work. It looks like something I did in high school, in one weekend. As…

Lets stay on topic here and not mudsling over your understanding of their development standards.

Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

#627

Post by dharma1 »

The only reason to announce hardware more than 6 months prior to availability is to deter people from buying iPads and Macbook Airs in the meanwhile.

I've played with Win8 running on an Atom tablet and while the hardware sucked, the idea of being able to do real work on legacy apps (Photoshop, 3DS Max, video editing etc) on it is nice. The x86 Surface is definitely a laptop replacement.

Not convinced about Metro yet though - depends on the apps we'll see on it I guess.

I also have an iPad with the Logitech Ultra Thin BT keyboard cover and I really like it. If only iOS had CMD/TAB keyboard shortcut for swapping between apps and more open file system I could do a fair bit of web dev work on it. My 13" Macbook Pro feels like a brick compared to the iPad+keyboard cover.

Still can't do Photoshop/3D/etc work on the iPad though.

Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

#628

Post by lerouxb »

greedo wrote: post #591
lerouxb wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could have so easily gotten around that by just calling it "Metro" and doing a clean break. Then just promise everyone that windows isn't going away and imply that there will/might still be a windows 8 which would be a continuation of windows as we all know it for PCs. Then all the ARM devices (phones, tablets, etc) and also XBOX uses "Metro". Just Metro, no mentions of Windows. If people like it, THEN windows 8…

A clean break would appeal to a lot of people who think that a lack of focus has been part of Microsoft's problems the last few years. But coming out with a tablet only OS was a non-starter for MS. If the Surface was Metro only, then it wouldn't differentiate itself from iOS and Android in any significant manner. This is why Windows Phone 7 isn't getting significant traction. The key for Surface is the integration wi…

I think they should have copied Apple there too: Remember the OS9 emulation that OSX used to have? Just emulate Windows 7 so you can use apps like microsoft office.

Or make a proper Metro / tablet / touch oriented version of Office a priority. Yes it would be a lot of work, but they can throw nearly limitless resources at it.

Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

#629

Post by evilduck »

nitid_name wrote: post #610
masklinn wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The simulator is not one. It's really a cross-compiling trick. Uh? No, that's the exact opposite, the simulator is exactly a simulator. What it's not is an emulator : it does not emulate an ARM device, it simulates an iPhone by running iOS/x86.

Possibly a naive question: what's the difference between a simulator and an emulator? Presumably an emulator copies the actual instruction set, while a simulator... only pretends to copy the instruction set?

In the iOS sense of the question:

An emulator would be binary compatible with the actual device by emulating the ARM instruction set on top of x86. The iOS simulator doesn't do this but instead runs a flavor[1] of iOS natively directly on x86 that is API compatible but not binary compatible (i.e. compiled binaries for the simulator cannot be ran on the devices).

[1] The simulator OS also has distinct limitations that diverge from the real device or what you would expect from a truly emulated environment. There's no motion detection, no GPU performance, no accelerometer or compass, location data is simulated, multitouch input is limited, some frameworks are not available, etc).

Re: Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet

#630

Post by 286c8cb04bda »

rudasn wrote: post #588
dangoor wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is nothing in the market that can do these things. Yes, there is... if that's the complete set of things. The iPad can do this. ebooks/pdfs, browsing, videos, TV hookup - all there and straightforward. text editor and git (GitHub, in this case): http://worqshop.com/ there are also other editors that have SFTP and SSH programs. I'm not saying you should replace your current computer with an iPad. I'm saying th…

I'm not looking to replace my primary computer. I'm looking for a secondary device (one device, not 2 or 3) that can do a handful of things that I most often need. The main reason I want to hook a device like that with my TV is so that I can download and watch movies (from torrents). AFAIK you cannot do that on the iPad. I'm I mistaken?

Yes, you are:

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD098ZM/A?mco=MTY3ODQ5OTY

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