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The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

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Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#81

Post by angryasian »

taligent wrote: post #66
wbkang wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Google Maps in IE10 with touch screen pretty well and I am assuming Chrome will handle it well if not better...

Chrome and Safari both use WebKit and it handles it terribly. So again. Unless Google has added something magical in recent builds of WebKit that hasn't yet made it to the iPad then it will equally be terrible.

its not even a fair comparison they both use different javascript engines. I won't comment on Apple's treatment with javascript on their mobile browser.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#82

Post by snotrockets »

antiterra wrote: post #73

This blog entry presents a single argument: aspect ratios should favor a more narrow width because they should aspire to the readability of a page. That's a single bullet point in a long pro/con list and you'll never reach consensus on the definitively correct aspect ratio. Plenty of people watch movies on their computer screens, others like having an IDE with frames on the side, others want games to spread across th…

(author here) I would have written that as a one line, but to quote Pascal, "that I had not the leisure to make it shorter then it is." Thank you for doing that for me.

I don't call for a single aspect ratio: I just call for more variety: there is a good use case for more squarish laptop screens, but they are gone from the market, the main reason for that mistake being copying TV designs.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#83

Post by r00fus »

ynniv wrote: post #79
beagle3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were true, people would have Preferred landscape books to portrait books. They don't.

When you open the book the two page spread is often landscape.

Do you actually read both sides? On a textbook, magazine or encylopedia, perhaps - mainly because a physical book doesn't have search features.

On a novel, it's portrait - you need paragraphs of context as you scan forwards and backwards to follow the information stream.

On a computer with text search facilities, it's more convenient to have vertical text results and paragraphs - as long as the width is acceptable.

Of course, TVs look better in a widescreen format, and computer screens have been forced to orbit TV display sizing for the past decade... and this is why we're stuck with useless 16:9 screens with not enough vertical pixels.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#84

Post by snotrockets »

taligent wrote: post #62
Cieplak wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can boot Linux. In that regard, it has the potential to be a general purpose laptop. Although you have to keep your files in the "cloud" because it only has 32gb of storage.

It can boot Linux but the trackpad and touchscreen doesn't work. Again. Why wouldn't you buy a MacBook Pro that is usable out of the box ?

I ran into warranty issues with the last Mac I owned, and swore never to buy one again.

But even if I did, I'm not sure it would run a sane Linux distribution out of the box (from what I'm reading, it's a bit touch and go,) and I don't consider a computer usable unless it can run the setup I need, which depends heavily on Linux -- developing on Mac OS X and deploying to Linux never worked for me: I could never keep a "sane" environment with the former.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#85

Post by r00fus »

esolyt wrote: post #56
pwthornton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I use Windows and OS X on most days of the week, and Windows has never been that well suited for wide screen use, whereas OS X's window management makes it much easier to put screens side by side. I'm often doing this, and it's one of the biggest reasons I'm more productive on OS X. The idea that an app would take up my entire screen, unless it was something like a video editing app, is crazy to me. A widescreen…

This is weird. I use both Windows 7 and OSX everyday. Windows 7's window management is so much better that, it makes me realize how much time I lose managing windows on OSX. The only logical explanation I can come up is that you don't know about snapping windows on Windows 7. Dragging a window to the left or right side of the screen (or with keyboard: Win+Left/Right) will tile it to that part of the screen.

Aero-snap-like utilites have existed on OSX for several years now (and bettersnaptool is free and very powerful).

I'd rather have a built-in unix shell (OSX) and install an aero-snap-alike than deal with Windows+putty+cygwin+...

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#86

Post by r00fus »

jfim wrote: post #24
NateDad wrote: post #4

Absolutely. I hated when everyone started making 16:9 monitors. The 16:10 ones weren't quite as bad, but seriously, give me some vertical pixels. Especially true for coding where it's useful to see as many lines of code on the screen at possible.

Get a monitor stand that swivels, so you can use the 16:9 ratio to your advantage. The only catch is that you start noticing when people write long lines over 120 chars, though they shouldn't do that in the first place. Edit: It's also really awesome for reading/editing documents, since you can fit the full page onscreen.

I'm doing this right now @ work with 2x16:9 monitors. Coworkers are amazed and amused, but if you don't do this with IPS panels, the vertical viewing angles (now horizontal) are pretty bad on most non-IPS monitors... so it's sometimes hard to share your screen.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#87

Post by codeka »

taligent wrote: post #66
wbkang wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Google Maps in IE10 with touch screen pretty well and I am assuming Chrome will handle it well if not better...

Chrome and Safari both use WebKit and it handles it terribly. So again. Unless Google has added something magical in recent builds of WebKit that hasn't yet made it to the iPad then it will equally be terrible.

Chrome on Android handles it just fine, though I'm not sure what specifically you're referring to (Chrome on iOS is just a wrapper around UIWebView so it doesn't really count).

Also, on iOS there is a ~300ms delay between taps and the "click" event (see for example https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick) which is not present on non-iOS browsers. Perhaps that could explain why it appears so slow for you?

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#88

Post by snotrockets »

r00fus wrote: post #85
esolyt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is weird. I use both Windows 7 and OSX everyday. Windows 7's window management is so much better that, it makes me realize how much time I lose managing windows on OSX. The only logical explanation I can come up is that you don't know about snapping windows on Windows 7. Dragging a window to the left or right side of the screen (or with keyboard: Win+Left/Right) will tile it to that part of the screen.

Aero-snap-like utilites have existed on OSX for several years now (and bettersnaptool is free and very powerful). I'd rather have a built-in unix shell (OSX) and install an aero-snap-alike than deal with Windows+putty+cygwin+...

One can say that he'd rather have a tiling window manager and an environment similar to the one he'll deploy in rather than dealing with various incompatible build systems and the strange mix of BSD environment presented in Mac OS X.

That is to say, all OS suck; and we should not compare dick sizes, as we would all lose.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#89

Post by raldi »

nsp wrote: post #61
raldi wrote: post #52

The Pixel's best feature is the touchscreen. The first time you tap a tiny onscreen link with your finger, instead of trying to aim for it with the trackpad, or the first time you pinch to zoom out on Google Maps, you'll never want to use a non-touchscreen laptop again.

My understanding (source: most recent verge podcast) was that the touch screen doesn't support pinch to zoom - is that incorrect? I'd love to be wrong

It does, and it's spectacular.

Re: The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature

#90

Post by snotrockets »

petsos wrote: post #80
snotrockets wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(author here) I find a 15" laptop to big to be useable as a laptop. My current one has a 13.3", and that's not enough to open two side-by-side documents showing 80 chars per line each, without having the fonts ridiculously small. remember that font size should be the same regardless the dpi, so having more pixels won't help if the physical size remain the same.

I think you are missing the point of using multiple windows. You don't need to have N number of symmetrical windows all the time. You can have e.g. a small IM window on the side and a twitter client underneath, a terminal at the bottom, etc. Personally I even like partially overlapping windows, e.g. I can only have part of a terminal visible if I'm tailing a file, I just need to see if something comes and then I can…

So instead of having an aspect ratio that fits computing, you prefer to work around a movie-fitting aspect ratio.
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