Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#51

Post by LukasMathis » Sun, Mar 02, 2014, 6:30 PM UTC

higherpurpose wrote: post #27

> It’s not an accident that the best selling, highest grossing iPad apps are almost exclusively games. Yes, it's not an accident, but not because of the reason you give. Gaming is one of the most popular, if not the most popular and highest grossing category on any popular consumer platform. That's just the way it works. Some of these platform vendors (like Apple), and unlike others (like Google) realized this is tru…

You're right, it only took me half a blog post to explain all of the new concepts Microsoft introduced in their completely novel approach to operating system user interfaces. I don't think that's evidence against its ease-of-use :-)

As for games completely ruling the top 100 list of highest-grossing apps on any popular consumer platform: this is definitely not the case in the Mac App Store.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#52

Post by ZanyProgrammer » Sun, Mar 02, 2014, 6:31 PM UTC

higherpurpose wrote: post #27

> It’s not an accident that the best selling, highest grossing iPad apps are almost exclusively games. Yes, it's not an accident, but not because of the reason you give. Gaming is one of the most popular, if not the most popular and highest grossing category on any popular consumer platform. That's just the way it works. Some of these platform vendors (like Apple), and unlike others (like Google) realized this is tru…

I think your comparison to 10 inch netbooks is spot on-granted, the Surface is 10.6, but considering I always felt uber crampted on a 10.1 inch netbook, I don't see the utility in having a tablet version of one. As a tablet, I think Surface has a lot going for it (kickstand, snapping apps side by side, flash, file system access), but there's no way I'd use a device that small as a primary computing device for productivity (programming or Office type stuff). Otherwise, its just an expensive VPN client.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#53

Post by gotyou123 » Sun, Mar 02, 2014, 6:36 PM UTC

fumar wrote: post #15

nextstep wrote: post #4

"There are artists who draw on iPads, and musicians who make music on iPads, and writers who write novels on iPads, and movie makers who cut their movies on iPads. But the fact that you have to point to these people, the fact that there are articles about these people, shows that they’re unusual." Unusual in a relative sense, the same way artists and musicians and movie makers are unusual in any segment of society. T…

Last summer I participated in a startup accelerator in Chicago. My Macbook died in the first week! At the time, I didn't have the funds to purchase another Apple machine. Luckily, my girlfriend had recently purchased a Surface RT with the keyboard cover. I did not think that the tablet would be able to replace a laptop for "serious" work, but it did. There are a couple of things that allowed me to do this. First, a U…

Who you believe you can fool with such a comment? 100% camouflaged ad spotted.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#54

Post by manilafolder » Sun, Mar 02, 2014, 6:37 PM UTC

satyrnein wrote: post #29

I definitely concur about the handwriting recognition being terrific, but the interface being terrible. I wrote a little prototype of how I thought it should work a few months ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhn6EdN3Vvw

Great demo. That's exactly how the handwriting UI should have been designed.

I have one small suggestion, if you don't mind: How about making the input box increase in size (maybe double in size) so you don't have to write so small? The resizing wouldn't need to reflow the rest of the page; it could turn into a modal textbox in the same location as the original textbox. It would make it easier for children, the elderly and people who aren't native speakers of the language, etc.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#55

Post by fumar » Sun, Mar 02, 2014, 6:44 PM UTC

pinaceae wrote: post #50

fumar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last summer I participated in a startup accelerator in Chicago. My Macbook died in the first week! At the time, I didn't have the funds to purchase another Apple machine. Luckily, my girlfriend had recently purchased a Surface RT with the keyboard cover. I did not think that the tablet would be able to replace a laptop for "serious" work, but it did. There are a couple of things that allowed me to do this. First, a U…

you did all of that on a Surface RT? Impressive, because Excel and Powerpoint are unusably slow on RT. Source: We've developed a business app for Win 8, development was co-sponsered by MS and Intel. We have a very succesful iPad app in our vertical, it allowed large swaths of our customer base to switch to iPads for their fieldforce. MS themselves acknowledged that if you want to handle "large Excel" files, the RT is…

Yes, I was able to do all that on the RT. I never planned on using it as my main machine, but I had no choice. Using an ARM powered device to handle an entire workload is not ideal. You are right it was not the fastest or best spec'd machine. When the time came instead of buying another RT, I purchased a Pro.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#56

Post by glasshead969 » Sun, Mar 02, 2014, 6:53 PM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #37

Some of the most significant issues with the iPad have to do with two areas: user management and the Apple "wall" The first cuts across a wide range of applications from consumer to business. The lack of multiuser capabilities (with permissions and all the things modern multiuser OS's can do) seriously limits usability. At home I would like to make a distinction between my usage of an iPad, that of my children and th…

For business usage, iPad does have User management and App store restrictions.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/business/it/management.html

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#57

Post by stcredzero » Sun, Mar 02, 2014, 6:59 PM UTC

Another difference between the Surface and an iPad is the Surface’s split screen mode...people often need multiple apps to work on a single task. I can’t count the instances where I’ve used split screen mode just in the last few days

Called it! In fact, I called it right here from before the Surface existed as a tablet when Microsoft put out the vaporware tablet commercial!

Split screen is one of those things like cut and paste. It might seem inelegant to some, but it's powerful and widely understood and can be used to share information between tools in very useful ways.

For a system to be powerful, it needs facilities like this.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#58

Post by glasshead969 » Sun, Mar 02, 2014, 7:03 PM UTC

LukasMathis wrote: post #51

higherpurpose wrote: post #27

> It’s not an accident that the best selling, highest grossing iPad apps are almost exclusively games. Yes, it's not an accident, but not because of the reason you give. Gaming is one of the most popular, if not the most popular and highest grossing category on any popular consumer platform. That's just the way it works. Some of these platform vendors (like Apple), and unlike others (like Google) realized this is tru…

You're right, it only took me half a blog post to explain all of the new concepts Microsoft introduced in their completely novel approach to operating system user interfaces. I don't think that's evidence against its ease-of-use :-) As for games completely ruling the top 100 list of highest-grossing apps on any popular consumer platform: this is definitely not the case in the Mac App Store.

regarding games not being popular on Mac app store, i feel like Mac is not in any way close to the scale of windows,iOS and android in terms of main stream popularity, especially internationally.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#59

Post by LukasMathis » Sun, Mar 02, 2014, 7:03 PM UTC

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #52

higherpurpose wrote: post #27

> It’s not an accident that the best selling, highest grossing iPad apps are almost exclusively games. Yes, it's not an accident, but not because of the reason you give. Gaming is one of the most popular, if not the most popular and highest grossing category on any popular consumer platform. That's just the way it works. Some of these platform vendors (like Apple), and unlike others (like Google) realized this is tru…

I think your comparison to 10 inch netbooks is spot on-granted, the Surface is 10.6, but considering I always felt uber crampted on a 10.1 inch netbook, I don't see the utility in having a tablet version of one. As a tablet, I think Surface has a lot going for it (kickstand, snapping apps side by side, flash, file system access), but there's no way I'd use a device that small as a primary computing device for product…

It's important to keep in mind that the Metro apps work better on smaller screens than normal desktop apps. They hide a lot of the UI when you don't need it, so there's much more room for actual content. I wouldn't want to run, say, IntelliJ Idea on a Surface, but for many other apps, the screen size is not much of an issue. Also, you can dock the Surface when you're on a desktop, and use a larger screen.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#60

Post by nickbarnwell » Sun, Mar 02, 2014, 7:04 PM UTC

LukasMathis wrote: post #40

AndrewGaspar wrote: post #35

"The way I want handwriting recognition to work is to take notes by jotting them down inside an app like OneNote, and have Windows recognize that automatically, behind the scenes, optionally without replacing my handwritten notes with printed text. Then, I want to be able to search my handwritten notes using full-text search." OneNote actually already does this! Try searching in OneNote for things you've written in p…

I just tried, but it didn't find anything. Not sure if my handwriting is so terrible, or if there's something else going wrong here. [Update: maybe the Metro version of OneNote doesn't support all of the features of the desktop version?]

I don't believe the OneNote Metro app supports indexing handwritten notes.

If you open the same notebook in the Win32 client and allow it to index and sync back to Sky/One/WhateverIt'sCalledThisWeekDrive you should be able to search through previously handwritten and Win32-client-OCRd notes in the Metro app.