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Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

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131–140 of 162 posts

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#131

Post by teamonkey »

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?]

The Metro version of OneNote doesn't, but Windows Journal does and it's installed on the Surface by default. It's a legacy app though.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#132

Post by bane »

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…

My wife had her computer blink out for a couple weeks and while the problem was getting fixed she hooked up her ~10 year old netbook she bought back then for ~$300 to a monitor/kb/mouse and after windows updated the ancient XP and office installs, was back to work pretty quick. It was absolutely fine for office work and basic web surfing, full screen videos were a little rough but they worked...she even got some dev work done on it.

Tbh, if the video performance was a little faster and it had an extra GB of RAM, she'd be perfectly fine with it as her day to day...and it fits okay in one of her larger purses.

It's absolutely amazing how overpowered our machines are these days, there's almost no sense to it.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#133

Post by rbanffy »

I don't see how it could be surprising that iOS devices are not used for the same purposes OSX devices are. Surface tablets are just Windows machines with a different keyboard. It's not surprising they can run all the software you are used to run on your Windows PC whereas it's expected software built for OSX does not run on iOS devices.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#134

Post by papa_bear »

dangrossman wrote: post #5
bunderbunder wrote: post #2

's funny; one of the screenshots is used to call out the Charms bar as an example of great UI. For me - as a user of Windows 8 on a desktop - it has become something of an icon of just how poor Windows 8's UI is. On a tablet, you swipe it out from the left edge of the screen. Makes sense - so much sense that Apple copied the idea in iOS 7. On a PC, you bring out the charms bar by frustratedly wiggling your mouse agai…

Shooting the mouse into a corner is actually one of those gestures that is hardest to get wrong, which is why we've placed the window's close button up there for decades. Your mistake is aiming for the side instead of the top right corner of the screen; you can't overshoot it, so it never takes more than one physical gesture. You can also swipe from the right edge of your touchpad as if it were the screen.

The biggest issue for me is that there's no visual cue with the charms gesture, which is pretty necessary if there's going to be any kind of delay in my mouse being there and the charms appearing.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#135

Post by nirnira »

r00fus wrote: post #122
nirnira wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what? Android isn't a productivity solution yet. Not even close. No manufacturer is trying with Android to build what Microsoft is building with 8.1+ - a coherent, unified, cross-device productivity and computing ecosystem.

Disagree. Samsung is trying very hard to win Enterprise customers (mostly failing so far, but they do have business users on their mind).

To me, Samsung is a joke company. At a time when Microsoft is increasingly forward-thinking in the clarity and tastefulness of its UI and UX, Samsung just can't stop throwing glossy plastic, pleather, knock-off iOS 6 icons, random fonts and gimmick apps around. They're the new 90s Microsoft when it comes to taste and sophistication.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#136

Post by jmspring »

sliverstorm wrote: post #129
slantyyz wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> iTunes runs like crap on anything other than OSX. I know a lot of Mac users who would beg to differ. I use Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive across all my devices, and I don't have many complaints at all. YMMV, of course. My use case is probably much simpler than yours.

Every time I try to overlap different sync tools, I get conflicts and wind up either losing all my data or having twenty copies of all my data. Also, of course iTunes isn't greased lightning & a buttered dream on OSX, it's just "less awful", or so I hear.

It is still quite awful, especially if you have a large media collection.

That said, one benefit to a mostly homogenous ecosystem around apple devices, at least for me, airplay and streaming media across devices with less work (I get lazy about home it issues)

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#137

Post by rudin »

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…

You have posted 10 positive Microsoft reviews in the past year which corresponds to approximately 10%-20% of your posts. Are you paid to do this or just really into the company?

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#138

Post by ntkachov »

rudin wrote: post #137
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 have posted 10 positive Microsoft reviews in the past year which corresponds to approximately 10%-20% of your posts. Are you paid to do this or just really into the company?

I think he just likes Microsoft and the anti-MS circlejerk has been pretty strong lately.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#139

Post by thaumasiotes »

dangrossman wrote: post #5
bunderbunder wrote: post #2

's funny; one of the screenshots is used to call out the Charms bar as an example of great UI. For me - as a user of Windows 8 on a desktop - it has become something of an icon of just how poor Windows 8's UI is. On a tablet, you swipe it out from the left edge of the screen. Makes sense - so much sense that Apple copied the idea in iOS 7. On a PC, you bring out the charms bar by frustratedly wiggling your mouse agai…

Shooting the mouse into a corner is actually one of those gestures that is hardest to get wrong, which is why we've placed the window's close button up there for decades. Your mistake is aiming for the side instead of the top right corner of the screen; you can't overshoot it, so it never takes more than one physical gesture. You can also swipe from the right edge of your touchpad as if it were the screen.

It's not exactly difficult to overshoot a window's close button. I don't run everything maximized; that would completely defeat the purpose of a large screen.

Re: Windows 8 and the Microsoft Surface

#140

Post by robomartin »

glasshead969 wrote: post #56
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

No, not the same thing. The corner coffee store can buy a Windows machine, create an admin and various user accounts and exercise a significant level of control over what your users can do. No server, no MDM program purchase, no lots of things. The same is true for OSX.

I can't take a single iPad and have a decent degree of control over it.

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