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Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

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Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#41

Post by _random_ »

GodEater wrote: post #20

It's great to read that Gabe has had such a positive experience with a Microsoft product team - but it seems pretty obvious to me that it's because he's a somebody. His posts on penny-arcade reach an enormous audience, and so of course they're going to do their damn best to make sure he sings the product's praises. My experience is very different. I've been working for an enormous organisation for the last 4 years, a…

I've heard that one company screwed up the basic fundamental component of their mobile phone once - the antenna. It was basically short-circuiting when you were holding it during the call. Their answer to consumers? "You are holding it wrong".

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#42

Post by wingerlang »

imaginenore wrote: post #10

Microsoft demoed 1ms touchscreen lag in 2012. Most modern touchscreens still have 100ms lag. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

I was under the impression that that setup was something including a camera or something, and not an actual touchscreen.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#44

Post by phaus »

TwistedWeasel wrote: post #17

It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution. However, all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious to anyone testing the device usage for any kind of drawing application (which, for a device with a stylus seems like a common enough use case to be testing), perhaps Microsoft needs to spend more time and effort on their QA process for the next roun…

>It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution.

It is admirable, but their work towards a solution will be fruitless. N-Trig's pressure sensitive stylus technology is vastly inferior to Wacom. Sure, most people can't tell the difference, but most artists can. Sure, artists can still produce professional quality work with an N-Trig stylus, but the experience of using an N-Trig stylus is substandard.

Microsoft improved nearly every aspect of the Surface Pro 3, but their switch to N-Trig was extraordinarily stupid. I'd rather have a slightly thicker, slightly more expensive device than one with a less than perfect stylus. I hope they continue to improve things by switching back to Wacom in the future.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#45

Post by danudey »

huhtenberg wrote: post #23

Gotta really give it to Microsoft. The transformation of the company under Nadella's leadership is really impressive. They really stepped up their game. They finally got someone on the PR team that actually knows what they are doing.

It's starting to feel as though the philosophy in Microsoft is less about 'Windows everywhere', but more about relevance. Product teams are created for various niches (e.g. Surface, Azure, etc.) but those teams now have a large degree of autonomy in pursuing their goals.

As an example, the Office team's goals aren't to prop up Windows as a platform by providing a sufficient but substandard product on other platforms, but rather to make a great product; as a result, Office 365 for iPad. The Surface team isn't about making a platform to foist Windows 8 onto people or pressure tablet makers, it's about making a great personal tablet/laptop frankenstein.

Likewise, Azure is (reportedly) a great backend for apps on all kinds of platforms, especially on iOS, rather than a 'competitive advantage' to make sure that Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 work great with each other and only with each other.

I really feel as though this is the right direction for them, and that it's producing some really great results so far.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#46

Post by milhous »

What Microsoft should do is bring more artistic people into the Surface team, perhaps engineers with artistic abilities, and by doing exactly what they did for Gabe: study how artists work. The end result is a much better product without the need for a post-mortem scramble.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#47

Post by omikun2 »

TwistedWeasel wrote: post #17

It's admirable that MS is responding to criticism of their device and working for a solution. However, all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious to anyone testing the device usage for any kind of drawing application (which, for a device with a stylus seems like a common enough use case to be testing), perhaps Microsoft needs to spend more time and effort on their QA process for the next roun…

I want to applaud MS but this whole thing stinks of a PR move. Wacom has always had a customizable pressure curve in their software. This should be a bedrock standard but instead this catch-up is spun as MS' dedication to artists. To think they are just getting around to doing this (not even a user adjustable slider scale but just a few presets) speaks volume of how much they actually care about artists -- it wasn't goal they had in mind until they sent out their demo units.

Personally, I think the SP3 is probably the best PC for digital artists, but I'm disappointed in how little they worked on making the stylus user friendly.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#48

Post by nether »

huhtenberg wrote: post #23

Gotta really give it to Microsoft. The transformation of the company under Nadella's leadership is really impressive. They really stepped up their game. They finally got someone on the PR team that actually knows what they are doing.

Gabe was raving about the Surface even with Ballmer at MS. I guess now it's time to credit anything good happening to Nadella's chairmanship.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#49

Post by danudey »

neltnerb wrote: post #8
programminggeek wrote: post #5

The one thing that nobody seems to appreciate when it comes to pushing forward towards retina displays is just how many more pixels, how much more memory, and how much slower everything is on the same hardware. Yet, anyone who has ever been a gamer knows that changing your resolution has a huge impact on your FPS. It is foolish to think that Microsoft can make the screen much higher resolution, have a similar chip, a…

As someone who is not a gamer, I am curious -- why is it not the GPU that is the most critical when talking about the FPS and refresh rate for things like pen input? Is the issue that the CPU is "in the loop"? Is this a matter of the built in graphics on the Haswell chips not being quite good enough for this application, or is it actually the CPU? I mostly wonder because I've found the improvements to the GPU in the…

The CPU is required to process the digitizer input, figure out what it's trying to do, communicate it to the application, process it within the application, turn that into pixels on a constantly-updating canvas, and express that canvas as a texture to the GPU.

The GPU is responsible for displaying that texture to the screen.

As a gamer, there's a similar issue in gaming: a lot of modern games are getting bottlenecked on the CPU (just like drawing on the Surface is), because drawing to the GPU requires several layers of software abstraction. This means that a lot of games (mostly MMOs lately) will lag no matter how good your video card is if you don't have a sufficient video card. In fact, up to 40% of the CPU use of some games is not spent by the game, but by the drivers that sit between the game and the GPU.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#50

Post by colechristensen »

stcredzero wrote: post #21

It’s very hard to take something like how the device “feels” to draw on and convert that into something engineers can use. I ended up describing it in terms of speaking. I said drawing on the Pro 2 was like having a conversation with someone. With the Surface Pro 3 I feel like I need to either whisper or yell to have the same conversation. I had to press very lightly or very hard, and it changes the way I draw. I was…

It seems like Microsoft could really benefit from having conversations (or hiring) experts in the (ahem) "UI" design of aircraft. The ergonomics, feedback and force required for action on controls, button placement.... all the sorts of things a pilot has to do to interact with the machine are very well studied and, more importantly, quantified by excellent engineers. That engineering expertise could surely be translated to the physical interface of a tablet in a way that is much less possible or relevant for a keyboard and mouse interface.
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