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Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

penny-arcade.com

151–160 of 256 posts

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article, it sounds like the Microsoft folks were kicking themselves for that oversight. To their credit, I've made similar mistakes in my career.

> To their credit, I've made similar mistakes in my career. What did you mean? You don't mean that if X makes a mistake that you made first, that mistake is a credit to X, do you?

[deleted]

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like it's already competitive in the market of nerds who draw cartoons on their computers, and need to be mobile. The Wacom Cintiq is probably much better for serious drawing, though you give up the portability of a self-contained tablet computer.[1] I'm not sure the Surface will succeed in any markets other than that though. It just solve any common problems significantly better than the alternatives. [1]…

If I didn't doubt Windows so much for programming stuff I'd really like to get one for university - looks like the perfect machine for lectures and also everything else I need a laptop for. For any students but CS I think it's awesome.

In my experience, I found that I was far more productive/successful in undergrad when I used Windows as my main OS and set up *nix virtual machines for the my computer science classes. Having the computer just _work_ and not needing to worry about software/configuration conflicts between classes was a huge improvement over trying to do everything inside of a single native OS.

That said, I now have a Macbook Pro and love that I have a native unix shell and MacPorts. But I still run virtual machines for specific projects (e.g. a Windows VM for all that software that just doesn't exist for OSX/Linux; unfortunately free alternatives don't work when you need to collaborate with a team).

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#153

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…

Yeah, I'm baffled as to how the button placement made it past any kind of initial hands-on testing. It's hard to imagine a person using the pen on the screen for ten or fifteen minutes not encountering that problem.

There's a comment from another sketcher in here talking about how it might be a peculiar grip not used by all artists.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, this is a great example of why show me don't tell me is vital in product creation. Here, the folks empowered to make the change saw the problem with their own eyes. They may indeed have heard or speculated about this issue previously. But there's a fundamental difference between someone saying something, filtered through language, organizational priorities, etc. and making that realization on your own . Related,…

While I completely agree with your point that there are things that are better shown then described, it doesn't seem that difficult to say, "The home button is positioned such that it is too easy to accidentally hit it."

Plus all one would have to do is actually use the pen for drawing. It doesn't take an artist actually using it to understand how that's a problem.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#155
post #58

>After I was done they told me they were going to take all the notes they had gathered and go to work on fixing the issues I had shown them. Later >To see them come back to me with fixes for my problems was really amazing. They are putting time and effort into making sure the Surface Pro 3 does what artists want it to do. Well played to the MS Surface team, I hope these fixes make it to production and stay there on t…

More like well player PR team, they failed to fix every single issue. They couldnt even let him have the home button fix, something that sounds like a simple script I could write in AutoHotkey in two minutes tops. Surface team looks like a committee full of control freaks. cant give users control over home button, cant give users control over pressure curves (they brought two HARDWIRED tablets instead of writing conf…

It may have been specifically coded as a "proof of concept" against a pre-release version of the OS, in which case it would have been very foolish to just chuck it on the machine he depends on for his livelihood.

Try not to be so arrogant in future. For Linux devices you could have developed this yourself (and assumed due responsibility) but under OSX/iOS the dev team wouldn't have been nearly as receptive to his issues.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually MS has always listened. The problem has been (a) whom they listened to (the user has usually not been their customer) and (b) lack of "taste". MS Office is, for good and ill, exactly what you get when you give users what they ask for and have no taste.

Office 2013, specifically Excel and Word are fantastic.

Except for my use case, which is when you have a 1,200 page document with hundreds of tables, lists, and pictures. The thing grinds to a halt and has all sorts of problems. Yes, I know that MS Word is not the best choice for documents that big, but it's not up to me.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually MS has always listened. The problem has been (a) whom they listened to (the user has usually not been their customer) and (b) lack of "taste". MS Office is, for good and ill, exactly what you get when you give users what they ask for and have no taste.

Office 2013, specifically Excel and Word are fantastic.

I like Excel as much as the next guy, but even in 2013 when you open a delimited text file it makes you manually tell it what the delimiters are. A computer should be able to guess whether a large text file is CSV, TSV, etc. This is an example of something Apple would get right, but Microsoft does not, even after more than a decade with this heavily-used feature. A tasteful implementer would make it do something reasonable by default, rather than making thousands of users click "Next" repeatedly and get presented with nonsensical defaults.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I completely agree with your point that there are things that are better shown then described, it doesn't seem that difficult to say, "The home button is positioned such that it is too easy to accidentally hit it."

Plus all one would have to do is actually use the pen for drawing. It doesn't take an artist actually using it to understand how that's a problem.

I'm sure they did draw on it. But, there's a difference between drawing to make sure drawing works and drawing because that's your job. In the first, people would be more likely to say "oh I brushed the home button". In the second, they're much more likely to suffer a critical flow interruption.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#159

Seems like a small niche to be focusing on. I understand the PR angle (it's a home run for the PR team) but I don't think catering to artists who draw digitally is going to make or break the tablet. Where's the feel good story about the coder, the gamer, or the office junkie? Each of which makes up a considerably larger slice of the premium laptop/tablet marketplace.

This feels like Altavista and then Google appealing to the tech types in the earlier days of search engines. If you wanted to convince the masses that the sketching and note-taking was high quality, why wouldn't you get it right for the artists as a priority?

I assume anyone from Penny Arcade has a gaming background too.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#160

Seems like a small niche to be focusing on. I understand the PR angle (it's a home run for the PR team) but I don't think catering to artists who draw digitally is going to make or break the tablet. Where's the feel good story about the coder, the gamer, or the office junkie? Each of which makes up a considerably larger slice of the premium laptop/tablet marketplace.

I dunno. Not make or break maybe. Be a potentially big market - hella yeah. The majority of design-ish people I know, including myself, would kill for a decent tablet drawing environment. Folk are already laying out for specialist devices like http://www.wacom.com/en/gb/creative/cintiq-24-hd-touch . My iPad is cute and useful for many things. I do very rough sketch stuff on it. For professional deign work it's pretty…

Was a Windows user but have a MBP now. I follow the Surface reports with interest entirely because of the apparent quality of stylus input. Getting a Wacom is my likely path at this point though.
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