171–180 of 256 posts
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Deleting my long rant here. It’s not really on topic for this thread. Suffice to say, I think MS Word is a pile of junk. For the curious: http://pastie.org/9297613
> I could go on and on. In about 2005, I decided I’d never again use Word unless I absolutely had to. So you're saying you haven't really used Word 2013 then?
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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 reas…
You may have non-standard CSV files (or at least delimited files that are not properly escaped)
When MS is cornered (when they are losing in one area or another), and they are determined to win the competition should be scared. They are very good at committing to a project, and being in it for the long haul.
> They are very good at committing to a project, and being in it for the long haul. How so? I can think of several projects ( especially hardware) that they abandoned after the first version. Granted, they gave the Zune a fair shake (though I don't think the iPod had much to be scared of). SPOT, too, considering that smart phones were starting to get useful about a year after SPOT's release. But as a counter example,…
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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…
Does your two minutes of effort also include regression testing? Did you verify that all aspects of the OS and applications which depend on the home button having a specific behavior continue to function within OS-guaranteed response times? Have you done user testing to ensure that the delay after lifting the stylus meets with user expectations and doesn't seem like the OS is frozen? Have you met with the hardware te…
Less choice is never a good strategy when it comes to UI.
btw there is a way of killing home button altogether for surface, might be useful for Gabe http://www.surfaceforums.net/forum/microsoft-surface-faq-gui...
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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.
Currently the only way to influence it is to delete registry key
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SurfaceHomeButton]
and kill all physical buttons completely.
> I could see some of them shaking their heads and looking at each other. They were very obviously bothered that they had not seen this before. To me this looks like engineers that had foreseen the problem but were promptly ignored by UX people. Or maybe the other way around.
Rather than single out engineer and UX guys, it would be more accurate to say that some person(s?) foresaw the problem, and their concerns were dismissed by someone above them.
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This lag is in the software stack (mostly in UI graphics). Not in hardware. Remember Androids ~>200ms sound lag?
Definitely not. Most of mobile software strives to run at 60fps. That's just 16.7ms.
Run of the mill 3M controller has 5ms latency
http://datasheet.octopart.com/87-5961-211-3M-datasheet-21189...
5 year old Fujitsu FMA1127 had 10ms.
http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/MICRO/fme/tsc/FMA1127_Data_...
Interrupt latency is measured in nano seconds.
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The benefit to the consumer is that some other company didn't just copy their technology down to the silk screening on the PCB, eliminating their ability to get any return on their R&D. Wacom is a terrible example for an anti-patent rant. Digitizing pen input is really hard to get right. N-trig has been working to come up with their own independent technology for years now. This is exactly the sort of R&D-heavy produ…
Fine, give them a limited monopoly. But for 20 years ? Um, no.
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Which knock-off tablet and digitizers have you used? The oddness is that Wacom is itself a Japanese company so even the 'original' products are Asian from soup-to-nuts. I'm unclear on the relevancy of your Korean extraction or what you believe I am supposing.
The oddness is that Wacom is itself a Japanese company so even the 'original' products are Asian from soup-to-nuts. So, why is that odd? Is this some kind of racist pseudo logic that claims asians can't knock off products of other asians? I'm unclear on the relevancy of your Korean extraction or what you believe I am supposing. I'm kind of unclear on the relevancy of this whole subthread. Currently, China and other a…
The relevancy is that the knock-offs aren't bad, considering the patent situation, and [geographic region] knock-off doesn't make sense to specify when the original is from that region and the competing products are largely not made by companies based in Asia (Nokia, Logitech, Livescribe, etc). Incidentally, the competing digitizers are quite the value if you can get over the extra battery weight in the pen. Which, again is a result of abiding by wacom's patent. In this case "Asian knockoff" is shorthand for you having no idea what you're talking about.
I have used wacom products for over 10 years, my first being a graphire2 and my most recent is the surface pro 2. The Microsoft default calibration is better than the halfassed 4 point calibration offered with the wacom feel drivers. The 273 point calibration to address the significant corner distortion requires dropping to command line and 15 minutes of tapping in hopes to get at all the tiny UI elements on the high res screen. Wacom is imperfect and competent competitors benefit us all. And they are competent.
You probably hear this frequently, but your ethnicity has nothing to do with this. If you actively declare your ethnicity while throwing around accusations of race-baiting whenever someone highlights your baseless brand affinity, I'd wager that you go through agonizing retail experiences.
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> 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?
Not at all. Just that mistakes happen to everyone, even the biggest corporations. I could have phrased that a little better. Perhaps "I've made similar types of mistakes that were obvious in retrospect, so I have a hard time faulting them" might be a better way to say it.