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Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

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Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#181

Post by WalterBright »

devindotcom wrote: post #31
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…

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.

I have that problem with every laptop with the touch pad square in front of the keyboard. I am always brushing against it with my palm while typing that produces very unintended input.

I'm not the only one, I've noticed other people having the same problem.

I have no idea how this design became ubiquitous. It does not work for me at all.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#182

Post by imaginenore »

rasz_pl wrote: post #177
imaginenore wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not. Most of mobile software strives to run at 60fps. That's just 16.7ms.

display animation at 60fps and react to a hardware input through layers and layers of software abstraction are two different things. 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.

If you had read the PDF, 5ms is the "minimum touch time", which is not latency, but a minimum touch time it can register.

The same software has no problem rendering complex games and doing all kinds of game logic, all in 16.7ms. What makes you think asking for a touch input will take 15 times longer?

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#183

Post by jpwgarrison »

jzwinck wrote: post #157
balls187 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My rage point recently- Why for the love of plain text can Excel not bother to encode csv exports as UTF-8? You can up and then download with google sheets to "hack" around this but I bought numbers.app out of spite since you can specify output encoding there.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#184

Post by hyperliner »

jacobolus wrote: post #168
balls187 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Office 2013, specifically Excel and Word are fantastic.

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

"There’s no good way to collaborate with multiple authors without hellish document synchronization effort."

Based on just that, I don't think you have used Office in a really long time.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#185

Post by rasz_pl »

imaginenore wrote: post #182
rasz_pl wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

display animation at 60fps and react to a hardware input through layers and layers of software abstraction are two different things. 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.

If you had read the PDF, 5ms is the "minimum touch time", which is not latency, but a minimum touch time it can register. The same software has no problem rendering complex games and doing all kinds of game logic, all in 16.7ms. What makes you think asking for a touch input will take 15 times longer?

Actually its response time.

I already gave you an example of software stack impact on latency - Android sound lag went down from >250ms to respectable 10ms for some Nexus devices. Blame buffers.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#186

Post by PhantomGremlin »

richardlblair wrote: post #43

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.

Nobody has yet mentioned Microsoft PlaysForSure. Those clowns really screwed the pooch on that one. They got their "partners" to commit to a form of DRM that the Zune (brown bar of turd) didn't support and that Microsoft then abandoned.

How's the "long haul" working out for that particular fiasco?

Sorry if this sounds like a rant (which it is). But I don't understand how Microsoft's numerous mistakes keep getting erased into the mists of time. This wasn't something that happened eons ago. PlaysForSure was introduced a mere ten years ago.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#187

Post by phaus »

benihana wrote: post #166
phaus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>It is admirable, but their work towards a solution will be fruitless. Any Microsoft employees listening: Go ahead and pack it up. Someone on the internet has told you all you need to hear. It's fruitless. Literally nothing you do will work, as this post has clearly pointed out. Look to this non sequitor full of opinion presented as fact for all the info you need: Until you switch to the hardware that OP knows is sup…

It is a fact that both Wacom and N-Trig digitizers have different sets of advantages and disadvantages. It is a fact that the Surface Pro 3 can't completely eliminate its chosen technology's disadvantages. I never claimed that the entire Surface product line was doomed to failure, after all, the world doesn't revolve around digital artists.

As a couple of people pointed out, Wacom has a major disadvantage as well. It really sucks that it loses its accuracy at the edges of the screen, but in spite of that I still find the experience far superior to using an N-Trig stylus. I have come to this conclusion after using many different devices with different kinds of digitizers over the last decade. I also frequent a few of the major online digital art communities, and they all seem to agree with me. Perhaps the N-Trig fans are just quiet, but I'm inclined to think the lack of representation is due to the fact that artists enjoy using Wacom products.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to be so childishly hostile. I wasn't aware that expressing an opinion in an anonymous online community where people gather to have casual conversations was frowned upon.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#188

Post by MaulingMonkey »

icebraining wrote: post #113
stcredzero wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all the issues he experienced seem like they would be quite obvious It's the classic QA paradox. The typical hacker world view doesn't prioritize such feel issues enough. Even in today's UX focused world, stylus specific issues aren't widely understood. Combine the dynamics of the Asch conformity experiment, and it makes perfect sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnT2FcuZaYI

The typical hacker shouldn't be testing this device, then. I'm sure Microsoft has someone with the skills on their teams.

> The typical hacker shouldn't be testing this device, then.

Like, say, Gabe? :)

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#189

Post by [deleted] »

krschultz wrote: post #60

"You hear a lot about MS being this massive company that doesn’t listen but that’s really not fair in this case." Every large company is made up of thousands of individual people, many of which really care about making a good product and making customers happy. The whole question in managing a big company is how to get out of the way of that natural process, while still coordinating all the disparate groups so that t…

[deleted]

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#190

Post by reallysure »

Tloewald wrote: post #129
krschultz wrote: post #60

"You hear a lot about MS being this massive company that doesn’t listen but that’s really not fair in this case." Every large company is made up of thousands of individual people, many of which really care about making a good product and making customers happy. The whole question in managing a big company is how to get out of the way of that natural process, while still coordinating all the disparate groups so that t…

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.

"Actually MS has always listened." Really? http://www.jax184.com/projects/filenames/filenames.html
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