It looks ugly as hell. I would never want to be seen using something like that.
Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
221–230 of 256 posts
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#222"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…
The most important and influential Surface user comments on product
Microsoft changes product to please important and influential user who's reviews are the most popular review of the product on the internet
"Microsoft is listening guys!!"
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#223Seems 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.
Apple has had a stranglehold on the graphic design industry for years despite not actually making a good stylus-driven product for that market. I don't know if there's a legitimate marketing reason for this, but it's a tremendously symbolic conflict. Microsoft attacking Apple in their stronghold.
Graphic design isn't about styluses. That would be illustration…
Styluses are actually worse for graphic design due to their lack of accuracy, all designers I've ever worked with who use styluses always end up moving objects by a few pixels when selecting them.
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
Office, like Excel, was mostly complete years ago. The iterations on file format and ribbon bar? Not so useful for most users.
As a casual user of the various Office apps, the ribbon bar is what made it usable. Before that, I'd make every attempt to keep out of Office. Those who use it with any regularity likely know the keyboard shortcuts for things they use regularly, and the ribbon should work for finding the less common things in the same way it helps me as a casual user find everything.
The ribbon bar made it more usable? I just found it annoying. Word 2003 still seems like the best form factor to me.
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#225Gotta 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.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. Microsoft has arrived at a place where simply being as good or a bit better than it's competition is not enough. Over the past 10 years, they've alienated, infuriated, exploited, cheated and abused so many of their users and people who support their users that the bar they have to jump over is higher than the bar any other company has to jump over.
That's a good thing for everyone else. It means better products and stiffer competition, but only if Microsoft recognises the true scale of the challenge facing them. There is so little good will towards Microsoft who are still seen by many as the lumbering, malevolent spoilt child of tech that (as I've already said) being good or a bit better falls far short of the leaps and bounds they need to be making.
I for one have been enjoying Microsoft's slow motion fall from grace and I'll continue to do so because I'm still angry at they way they've behaved on the web and abused their position with Internet Explorer. People may well disagree with my view point, but disagreeing with me (and the score like me) makes no difference. It's the way we feel, the way we will continue to feel and Microsoft will need nothing short of a miracle to change our minds.
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whatever are you complaining about? Little as I am a fan of the WYSIWYG philosophy, Office is a genuinely spectacular product.
I said for "good and ill". If you can't see the problems in Office then you aren't looking very hard.
What exactly are these problems? My only problem has been difficulty forcing it to get down to "advanced options" on certain parts where something needs a minor adjustment that doesn't work through the normal channels
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Oh just put it back in the deck. 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 ba…
Oh just put it back in the deck.
Someone reading this who has a brain can easily figure out that you got it out in the first place. I was only talking about geographic and economic circumstances.
If you actively declare your ethnicity while throwing around accusations of race-baiting whenever someone highlights your baseless brand affinity,
Whatever. I was giving you a chance to "put the card back" but you blundered ahead anyhow. Anyone reading this thread can see you open up with the race-baiting question. Now you are upset because you were called out for it, and it's there to read.
Exercise: Where do you try to use set-like precision where it's not appropriate and wind up with racist pseudo logic, and what should one learn from that?
Also, if this is really about "brand loyalty" from the beginning, why does it take you so long in the thread to come out with brand-related evidence? Come on now.
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A document that large must have some kind of a structure that you and your team can use to break it apart into smaller, more manageable chunks. One thing to consider is to place the content into a content management system of kind (a wiki comes to mind) to allow the content to more easily be maintained and grow without the limitations Word creates.
The decision may not have been up to you to keep it all in one Word document but making the case to either break apart the document or find a better system in which to maintain it ought to be easy in the face of the usability issues you mention.
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
[Sorry that this is all quite off topic for a conversation about surface.] So imagine you have 4 authors: person A writes a document, and person B makes one set of changes, while person C makes a different set of changes, with person D working off of C’s version. Now person A wants to accept some but not all of C’s changes, and some but not all of B’s changes, and person D wants to “rebase” his document to add the ch…
The first is basically a rather complicated workflow that is handled for instance with plain text documents in git. I doubt Word can do that (wouldn't know, haven't used it for a long time), after all it's core thing is being a word processor.
Now I didn't read your rant, but ranting that something is a pile of junk and then using a rather far-fecthed missing feature as an example of why it is a pile of junk, as a counter-argument to someone questioning your reasoning, is not proper logic. Can't think of a proper analogy atm, but claiming git is a pile of junk and then coming up with git diff not being able to deal with Word files as one of the reasons would probably come close: it makes no sense.
Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, actually, collaborating in office as compared to google docs or tex + git is hell.