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Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

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Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#231

Post by vertex-four »

jimmaswell wrote: post #224
vertex-four wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It did. I couldn't find anything before the ribbon bar, frankly, and using tools took significantly more time because I had to search for them in overly long menus, or even submenus. Now they're mostly laid out directly in front of me, logically and visually ordered. I don't feel that menus are a good UI to anything.

It would seem that most UX people now agree with me, as traditional menu bars have been de-emphasised across nearly all the apps I use. Word was the only app which required me to delve into the menus in common use.

Why do you think the ribbon bar has a worse UX than a menu bar?

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#232

Post by Retric »

balls187 wrote: post #170
jacobolus wrote: post #168

Earlier 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

> 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?

I used Office 2010 for a while and it was crashing 4+ times a day, so I tried 2013 and easily recreated some of those crashes. I have not used it extensively but it does not take long to discover it's still trash.

PS: Office 2013 still has bugs from word 97, which is what happens when there is zero competition.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#233

Post by pbhjpbhj »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #167
rayiner wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The case for a monopoly has been put - and it's one I agree with - but I' with camperbob here, patent monopolies are too long. They don't respect the change in product lifecycles that's come about in the last century or so.

If it took 10 years to produce the next line of products and if products were manufactured to last that long then 15-20 years seems fine.

But the patent term is far too long compared to the product lifecycle (in computing/electronics fields at least); patented tech is too often redundant by the time it enters the public domain.

I'd like to see maybe 5-8 year terms and possibly with a cap that looks something like "if global revenue is 100 times the number of inventors times 50 years times the 90th percentile pay in the country where patented the patent lapses" (the idea being selling at a 1% patent premium that returns enough to reward the inventors with never having to work again means the patent should lapse) [but admit that would be a very hard law to draft without leaving loopholes; there's probably major flaws too, one really would rather look at profit but it's too easily manipulated I feel].

Anyway, can someone justify the 15-20 years over a 5-8 year term (for electronics, say)?

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#234

Post by taude »

rthomas6 wrote: post #156
balls187 wrote: post #132

Earlier 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.

That's weird you can't break it down into smaller parts? I worked on a big book, about that size with several people and the major, mainstream publishing company wanted it in individual documents mapping to individual chapters.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#235

Post by zerohm »

tomelders wrote: post #225
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.

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…

Microsoft knows the days of strong arm tactics and PC dominance are gone. They know they aren't the king of the hill anymore. You can see it in the way they are handling Surface and Azure, or mishandling in the way of Xbox.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#236

Post by freehunter »

mukundmr wrote: post #207

Why would people want to use a Surface Pro3 as a drawing tablet? What is the target consumer for this device? The last time I played with the device, it was running regular Windows apps on a small screen and it was a nightmare getting the menus and buttons right. If applications have to be tailored for the Surface, how will they work on the desktop?

The Surface Pro 3 has a 12 inch screen compared to the Surface Pro 2's 10 inch screen and the Macbook Air's 11 inch screen, so the real estate is improved by quite a bit. It gets expensive to find a larger screen with a digitizer, and the guys from PA are on the road quite a bit so I'd imagine portability counts.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#237

Post by epaladin »

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…

I usually just drag tab-sep files into an open Excel window, and it opens just fine. I only get the import wizard when I try to use file -> open. There are a couple of "gotchas" I regularly experience- the worst of which is the automatic formatting- which unfortunately converts a number of gene names into dates (I'm in Bioinformatics). It's enough of an issue that papers have been published about it [1]. For example MAR1 ends up formatted as 1-Mar. When you have a list of 20,000 identifiers, it's quite annoying to deal with. I see the transformed strings show up in biological databases all the time. I don't know why there isn't an easy way to disable autoformatting. Even if I avoid incorporating Excel into my own workflow, when I send documents to scientists, they're going to want to use it, and we end up with the same results then.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15214961

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#238

Post by pmelendez »

rthomas6 wrote: post #156
balls187 wrote: post #132

Earlier 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.

"which is when you have a 1,200 page document with hundreds of tables, lists, and pictures"

This is like saying that SQLite is not a good product because you are using it on a Terabyte database having 1,000,000 hits at the same time... It might work but it would have problems because wasn't designed for that scenario.

I sympathize with you though... since it is not your decision :/

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#239

Post by rayiner »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #233
CamperBob2 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, give them a limited monopoly. But for 20 years ? Um, no.

The case for a monopoly has been put - and it's one I agree with - but I' with camperbob here, patent monopolies are too long. They don't respect the change in product lifecycles that's come about in the last century or so. If it took 10 years to produce the next line of products and if products were manufactured to last that long then 15-20 years seems fine. But the patent term is far too long compared to the produc…

I don't disagree with any of this. What's a sensible patent term in aerospace, where a single design might take a decade to bring to market, and what's sensible in consumer electronics isn't the same.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#240

Post by rasz_pl »

kalleboo wrote: post #197
rasz_pl wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Process you described produced permanent hot corners that couldnt be disabled (lower right one still cant, even in W8.1) and hardcoded inconsistent WM_SYSKEY acting differently depending on application you run (ignores bindings when Task Manager has focus). 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.su…

> Less choice is never a good strategy when it comes to UI. Apple has made quite a lot of money disagreeing with you there.

Dont you mean despite? Look at gnome, look at W8. Targeting lowest common denominator is not something I would strive for.

It took apple two years to finally deliver cut&paste on a phone. Were you really happy about lack of it? Was it a good thing?

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