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IPhone 4

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Re: IPhone 4

#101

Post by jacobolus »

blehn wrote: post #52
spicyj wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the current trackpad?

- incredibly noisy - requires too much force to depress - the travel distance is too far - the hinged design means that the necessary pressure varies at different locations I've noticed there is a bit of variation between machines, but most seem to exhibit these behaviors in my experience

It is designed to be used by touch by people used to Apple trackpads. If you keep your thumb on the bottom part of the trackpad and use that part as if it were a button, it works pretty much identically to prior models. But then, it has an additional big advantage that when when you want to use that bottom part for gestures, you can.

I think it requires the perfect amount of force to depress – I don’t press it accidentally, but it presses easily when I want it to – and just the right travel distance. The noise is a nice confirmation that I just pressed it (then again, I use a Model M when possible so YMMV).

It’s a matter of personal preference, but I would be surprised if most people share your opinions about it.

Re: IPhone 4

#102

Post by blehn »

blasdel wrote: post #84
blehn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely a subjective thing, but I think it just sucks. I set my machine to "tap-to-click" within a few minutes.

You and your cohorts will be among the first put up against the wall when the HCI revolution comes, especially the assholes that baked that behavior into the device firmware of some trackpads, forcing you to twiddle bits in the driver to ignore the taps (like on the OLPC XO-1). "tap-to-click" is an abomination I wish to abolish from the face of the earth. I find it incredibly frustrating myself, but the older folks I…

I'm not saying tap-to-click is the optimal paradigm, only that I had to employ it as a means of avoiding the shoddy trackpad button.

Re: IPhone 4

#103

Post by barrkel »

ergo98 wrote: post #76

Even though this is the Haus of Gruber (why, exactly, does everything he post get FPd here? Confirmation bias, perhaps?), I'll take my downvote suffering- >In fact, Apple seems very confident regarding everything it decided for the original 2007 iPhone Except multitasking in apps. Actually, scratch that, except apps altogether. Two major shifts in direction. Of course Gruber led into that talking about hardware. Ther…

I agree with you that fanboy fawning makes one queasy.

I do want to point something out about bezels on iDevices, though. They make accidental touches with the base of your thumb rarer when you're using the device one-handed. With only one hand, and holding the device in your palm, your thumb becomes your primary way of interacting. But that means that the base of your thumb is pushed against the edge of the device, and slightly touching the front of the device. This turns into either spurious touches, or spurious multi-touches (think: drag turns into zoom) if the very edge of the device is sensitive to touch.

The solution is to have a little bit of a dead zone there. This is the one area of my Nexus One which annoys me - the N1 seems to have a comparable bezel, but it's actually sensitive very close to the edge. Consequently I often have to hold the N1 not securely in my palm, but resting on my fingers, so that the base of my thumb is nowhere near the edge of the device.

Re: IPhone 4

#105

Post by jacobolus »

theBobMcCormick wrote: post #66
btmorex wrote: post #12

>The overall build quality seems impossibly good. The iPhone 4 is beautiful to behold and feels like a valuable artifact. It’s like a love letter to Dieter Rams. Do other people actually like reading stuff like this? I mean, regardless of what you think of the iphone 4, that level of praise almost makes me feel bad for him. It's like romantic love for an object.

I feel that way a lot when reading Gruber. He has the same kind of unwavering fawning praise for Apple that Rush Limbaugh has for the Republican party.

Rush Limbaugh constantly criticizes the Republican party from the batshit crazy right.

Gruber’s frequent criticisms of Apple are ones I think most people on this board would agree with (probably including you).

Your comparison is so absurd as to be trivially dismissible, and implies that either you’re irrationally angry/resentful about something, or trolling.

Re: IPhone 4

#106

Post by jacobolus »

cj wrote: post #36
btmorex wrote: post #12

>The overall build quality seems impossibly good. The iPhone 4 is beautiful to behold and feels like a valuable artifact. It’s like a love letter to Dieter Rams. Do other people actually like reading stuff like this? I mean, regardless of what you think of the iphone 4, that level of praise almost makes me feel bad for him. It's like romantic love for an object.

I skimmed through the article looking for anything negative. Acknowledging its flaws is more productive than studying its perfection.

It seems likely to me that these won’t be obvious until people have had more time to use the device. Which flaws should he have acknowledged?

Re: IPhone 4

#107

Post by jacobolus »

ergo98 wrote: post #82
ugh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a rather serious accusation. Do you have any evidence which would point you that way?

A less serious accusation is that Gruber now knows that his core readership consists of, essentially, the Apple faithful. He knows to pander to that crowd and that is how he gets paid. It's iPhone fans who feel that every Gruber observation about the iPhone is so critically important that it needs to be voted up on HN.

His readership, from the frequency with which his posts make it to the front page here, seems to include the hacker news community. Do you consider yourself, or the rest of us, “essentially the Apple faithful”?

As far as I can tell the subject of his blog could be summarized as something like “high signal-to-noise and semi-technical discussion of Apple, the web, and graphic design, with occasional sports and politics related tidbits.

“The Apple faithful” as a group is quite different from “technical and semi-technical readers interested in Apple and the web”.

Re: IPhone 4

#108

Post by ugh »

jsz0 wrote: post #100
ergo98 wrote: post #76

Even though this is the Haus of Gruber (why, exactly, does everything he post get FPd here? Confirmation bias, perhaps?), I'll take my downvote suffering- >In fact, Apple seems very confident regarding everything it decided for the original 2007 iPhone Except multitasking in apps. Actually, scratch that, except apps altogether. Two major shifts in direction. Of course Gruber led into that talking about hardware. Ther…

His quote makes a lot more sense in context: * In fact, Apple seems very confident regarding everything it decided for the original 2007 iPhone. There are no new buttons, or even moved buttons. The Retina Display is emblematic of the iPhone 4 as a whole, both hardware and software: the same fundamental idea as the original iPhone, but clarified. It hasn’t really changed so much as improved — like the same picture in…

If you read something with the sure belief that someone is biased you are liable to read all sorts of stuff into what someone is writing. I think that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Maybe I’m naive but I really do think that way too many people read way too many things into what Gruber is writing – things he never actually said.

Re: IPhone 4

#109

Post by danudey »

blasdel wrote: post #73
neonfunk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not so much "love" as it is obsession; and obsessive people tend to be at least colorful , if not interesting, just given how much time they're willing to devote to a subject seemingly so minute. This article is the 1st I've read since the initial batch of reviews that I didn't stop reading after the 1st paragraph.

Except that Gruber is anything but colorful -- his whole aesthetic is dour gray

People go to his site for the words, not for the site. A flashy design would be distracting, and for someone who (IMHO) writes as well as he does, anything that takes away from that is impractical.

It's the same reason he'll link to images or videos or sound clips, but he never posts them directly on his site.

Re: IPhone 4

#110

Post by pohl »

cj wrote: post #36
btmorex wrote: post #12

>The overall build quality seems impossibly good. The iPhone 4 is beautiful to behold and feels like a valuable artifact. It’s like a love letter to Dieter Rams. Do other people actually like reading stuff like this? I mean, regardless of what you think of the iphone 4, that level of praise almost makes me feel bad for him. It's like romantic love for an object.

I skimmed through the article looking for anything negative. Acknowledging its flaws is more productive than studying its perfection.

Not only did he find and acknowledge a flaw, but he filed an issue on it.
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