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Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over

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Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over

#191

Post by Loughla »

Zancarius wrote: post #124
Loughla wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With enough of a screen, text editing is not bad either. I didn't realize how terribly I wanted a touch screen for work until I worked with excel on a touch screen with a keyboard. It was unbelievably fast. With my left hand I could poke cells, the equation and scream around doing that. Meanwhile, my right hand was typing letters and numbers. It was like the first time I heard the Beatles. I was laughing to myself wh…

Interesting. I'd never considered spreadsheet use, but that sounds like an area worth exploring for touch-based interaction. For some things, reaching out and "grabbing" (for lack of a better term) seems to be a more natural gesture than trying to isolate whether the UI expects left click, right click, or some permutation of drag + clicking. I wonder now how much cross over will eventually occur between keyboard + to…

I've considered this. Multi-touch would be great for this. Pinch horizontally to shrink the selection, anti-pinch (I've never really though about what that motion of moving your fingers apart would be called) to expand the selection. Pinch vertically to be able to drag it around and drop it where you want.

I can't wait for a 28" touchscreen at my desk with some software to make the touch interface and excel, CSS and other random statistics programs work together a little better. It will genuinely make work easier, and make me more productive.

Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over

#192

Post by bhauer »

maxerickson wrote: post #189
bhauer wrote: post #65

Although I own three tablets, my love affair with the tablet as it exists today never really took off the same way it did for so many consumers. The primary reason is that I do not believe that tablets should be first-class computing devices. Tablets, and in my opinion, the entirety of what we today call "mobile," should be subservient to a general computing model of personal omnipresent applications [1]. Put more co…

I'd like to see much better integration between devices, but I also don't want them arbitrarily limited to dependence on a server. A couple of sibling comments have mentioned Google's stuff, but really, while something like Chromecast is a big step forward, it is still a feature missing from large screens, not a real product. The problem is that manufacturers are more interested in crap like 'content partners' than t…

Incidentally, I too was intrigued by Chromecast [1] and the similar Miracast because these are technologies that dance awfully close to where user interface push and pull should go. But they are constrained by narrow thinking, leaving them frustratingly limited and merely bite-size demonstrations of what multi-device life should look like. Both only push views, and are only read-only without a whole lot of context adaptation.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/chromecast-a-miss

Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over

#193

Post by the_watcher »

I really like my iPad a lot for second screen viewing. I think there is still a ton of untapped potential there (sports in particular could have all kinds of cool things built for tablets involving motion tracking). I really don't use it for anything else but movies when travelling.

Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over

#194

Post by jack-r-abbit »

dragontamer wrote: post #176
jack-r-abbit wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming on a Tablet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XmxtIDWI_E That clip is 1.5 minutes long. I can handle any annoying thing for a minute and a half. But I can not see any way that would be sustainable for an entire day (week, years) of coding. I doubt I will ever give up my physical keyboard. Your drawing example makes perfect sense though. We started with the Wacom tablets and such since it very closely mat…

The AIDE programming environment was more of a proof of concept video, rather than an actual methodology to programming. No, we cannot program effectively on tablets with touch / pen yet. However, I bet that we will one day create a UI design program on the tablet (drag and drop perhaps? Gesture based?) that is more natural. At least, more natural for programming tablet applications. There is a major advantage when y…

> No seriously, a dock makes things much better

Exactly. Which is why I said I doubt I'll ever give up my physical keyboard. It doesn't have to be attached... it just needs to be real (not virtual). :)

See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7191779

Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over

#195

Post by wonderyak »

scribu wrote: post #150
wonderyak wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably Workspaces: http://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/

Indeed. Thanks!

Being able to assist you in any small way is really a treat considering all I've learned from your site over the years.

Thank you.

Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over

#196

Post by memracom »

bad_user wrote: post #172
grecy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever seen a child use a tablet? It's mind-blowing to see a 3 year old use one better than their parents. I don't think tablets will ever replace laptops, but that's not the point of consumption is it. They'd rather you buy a laptop for "work" a tablet for "consumption" and a phone, and...

I have a 3 year old, he likes my iPad, but I don't get the fascination of people with children that are "using one better than their parents". Are they using it for anything useful? Are they reading emails? Are they browsing websites? Can they search YouTube for their favorite cartoons or songs? So what the hell are we talking about anyway? Moving stuff around the screen and opening their favorite game? I don't see h…

My 6 year old daughter has an iPad 1 which she appropriated from mum. She has taught me gestures that I didn't know about, and that you can click the button twice to get a menu of running apps and shut down ones that are slowing things down. She figured out on her own, that the URLs announced on the kids TV channels can be typed into the browser and she works her way through these sites, saves high scores, wins prizes (pages to print and colour) and so on.

Just yesterday something new came up on one channel and she grabbed her iPad to look up that channel's schedule page to see if it was a schedule change or just a short that they sometimes play between programs.

And she draws all kinds of stuff in a kind of story mode, kind of like the way the Olympics opening ceremony unfolds a story. And she plays some games (only free ones and I decide what to install). These aren't drawings that she saves, because she is continually erasing and redrawing, but sometimes she does draw things and saves them into the gallery. I downloaded a selection of free drawing apps based on review sites that list stuff like X Great Apps for Kids.

She sets up reminders for events in her life including school field trips. Personally I never use calendaring programs so she just figured this out on her own. And she worked her way through Settings experimenting and asking questions about anything that she did not understand.

Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over

#197

Post by rdl »

I use my tablet (iPad 4 with LTE for $10/mo) for a fair number of specific tasks, but I prefer a laptop/desktop generally.

It rocks on planes, as a car nav system in a rental car, for reviewing applications (...), for instapaper, for bathroom computing, for reading PDFs (although sometimes I use a Kindle DX), etc.

Maybe I'm old, but using an iPhone 5S for reading long articles is kind of painful.

Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over

#198

Post by giantrobothead »

mathattack wrote: post #190
giantrobothead wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Any device that limits my ability to communicate effectively is not for me. Also, as an avid CLI user, a tablet is next to useless for me. I don't really feel like buying a bluetooth keyboard for a tablet just to optimize text input.

I think the iPad is most efficient as a 1 way device. Great for reading and viewing, but not good for responding. Hence the airplane use call. Laptops have gotten convenient enough (and strong enough batteries) to compete though.

I can see the utility of the tablet as a browsing/reading/listening device. However, I am a bit of a curmudgeon and will clutch my laptop to myself as long as possible.

Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over

#199

Post by _Simon »

w1ntermute wrote: post #163
snogglethorpe wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have an iphone. I have an Android phone which is larger (65mm width) than an iphone 5, but decidedly smaller than a phablet. My phone is just on the edge of one-hand usability (I can mostly manage it but sometimes things get pretty awkward) and I often wish I had something iphone-sized instead, but choice is pretty limited among smaller Android phones (they exist, but tend to be old/slow/etc). People I know w…

Have you considered that one-handed usability isn't a defining property of smartphones?

Have you considered being less patronising?

Re: Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over

#200

Post by bad_user »

memracom wrote: post #196
bad_user wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a 3 year old, he likes my iPad, but I don't get the fascination of people with children that are "using one better than their parents". Are they using it for anything useful? Are they reading emails? Are they browsing websites? Can they search YouTube for their favorite cartoons or songs? So what the hell are we talking about anyway? Moving stuff around the screen and opening their favorite game? I don't see h…

My 6 year old daughter has an iPad 1 which she appropriated from mum. She has taught me gestures that I didn't know about, and that you can click the button twice to get a menu of running apps and shut down ones that are slowing things down. She figured out on her own, that the URLs announced on the kids TV channels can be typed into the browser and she works her way through these sites, saves high scores, wins prize…

What drawing apps have you installed that you can recommend? The one I found for my son is terrible - sluggish and shows an annoying top banner serving ads completely unrelated to kids or drawings.
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