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Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

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Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#191

Post by Tloewald »

quink wrote: post #138
Tloewald wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#192

Post by jacobolus »

hyperliner wrote: post #184
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

"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 changes that A approved from B and C, but not the changes that A did not approve...

How do you handle it? You’re saying MS word now has a solution for this that avoids conflicts? I guess I’m not enough of a power user to know about it.

Okay, now imagine that you want to both want to open and type on the same document at the same time, real-time-collaboration style. You’re saying Word has a solution for this one too?

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#193

Post by nightpool »

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.

Honest question, why can't you split the document and work on individual chapters?

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#194

Post by higherpurpose »

ajessup wrote: post #18

OP, surprised that MS (as with any large company) didn't require you to sign an NDA to not discuss unannounced features during development. Bold (and encouraging) move on their part if they didn't.

They're using him as a PR sheep. Of course they didn't require an NDA.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#195

Post by imaginenore »

rasz_pl wrote: post #185
imaginenore wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Actually its response time.

Actually, no, it isn't.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#196

Post by rasz_pl »

imaginenore wrote: post #195
rasz_pl wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Actually its response time. Actually, no, it isn't.

"This controller is well known for its < 5.4 milliseconds response time"

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#197

Post by kalleboo »

rasz_pl wrote: post #174
biot wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your two minutes of effort also include regression testing? Did you verify that all aspects of the OS and applications which depend on the home button having a specific behavior continue to function within OS-guaranteed response times? Have you done user testing to ensure that the delay after lifting the stylus meets with user expectations and doesn't seem like the OS is frozen? Have you met with the hardware te…

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.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#198

Post by gcanyon »

balls187 wrote: post #172
jzwinck wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I open a CSV file in Excel 2013, it correctly delimits the file. You may have non-standard CSV files (or at least delimited files that are not properly escaped)

It's important to point out that there is no standard for CSV files, only conventions.

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#199

Post by kalleboo »

rasz_pl wrote: post #70
imaginenore wrote: post #10

Microsoft demoed 1ms touchscreen lag in 2012. Most modern touchscreens still have 100ms lag. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

This lag is in the software stack (mostly in UI graphics). Not in hardware. Remember Androids ~>200ms sound lag?

What I've read is most of the lag in the more optimized touchscreen stacks (read=iOS) is due to filtering and smoothing, which takes a few samples to do. The worse stacks (early android) had poor drivers and a lot of layers of abstraction, or worse, Java (maybe this is what you mean when you say "UI Graphics", but the raw numbers we're talking about here are on a far lower layer than scrolling in lists).

Graphics rendering lag is at worst 2 frames of video (double-buffering).

Re: Penny Arcade – Surface Pro 3 update

#200

Post by gcanyon »

nightpool wrote: post #105
rasz_pl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like well player PR team, they failed to fix every single issue. They couldnt even let him have the home button fix, something that sounds like a simple script I could write in AutoHotkey in two minutes tops. Surface team looks like a committee full of control freaks. cant give users control over home button, cant give users control over pressure curves (they brought two HARDWIRED tablets instead of writing conf…

Did you read the article? They're planning on distributing a pressure curve configuration tool.

"They're planning on distributing a pressure curve configuration tool," seems like a much stronger statement than the article's actual statement, "What they proved was that MS could release an app that let artists adjust the pressure curve to suit their style. They assured me this is something they want to do."
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