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Touch Laptops

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Re: Touch Laptops

#51

Post by lloeki »

smiler wrote: post #18
meaty wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am British! I haven't used imperial for at least 15 years apart from for speed limits, which I ignore anyway.

Except you subconsciously have. All display sizes are sold in inches. The trip computer on your car will tell you miles per gallon. Even if you ignore speed limits, your speedometer gives you your speed in MPH :). If you've ever flown on a plane, altitude has been given as feet and distance in miles. So you do use both.

> If you've ever flown on a plane, altitude has been given as feet and distance in miles.

If you fly a plane (not just on a plane), those are nautical miles, not land miles. And speed in knots. And rate of climb in ft/min.

Re: Touch Laptops

#52

Post by tonyedgecombe »

octotoad wrote: post #39

This got me thinking about the whole Windows ARM port and x86 compatibility. I'm sure it's been mentioned before, but, why the hell didn't Microsoft make use of .NET for cross-platform compatibility? Have developers write applications in C# or any other language supported by the CLR and let .NET work out the x86/ARM differences. I'm sure there are valid technical and possibly political reasons this didn't happen, but…

I just fired up VS2012, created a C# Store (Metro) app and looked in properties. One of the platforms available is ARM.

Re: Touch Laptops

#53

Post by gabemart »

josteink wrote: post #21

His complaints about widescreen tablets not being very natural in portrait mode speaks volumes about his lack of experience with Android tablets, which all comes in this form. It may feel a bit weird at first, but really, it's sorta like reading webpages of a normal A4 sheet of paper. And we should be pretty used to that. The iPad haven't been around for so long.

I was baffled by his example of the wikipedia article in both orientations. For me, the portrait mode he spent so long criticizing seemed the clear winner in terms of readability.

Re: Touch Laptops

#54

Post by Breakthrough »

And this is exactly why I wonder who decided 16:9 was better than 16:10 for laptops/tablets/etc... Even just that little bit of extra vertical space makes it so much more comfortable in portrait mode (when I rotate my computer monitor, which is an old TN LCD panel since low response 16:10 monitors are pretty much non-existent now).

Re: Touch Laptops

#56

Post by isani »

tomflack wrote: post #40
josteink wrote: post #21

His complaints about widescreen tablets not being very natural in portrait mode speaks volumes about his lack of experience with Android tablets, which all comes in this form. It may feel a bit weird at first, but really, it's sorta like reading webpages of a normal A4 sheet of paper. And we should be pretty used to that. The iPad haven't been around for so long.

A4 has an aspect ratio of 2:3, not 9:16. The iPad is 3:4 which is significantly closer to A4 than a weirdly tall portrait widescreen tablet (3:5.33333)

Actually, A4 has an aspect ratio of one to the square root of two. Your point still stands, as this is even closer to the iPad screen than 2:3.

Re: Touch Laptops

#57

Post by xradionut »

kevingadd wrote: post #49
octotoad wrote: post #39

This got me thinking about the whole Windows ARM port and x86 compatibility. I'm sure it's been mentioned before, but, why the hell didn't Microsoft make use of .NET for cross-platform compatibility? Have developers write applications in C# or any other language supported by the CLR and let .NET work out the x86/ARM differences. I'm sure there are valid technical and possibly political reasons this didn't happen, but…

Judging by Microsoft's recent choices to kill .NET-based products like XNA and Silverlight it seems to be the case that management aren't fans of it anymore. Dropping support for XNA is particularly mysterious given Microsoft's struggles to get game developers to support Windows 8 - they literally had a dedicated community of game developers that could have put titles on the Windows 8 store on day 1 if Microsoft had…

Yes, plenty of C# developers were shafted over the changes to the infrastructure. I'm ignoring the "Metro" Apps for now, most of what I do is either server, web or a "real desktop" application. (Not to mention lots of CRUD corporate projects.)

Re: Touch Laptops

#58

Post by bryanlarsen »

rikf wrote: post #7

I find it annoying when I have to move my hands from the keyboard to the mouse. I imagine it would be infinitely more irritating and far less comfortable moving my hands from the keyboard to touch a vertical screen in front of me.

A large part of the reason why that's so annoying is that when you do that you have to also figure out where the mouse pointer is, and then start the mouse moving in the right direction. Once the mouse is moving the interaction is very natural and you can do it by auto-pilot. But until it is, you actually have to use a little piece of your brain which you'd rather focus on the problem at hand.

Touch should completely negate that. Just touch what you're looking at; you should be able to do that without requiring any higher brain activity.

Re: Touch Laptops

#59

Post by pretoriusB »

smiler wrote: post #18
meaty wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am British! I haven't used imperial for at least 15 years apart from for speed limits, which I ignore anyway.

Except you subconsciously have. All display sizes are sold in inches. The trip computer on your car will tell you miles per gallon. Even if you ignore speed limits, your speedometer gives you your speed in MPH :). If you've ever flown on a plane, altitude has been given as feet and distance in miles. So you do use both.

>Except you subconsciously have. All display sizes are sold in inches.

I'm in a country that uses the metric system, and have never cared about learning the exact equivalent of screen sizes. I just intuitively know, (from using and looking at them in the office or the store) what a 13", 15", 24", 40" etc screen is like -- and I never bothered to do the conversion at all.

It wouldn't even really help, because even if a knew the measurement in metric units, it would mean very little to the actual feeling of the screen, especially considering the variety of aspect ratios and that the display size measures the diagonal.

>The trip computer on your car will tell you miles per gallon.

All trip computers I've even seen can be set to show metric units.

>Even if you ignore speed limits, your speedometer gives you your speed in MPH :)

Still no need to do any conversion. I've travelled thousands of miles in the US (Route 66 and coast to coast several times), and I never wondered "Hmm, how many km/h are 70 mph?". I just needed to keep an eye on the speed limit signs to keep below that, and drive as fast as the car/road called for. Intuitively, not by translating to metric units.

Re: Touch Laptops

#60

Post by pretoriusB »

HCIdivision17 wrote: post #42
rjd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having growing up in a metric country and lived in Britain I must admit its very nice having 60miles per equalling 60 minutes of driving for long trips. Being able to say "I'm 45 miles away from X I'll be there in 45 minutes" without having to do recalculate each time you pass a road sign makes trips all the more pleasant.

This principle is likely the reason imperial units stick: they're fantastic for fast fractional math. For the same reason, it's easier to work with 360 degrees in a circle than 2*pi radians.

>This principle is likely the reason imperial units stick: they're fantastic for fast fractional math.

As opposed to multiples of ten, in the metric system? Huh?

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