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Samsung Reinvents Windows (Not the OS) With Touchscreen Display
An anonymous reader writes "If you want a large, interactive display on your wall, typically you have to make space for it by moving any pictures out of the way, and finding room next to any shelves or lighting you have installed. Samsung's idea is to remove that problem by creating a transparent display that replaces an actual window, or at least sit over the top of one. The display uses ambient light during the day and then can switch over to a more traditional black background as a night time mode. If you want to shut the daylight out it has virtual blinds you can draw to help darken a room. And from the outside you just like you are tapping your window as none of the graphics can be seen. Yes, your neighbors will talk."
Wouldn't be surprised if a Samsung Window would eventually be cheaper than a real window. Where I live that might be the case anyway.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I'll finally be able to see the dust in the back corner of my cubicle!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Yeah, cause there's so many unique ways to lay out a weather widget. Oh, right. Apple exclusively owns any layout they happen to use, and anyone else must use the most inconvenient format and layout they can think of.
Because Apple is so unique and innovative
Fucking idiot fanboys.
yes..there is a typo in the statement from the article..and I just copied and pasted it directly....did not want to change what the site said....
That's what 'sic' is for. I'd link to the page at wikipedia, but, you know...
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Nah. I don't have an OSX box to play with, but the Windows 7 widget is currently on the right side of my screen, and the screenshots from OP appear accurate: Both Samsung and Apple have widgets that extend beyond the top of a rectangle, while MSFT does not.
So it looks, to me, more like the OSX widiget.
But really, who cares? It's not like whoever is responsible for these various computer devices invented the concept of a concise tabular weather display with informative graphics. Folks had been doing that long, long time before before any of this in both print and on TV.
That the layout persists is more evidence of its perceived usefulness, than it is evidence that it has been flagrantly copied from someone else's creative work.
Kid-proof tablet..
Man, those stray baseballs from the backyard are going to get much more expensive... Oh who am I kidding - kids don't play ball anymore.
These windows should look nice with this ceiling together: http://idle.slashdot.org/story/12/01/05/1517243/germans-increase-office-efficiency-with-cloud-ceiling
Perpetual good weather outside! I feel great, and work better!
I had to use a link to Slashdot, because Wikipedia Links are, like, so out, today.
Now my only problem is that I have to replace my broken windows often. Rocks get hurled through them, flaming Native American arrows get shot through them, and even I manage to damage them when plinking with great-great-granddaddy's 'ole Gatling.
Fix that for me, Samsung.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Seriously. So many folks are blamed for errors in these days of blogs and chaos, when a simple [ sic ] would be perfectly adequate to exonerate them.
Kid-proof tablet..
After a bit of googling it seems as though Apple ripped off the entire Dashboard concept from Konfabulator.
Contrary to what you may believe, fanboy, Apple are not the epitome of innovation. They'd have gone nowhere if they didn't steal ideas from Xerox (just like Microsoft did). Steve Jobs admitted it himself.
I don't think this is meant to be used as a primary display for long term sessions, just as a terminal for quick tasks (e.g. see time/weather, check flight schedules, etc.).
weinersmith
Maybe we should rephrase the proverb “When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger”, into "When shown a new display technology, the imbecile looks at the weather widget design".
"Sport is for the proletariat"
That one would look great on a Sports t-shirt.
The window itself is seriously awesome. But the weather app is a direct rip-off of OS X's weather widget. There's seriously no other way to design a weather app but how Apple did in 2005?
Never change, Samsung.
The Apple Weather app looks like the weather presentation has looked when PRINTED in different Swedish NEWSPAPERS from cirka 1980 (ever since Swedish newspapers started to be printed in colour). Similar weather presentations was used by Swedish Television when it was still broadcasted in monochrome; Sweden switched to colour TV broadcasts in 1970. I'm not claiming it is a Swedish invention, this kind of weather display may have been used and invented in some other country/-ies decades before it become common in Swedish media. I'm just pointing out that there is a much larger and diverse world outside the boarders of the country you live in.
Just because some "innovation" is brought to the publics attention by some company in USA, that doesn't mean that company invited it. Most (all?) US companies are copycats by nature (and Apple in particular is a pure copyist), usually decades behind how stuff is done in other countries (and usually the US consumer has less to choose from when it comes to different gadgets doing the same thing, differently, US companies like to standardise on one way for a consumer product to work, to avoid that their consumer will get confused (like early automobiles steered by reins), while most companies operatinh outside USA take for granted that their consumers are intelligent enough to understand that different products might achieve the same end result, even if they need to be handled/interpreted differently). Unlike companies in other countries, US companies like to imply that they invented the things they market, even when they didn't. Because the US population like to live in isolation from the (scary/insignificant/...) world outside USA (when was the last time you visited a foreign website? one that was not in English?), US companies can get away with this kind of shenanigans without getting caught.
Wearing it, however, would imply the wearer to be so much of a prolete that his being one would preclude him knowing about being one. So there would be one explicit and one implicit self-referential aspect to the t-shirt. Congrats with that intellectual achievement :-)
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
But Wikipedia is "down" right now!
Just turn off CSS and you're good to go.
If it has rounded corners apple has already invented the iWindow.
And Konfabulator was nothing more than Desktop Accessories
We heard nobody liked Vistas but we put Windows in your windows so you can play flash games with your neighbors while you play Flash games with your 'Friends'. At least, until the cops show up: "This window has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down immediately!"
Disabling JavaScript works here to get around the SOPA banners (which are pretty pointless outside the US, since we can't do anything much about it).
Which is the point. You can't do much about it, but you'll suffer the consequences with the rest of the world.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
10 minutes is an over-estimate - my research has found RTC fatigue occurs in as little as 2 minutes. Its funny how this mistake keeps being made over-and-over again...I speculate that it is due to a lack of serious research and the general prescriptions of avoiding fatigue, without understanding the full range of human capabilities, when designing Touch-UIs such as this.
Anyways yes, for very minimal interactions this concept is great - so much surface area is devoted to glass that I'm sure Samsung is going to have a massive product here, however I foresee the big interest in this being less to do with the interactivity, more with the transparency of the display. Imagine walking down the high street in 2025 and every shop front having animated displays which complement the internal displays. Imaging mirrors where you can try on different colours of make-up, hair shades, hair styles etc; add on some head tracking capabilities and there are some possibly fascinating AR applications.
The tech seems to be scaling up year by year and they appear to have improved the transparency (its was 40% (?) opaque in 2010) - really an exciting product. Cant wait for it to come on a roll ;)
Make a tablet with this kind of screen in front of an e-ink display and you'd have the best of both worlds: crisp, clear text with long battery life, or full color.
These devices look great in the movies but in daily life... well, there are a LOT of people who think tablets will take the place of computers, these thoughtful posts often being written on PC's has of course no bearing on their value...
The problem is that cost, convenience and usability, just don't measure up. Say I see an email I want to respond to on my window... do I then reply to it on the window? Try it, it isn't nearly as comfortable as it seems. Same with things like the weather, the amount of time really spend checking the weather is very very low and the TV which is already in the house is more then happy to report on it.
Your early morning routine just doesn't fit a dozen gadgets all begging for your attention. The people who have enough time to spend in the kitchen looking at their window can't afford it (the unemployed) and the people who can, have better things to do.
It as with the intelligent fridges that have been just around the corner for god knows how long now. People that do the shopping "mum's" are like the soviets, rather then spending a billion dollars creating a pen that works in zero gravity, they use a piece of paper and pencil and call it a shopping list. The early adopters who could afford the early models just don't do shopping that way.
These widgets all seem nice, as nice as when MS called it Active Desktop, which died. Then Vista something or other, which died and now in Windows 8 again, I am supposed to be looking at my desktop rather then at the program I have opened full screen obscuring it completely.
Even on a tech site such as this, I am fairly certain that 99% of you life in a house that is no more techie then that of your parents. For that matter, lights turned off by clapping, once the next tech, how many are still around?
Windows in houses are often the oddest sizes, go ahead, see if what happens if you break one of yours, almost certain a replacement has to be custom made to fit. They are often very large indeed, so that any tech window replacing them, is going to be highly expensive. Until they get within reach of the common geek software for them will be in short supply making them less usable and until companies start working together instead of fighting each other (wanna bet your Samsung Window conspires with your Philips dishwasher to kill off the iPhone?)
Once I specifically made sure I could watch shows like Beyond 2000. Back then I was young and hopeful. Now I am old and angry I just feel bitter that I still don't have my sex robot... eh flying car. I have come to realize that most of the World of the Future stuff just isn't practical.
I mean, a weather widget on a window? What is it going to tell me, what the weather looks like outside? I am not interested enough to pay for an expensive screen, the cost of installing it and for that matter getting up to check. I just look at the cat. sprawles on the kitchen floor (hot), on the window sill huddled up (okayish), buried with the wife in a pile of blankets on the bed (nice and brisk (ducks pillow thrown at him) sorry cold).
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Sure, great ideas. My point is not that this is unusable, but that it's gonna be way too expensive for 99.9% of consumers to consider buying one. Especially since the use cases you mention are "this would be cool, kinda".
Now, to get a very optimistic (as in, low price) estimate of what this will cost: We add up 1 LCD screen of about 40 inches, 16 replacement Ipad digitizers from ebay, and an Atom-powered net-top to run the software and control everything. You end up with $500 for the screen + $800 for the digitizers + $200 for the net-top, or a total cost of $1500.
Note that this very optimistic estimate, assuming that everything scales linearly and that they are able to sell millions of these and get the same economics of scale as with LCD TVs, gives us an unbelievably expensive way to quickly check your email and watch TV while cooking. Particularly when you take into account that 99.9% of all consumers already own several devices that can do exactly these things. The question becomes "would you rather buy this, or would you buy three Ipads instead"? That is why this technology, while cool, will suffer the same fate as the Microsoft Surface.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
The display looks like it's running the Enlightenment window manager. Samsung is a known, perhaps the biggest, sponsor of the Enlightenment project, which they probably use in some hardware already shipping now.
You say ripped off when Steve has clearly stated it was in homage to the record label.
Jonathanjk.com
You can even just turn off Javascript and use the site entirely as normal (with CSS et al), but I would advise not to - it's a worthy cause and we should be supportive of it, even if it's a little inconvenient.
Apparently standard displays have 5% transparency, this pushes that to 15-20%, so it's still an improvement (and probably less of a power drain during daylight when it doesn't need edge lighting - or not so much - as it can rely on natural light).
You forgot one little detail there. Apple music sued Apple for stealing their name. So Apple Music was not amused by that "homage" cock and bull story from Dear Leader Steve.
Sure, but Apple Computers settled the ripping off of Apple Record's name with a consent agreement that Apple Computers would never enter the music business, and of course Apple Computers is always true to their word...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Right... and Chinese "bootleggers" are clearly just paying "homage" to well known designer labels!
What Jobs said is clearly bullshit. What he actually DID was all about the Benjamins, no "homage" intended.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"And from the outside you *look* just like you are tapping your window as none of the graphics can be seen. "
They accidentally a verb.
Oh come on, it's completely transparent!
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
... if, instead of just appearing to be a window from the outside, you could project scenes of your own choosing to the outside world. The possibilities for mischief tantalize.
I know that a big translucent touch sensitive screen floating in the room is visually stunning, but has anyone thought of the consequences of having to use one for any long period? Waving your arms around and having your arm elevated for longer than a few seconds is hard on the shoulders.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Wow! Instead of looking out the window to see what the weather is like we can now look at the icon on the window to see what the weather is like. I think that soon we will replace windows with video monitors and cameras anyway. It would result in more security and less energy use. I can just see people with ocean views living far away from the oceans. All we need is a monitor that will last a hundred years or so.
Being supportive of the cause means contacting your representatives, not abstaining from wikipedia. Go ahead and use a workaround, just don't forget to call.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
My daughter is currently in an urban design class. She has severe dyslexia so I read the materials to her, which gives me some familiarity with all her classes. The architects featured in this class seem to be most concerned about the usefulness of the perimeter of buildings, wanting us to abandon flat featureless walls for the porches and doors and windows -- permeability, they called it -- that were popular before WWII. Although I disagree with some of their philosophies, (I am violently opposed to brutalism, for instance) I agree with this.
So a horror slideshow from their standpoint would be commercial and private buildings with utterly blank walls that end flatly against the property, isolating the residents inside and making the space outside useless except for traveling away from the hulking building. And sadly, there are many examples of that, both for commercial businesses and for private residences.
It occurs to me that technology like this would make that type of design even more likely. If you could put a "window" anywhere, showing any type of scene, what do you care what's actually outside? [1] I know, you can sit this on top of a real window, but I wonder how often that will be done in real life? In an age where all the up and coming adults have been trained since grade school to live with ear buds inserted and head lowered to a 4" display, what chance do us old fogeys who remember fresh air and open views, have, to convince them that houses should have access to the outdoors?
[1] Except, I suppose, from a security standpoint, although there's hardware and software solutions for that.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Actually, Apple didn't steal it. Jobs licensed it from Xerox in exchange for Apple stock.
(Apple also improved on it because the Xerox Alto didn't have overlapping windows ,and Woz came up with regions to handle updating overlapping windows. Woz subsequently got in a plane crash (in his Piper) and told Jobs (who visited him in the hospital) that he still knew how to do regions. Later, when Woz talked to Xerox, he found out that no, they didn't handle overlapping windows at all. So Woz got a patent on it)
Now we can finally see what the weather's like by looking at a window!
Really, of all the applications they could have chosen for the main picture, they pick a weather forecast?
When someone says, "Any fool can see
iTunes.
It's a chart. How many different ways can you display it? There's only a few, so no matter what they did they'll be "ripping off" someone.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...