How about telling me why such a program is impossible?
Don't change your story. I implied it was hard, not impossible. You know it's hard when after decades of research, people haven't managed to make this work even in simple cases.
Why would any large keyboard be designed to be used with thumbs?
It wouldn't. And since you only get a large keyboard in landscape mode, you can't type on the thing holding it with two hands. Stupid design.
On the iPhone, I got used to the portrait keyboard that I rarely use the landscape mode anymore.
Yeah, me too: when handheld, portrait only on iPad and landscape only on iPod/iPhone. Kind of like Nokias, which also have notoriously bad keyboards. It doesn't have to be that awful.
How are other predictive and correction systems better?
Some use word-level prediction, so you often just have one tap per word. Many use much better character-level analysis so you can type much faster and less precisely.
Do you have any research to show that Swype is more usable?
Do a Google Scholar search; all these input methods have been extensively evaluated scientifically.
You only need to hold it down for a second. Having dedicated keys would take just as long, since you'd have to switch keyboards.
Mobile keyboards on other platforms solve this problem. The Apple keyboard is just a loud and clear "f*ck you" from Apple to European users, particularly since you can't replace it.
Care to link to a review that says such a thing for a decent stylus made for a capacitive touchscreen? And are you talking about the iPad or iPhone touchscreen, or another device?
Just look it up in the literature; it's a hardware limitation known for decades. Some manufacturers are working on fixing it with hybrid devices.
BTW, you didn't mention which note apps you had tried and what you didn't like about them
What I didn't like about them is that none of the ones I tried successfully compensated for the limitations of the stylus; writing was still much slower than on paper. None of them had decent handwritten word wrap either; they all forced you to think about word wrapping yourself. (I'd have to check on iTunes which ones they were since I erased them, but it was basically all the highly rated ones.)
The Internet wasn't "designed for" delivering DVDs. It can certainly handle it, but you should pay for the bandwidth and volume you actually use. High bandwith requirements and high data volume = you should pay more.
The keyboard is great. In landscape, I can touch-type on it much faster than I thought I would be able to.
Me too, but that doesn't define "great". On the iPad, the landscape keyboard is nearly impossible to use with thumbs. On the iPhone, the portrait keyboard is too small. Predictive text and correction is far below the quality you get on other platforms. And there's nothing like Swype.
I would have typed some Russian characters, but Slashdot eats them up. Not sure what you’re on about there.
You need to do long key presses to get common alphabetic characters in Western European languages, keys that should have dedicated buttons.
What do you mean when you say [the styli] don’t work right?
They give inaccurate positions and often don't register touch at all.
Happy trolling.
Unlike you, I have the facts, since I use both platforms regularly. I'm sorry that my observations don't fit your limited understanding.
Or, more likely, you're just an astrotufer, either working for Apple, or having your livelihood bound up with Apple products.
Also, unless the software can convert your input into something useful, there isn't that much of an advantage over pen and paper to most people.
There is to students and academics. You don't need to parse that input to make it useful to keep online.
then you can usually offer a better input method for that data
Just as hopeless as parsing the data. Nobody knows how to do that for chemical formulas.
avoiding the need for an accurate stylus.
Some of the best input methods use a stylus; that's why we write with pens instead of fingers.
And Apple's input methods are really lousy. Swype and Swiftkey on Android beat it hands down, and Graffiti with a pen is even better. Apple's misshapen keyboard is a pain to use, and it doesn't even have international characters. Sorry, but text input on the iPad is a joke.
Which stylus have you tried and what app did you use, BTW?
Pogo, Targus, and a bunch of others; foam-tipped, soft rubber tipped, and hard rubber-tipped. None of them work right, on any capacitive screen. I also tried half a dozen different note taking apps and finally gave up. I'm probably going back to a real tablet for note taking.
My god, do you even own an iPad? Any of the commercial styli for the iPad are like trying to write with a sausage.
Someone is going to come out with decent hardware combining a multitouch screen with a Wacom digitizer and pen; it's not going to be Apple because Apple puts appearances ahead of functionality.
Apple succeeded because they made a shiny, fast phone and music player for a semi-literate teenage clientele. And they got a few percent of the market that way. Apple did pay attention to basic usability; Apple phones have interfaces like ATMs, easy to use for simple things. They certainly didn't even get that market share because of obscure three finger salutes in the operating system. And Apple didn't "lead" anywhere, these kinds of interfaces have been around for many years, and other people were putting them on phones as well.
Sooner or later, people want to write and sketch, and that's impossible on the iPhone and iPad.
Only in comments? gee... how about if I want to print Hello World in thai language?
Well, of course Unicode strings should be supported. I was referring to program code, not data: keywords, identifiers, etc. Those should stay in ASCII in any programming language.
(However, for professional development, you need to use internationalization support anyway.)
If you're going to be that childish, please get the fuck out.
Indeed, I am "getting the fuck out": I'm getting rid of my Apple stuff, because it just doesn't work well.
But it's you who's being childish, because you prefer gimmicks over
In any case, I don't think Android will be dropping multitouch at all. It's just too useful. Even if Google drops it, others will add it again.
Multitouch is useful and the screen and OS support should stay, but that's not what this is about.
The multitouch features that we're talking about here, that Apple patented, and is suing Motorola over are unintuitive and a bad idea for a consumer phone.
Using full Unicode for programming causes lots of problems; even string equality is a tricky proposition for Unicode, let alone precise parsing. Most people don't even know how to enter Unicode characters not found in their own language. And once you allow Unicode, people will do things like they did in APL.
The only place Unicode should be allowed--if at all--is in comments. Everything else should be in ASCII.
What about you RTFA before responding? I'm not saying that one should get rid of multi-touch capable hardware, I'm saying that one should get rid the stuff Apple is putting into their UI using it. You know, crappy features like pinch-to-zoom and two-finger-scrolling. They are unintuitive and don't work consistently.
Were it not for the multi-touch screen, you'd need multiple buttons for the same purpose. So for a touchscreen device:
Stop responding to some imaginary, made-up point. We're not talking about screens that can register multiple or complex touch patterns--of course, those are good for all sorts of things. Apple contributed exactly zilch to those. We are talking about what's in the patent: using specific multi-touch gestures as part of the regular UI, for zooming, scrolling, etc.
This isn't an insane Jobs obsession. He's just thought it through, and you haven't.
It's you who hasn't thought this through: you're confusing multi-touch capable hardware with what Apple is actually claiming in their patent.
Since you seem a little daft, let me be explicit: Android should drop the crap that Apple is suing Motorola over. It's a useless gimmick. Of course, Android should keep multi-touch capable hardware, and apps like keyboard and music apps should continue to use it.
Multitouch is a gimmick, something Apple can use to distinguish themselves from the rest. It's like their menu bar and their Finder.
Anybody who thinks that multitouch helps usability hasn't tried explaining it to their mother. And even for experienced users, it's an exercise in frustration: it works in some apps and not in others, it does different things, and you need to cover up even more of the screen with your hand. Furthermore, it doesn't carry over to pen-based input, and as the number of handwriting and drawing apps on App Store shows, people want pens.
Let Jobs pursue his insane obsessions. Google should focus on usability, do everybody a favor, and eliminate multitouch from Android.
When was the last time some major company was sued to stop production of a product, and they were actually stopped? Never, of course; patent holders just want money.
Large companies often have to pay penalties and modify their products. Small companies, however, go out of business when this happens. The patent system basically creates an oligopoly where only companies with lots of lawyers and resources (=tons of money) manage to survive the inevitable patent lawsuits.
People used to file lots of patents on "doing X on a computer", then "doing X over the Internet", and "doing X in Java".
Apple has contributed a great innovation to the world by patenting "doing X using a heuristic". Thousands of companies and lawyers desperate for more patents now have a rich patent field to mine.
Too bad that Apple didn't patent "patenting doing X using a heuristic".
I think it's pretty clear that facebook has broken the law. It's not OK for businesses to keep breaking the law simply because the penalties are lower than the gain.
If this doesn't stop, penalties will increase, and maybe one should go with tough criminal penalties after the owners and managers.
It's a problem if you must fly there right now. However, if you take a long-term perspective, it's not that hard. There are plenty of objects between here and nearby stars and you can hop from one to another, settling and recovering as you go along. And long term, stars move relative to one another quite a lot, so once you've managed to get to your neighboring stars and settle them; a complete galactic orbit takes about 200 million years.
So, between spreading out and having things mixed up while orbiting the galactic center, humans could spread out over fairly large numbers of planets fairly quickly (on a cosmic scale). We need to master traveling to, and living on asteroids and oort cloud objects, but once we have done that, humans will spread across the galaxy. It doesn't even matter whether "we" think it's a good idea; it doesn't take a lot of humans to get the process started.
But if they succeed, then that culture will be passed down, so you'll have a whole population that is happy staying in their little box.
Humans aren't "happy staying in their little box" (earth) right onw, so what makes you think many of them wouldn't jump at the opportunity to land on a planet?
What this proposal means is basically that everybody carry around extra batteries so that people far from the tower don't have to.
But, really, now, there are more fun way of getting help with your dying battery than that. Like "Hey, lady, can I plug my high-powered USB plug into your USB socket to recharge my battery?" So much more personal!
Slashdot Mirror
How about telling me why such a program is impossible?
Don't change your story. I implied it was hard, not impossible. You know it's hard when after decades of research, people haven't managed to make this work even in simple cases.
Why would any large keyboard be designed to be used with thumbs?
It wouldn't. And since you only get a large keyboard in landscape mode, you can't type on the thing holding it with two hands. Stupid design.
On the iPhone, I got used to the portrait keyboard that I rarely use the landscape mode anymore.
Yeah, me too: when handheld, portrait only on iPad and landscape only on iPod/iPhone. Kind of like Nokias, which also have notoriously bad keyboards. It doesn't have to be that awful.
How are other predictive and correction systems better?
Some use word-level prediction, so you often just have one tap per word. Many use much better character-level analysis so you can type much faster and less precisely.
Do you have any research to show that Swype is more usable?
Do a Google Scholar search; all these input methods have been extensively evaluated scientifically.
You only need to hold it down for a second. Having dedicated keys would take just as long, since you'd have to switch keyboards.
Mobile keyboards on other platforms solve this problem. The Apple keyboard is just a loud and clear "f*ck you" from Apple to European users, particularly since you can't replace it.
Care to link to a review that says such a thing for a decent stylus made for a capacitive touchscreen? And are you talking about the iPad or iPhone touchscreen, or another device?
Just look it up in the literature; it's a hardware limitation known for decades. Some manufacturers are working on fixing it with hybrid devices.
BTW, you didn't mention which note apps you had tried and what you didn't like about them
What I didn't like about them is that none of the ones I tried successfully compensated for the limitations of the stylus; writing was still much slower than on paper. None of them had decent handwritten word wrap either; they all forced you to think about word wrapping yourself. (I'd have to check on iTunes which ones they were since I erased them, but it was basically all the highly rated ones.)
The Internet wasn't "designed for" delivering DVDs. It can certainly handle it, but you should pay for the bandwidth and volume you actually use. High bandwith requirements and high data volume = you should pay more.
I don’t see why it’s so impossible.
Well, then you know little about usability.
The keyboard is great. In landscape, I can touch-type on it much faster than I thought I would be able to.
Me too, but that doesn't define "great". On the iPad, the landscape keyboard is nearly impossible to use with thumbs. On the iPhone, the portrait keyboard is too small. Predictive text and correction is far below the quality you get on other platforms. And there's nothing like Swype.
I would have typed some Russian characters, but Slashdot eats them up. Not sure what you’re on about there.
You need to do long key presses to get common alphabetic characters in Western European languages, keys that should have dedicated buttons.
What do you mean when you say [the styli] don’t work right?
They give inaccurate positions and often don't register touch at all.
Happy trolling.
Unlike you, I have the facts, since I use both platforms regularly. I'm sorry that my observations don't fit your limited understanding.
Or, more likely, you're just an astrotufer, either working for Apple, or having your livelihood bound up with Apple products.
Either way: stop spreading lies.
Also, unless the software can convert your input into something useful, there isn't that much of an advantage over pen and paper to most people.
There is to students and academics. You don't need to parse that input to make it useful to keep online.
then you can usually offer a better input method for that data
Just as hopeless as parsing the data. Nobody knows how to do that for chemical formulas.
avoiding the need for an accurate stylus.
Some of the best input methods use a stylus; that's why we write with pens instead of fingers.
And Apple's input methods are really lousy. Swype and Swiftkey on Android beat it hands down, and Graffiti with a pen is even better. Apple's misshapen keyboard is a pain to use, and it doesn't even have international characters. Sorry, but text input on the iPad is a joke.
Which stylus have you tried and what app did you use, BTW?
Pogo, Targus, and a bunch of others; foam-tipped, soft rubber tipped, and hard rubber-tipped. None of them work right, on any capacitive screen. I also tried half a dozen different note taking apps and finally gave up. I'm probably going back to a real tablet for note taking.
My god, do you even own an iPad? Any of the commercial styli for the iPad are like trying to write with a sausage.
Someone is going to come out with decent hardware combining a multitouch screen with a Wacom digitizer and pen; it's not going to be Apple because Apple puts appearances ahead of functionality.
Good luck with that:
http://course1.winona.edu/tnalli/s06/scan0001.jpg
Illiterate, sexting teenagers don't want pens.
Adults need them for note-taking and sketching, in addition to multi-touch for poking at buttons.
Apple succeeded because they made a shiny, fast phone and music player for a semi-literate teenage clientele. And they got a few percent of the market that way. Apple did pay attention to basic usability; Apple phones have interfaces like ATMs, easy to use for simple things. They certainly didn't even get that market share because of obscure three finger salutes in the operating system. And Apple didn't "lead" anywhere, these kinds of interfaces have been around for many years, and other people were putting them on phones as well.
Sooner or later, people want to write and sketch, and that's impossible on the iPhone and iPad.
Only in comments? gee ... how about if I want to print Hello World in thai language?
Well, of course Unicode strings should be supported. I was referring to program code, not data: keywords, identifiers, etc. Those should stay in ASCII in any programming language.
(However, for professional development, you need to use internationalization support anyway.)
If you're going to be that childish, please get the fuck out.
Indeed, I am "getting the fuck out": I'm getting rid of my Apple stuff, because it just doesn't work well.
But it's you who's being childish, because you prefer gimmicks over
In any case, I don't think Android will be dropping multitouch at all. It's just too useful. Even if Google drops it, others will add it again.
Multitouch is useful and the screen and OS support should stay, but that's not what this is about.
The multitouch features that we're talking about here, that Apple patented, and is suing Motorola over are unintuitive and a bad idea for a consumer phone.
Using full Unicode for programming causes lots of problems; even string equality is a tricky proposition for Unicode, let alone precise parsing. Most people don't even know how to enter Unicode characters not found in their own language. And once you allow Unicode, people will do things like they did in APL.
The only place Unicode should be allowed--if at all--is in comments. Everything else should be in ASCII.
What about you RTFA before responding? I'm not saying that one should get rid of multi-touch capable hardware, I'm saying that one should get rid the stuff Apple is putting into their UI using it. You know, crappy features like pinch-to-zoom and two-finger-scrolling. They are unintuitive and don't work consistently.
Were it not for the multi-touch screen, you'd need multiple buttons for the same purpose. So for a touchscreen device:
Stop responding to some imaginary, made-up point. We're not talking about screens that can register multiple or complex touch patterns--of course, those are good for all sorts of things. Apple contributed exactly zilch to those. We are talking about what's in the patent: using specific multi-touch gestures as part of the regular UI, for zooming, scrolling, etc.
This isn't an insane Jobs obsession. He's just thought it through, and you haven't.
It's you who hasn't thought this through: you're confusing multi-touch capable hardware with what Apple is actually claiming in their patent.
Since you seem a little daft, let me be explicit: Android should drop the crap that Apple is suing Motorola over. It's a useless gimmick. Of course, Android should keep multi-touch capable hardware, and apps like keyboard and music apps should continue to use it.
If multitouch is eliminated from Android, there's very little reason for me to keep using Android.
Don't let the door hit you in the behind on the way out.
Multitouch adds a lot of power to the UI for those apps that can make use of that power.
Doesn't seem to help improve all those crappy iPad and iPhone apps.
Ah, but things work out once a bunch of them use the fork they have to stab their neighbors and steal their forks.
Multitouch is a gimmick, something Apple can use to distinguish themselves from the rest. It's like their menu bar and their Finder.
Anybody who thinks that multitouch helps usability hasn't tried explaining it to their mother. And even for experienced users, it's an exercise in frustration: it works in some apps and not in others, it does different things, and you need to cover up even more of the screen with your hand. Furthermore, it doesn't carry over to pen-based input, and as the number of handwriting and drawing apps on App Store shows, people want pens.
Let Jobs pursue his insane obsessions. Google should focus on usability, do everybody a favor, and eliminate multitouch from Android.
Clearly someone thought of the poor struggling lawyers. They needed some love too.
I thought lawyers just used high-priced hookers.
When was the last time some major company was sued to stop production of a product, and they were actually stopped? Never, of course; patent holders just want money.
Large companies often have to pay penalties and modify their products. Small companies, however, go out of business when this happens. The patent system basically creates an oligopoly where only companies with lots of lawyers and resources (=tons of money) manage to survive the inevitable patent lawsuits.
People used to file lots of patents on "doing X on a computer", then "doing X over the Internet", and "doing X in Java".
Apple has contributed a great innovation to the world by patenting "doing X using a heuristic". Thousands of companies and lawyers desperate for more patents now have a rich patent field to mine.
Too bad that Apple didn't patent "patenting doing X using a heuristic".
I think it's pretty clear that facebook has broken the law. It's not OK for businesses to keep breaking the law simply because the penalties are lower than the gain.
If this doesn't stop, penalties will increase, and maybe one should go with tough criminal penalties after the owners and managers.
It's a problem if you must fly there right now. However, if you take a long-term perspective, it's not that hard. There are plenty of objects between here and nearby stars and you can hop from one to another, settling and recovering as you go along. And long term, stars move relative to one another quite a lot, so once you've managed to get to your neighboring stars and settle them; a complete galactic orbit takes about 200 million years.
So, between spreading out and having things mixed up while orbiting the galactic center, humans could spread out over fairly large numbers of planets fairly quickly (on a cosmic scale). We need to master traveling to, and living on asteroids and oort cloud objects, but once we have done that, humans will spread across the galaxy. It doesn't even matter whether "we" think it's a good idea; it doesn't take a lot of humans to get the process started.
But if they succeed, then that culture will be passed down, so you'll have a whole population that is happy staying in their little box.
Humans aren't "happy staying in their little box" (earth) right onw, so what makes you think many of them wouldn't jump at the opportunity to land on a planet?
They're homos too, right,
Yeah, that's why they died out. :-)
What this proposal means is basically that everybody carry around extra batteries so that people far from the tower don't have to.
But, really, now, there are more fun way of getting help with your dying battery than that. Like "Hey, lady, can I plug my high-powered USB plug into your USB socket to recharge my battery?" So much more personal!
My laptop can take screenshots, too. That doesn't mean it needs to be a digital camera and bug me every time I plug it in to recharge.