A Fujitsu P1610... weighs about 1 kg, on par with the iPad.
Uhhh... No? The iPad2 has 601g, which is a huge difference when you're holding it with one hand.
Microsoft continues to support tablet PCs in Windows 7.
Technically, yes. I recently tried using Windows 7 with a touchscreen monitor (by iiyama). Technically it worked (after fiddling around for 20mins), but I was unable to hit any menu on the screen, it was too small by far, even though I cranked the resolution down to unbearable levels. On the iPad, every dev knows that a touch area has to be at least 44x44px to be usable. On Windows 7, nobody cares (and the area required even depends on the device used, which makes it kinda impossible even if the dev wanted).
That's okay. In five years, computers will probably be shipping with full disk encryption enabled by default anyway.
Well, in 5 years all storage will probably be offsite on some storage cloud anyways. You notebook will only contain a bootloader with a 32MB SSD, just like the Google concept notebook.
Since Japanese specifies the type of number even in dates, you never have any doubt about whether that number is a day or month or year anyways...
Btw, the official ISO date format also is yyyy-mm-dd, which I switched to for any communication. Since the colon is only used for this format as a separator, there's no ambiguity.
As far as I can see at a first glance in the paper, they used a CPU-based implementation, so that benchmark wouldn't say anything about the GPU performance. Thanks for the reference though, that looks very cool!
I agree, Portal shows how it's done properly: Portal 1 was short & cheaper. Since it worked so well, Portal 2 is a regular AAA title with the very same concept (plus minor additions so the critics have something to ramble about).
Mirror's Edge? That was a pretty new concept, and I actually quite liked the game. However, apparently it tanked (like so many AAA games do), since Mirror's Edge 2 was canceled.
I can't talk about other fields of science, but German is my native language, and whenever in American movies/TV shows somebody pretends to be German, it's really really awful. Here's one example from Scrubs. Those two guys clearly are Americans who have spent maybe a year in a German language class, if even that. Sarah Chalke's (Elliot's) German is actually better than theirs.
One exception to this is Inglorious Basterds, where they actually used real native speakers.
You want to enhance my "user experience" when shopping? Price your products fairly.
Well, that's mostly outside of Apple's or the app developers' influence:)
Then let me give you some customer feedback: Forget the conventional wisdom about developing products for the market. Don't try to make people's decisions for them. Don't create a "user experience" for me. Make the game that you would want to play. That your friends would want to play.
That's actually pretty much what Apple does. They don't do market research.
Do you really think that people don't want to have a mini-USB port and an SD slot on their tablet?
Well, I as an iPad owner had quite a few occasions where I'd like to have been able to use a USB-stick for data transfer... SD slot isn't that much of an issue, since I have the SD-slot adapter (which I've yet to use for anything else than testing it). Mini-USB wouldn't help there though, or I'd have to carry yet another adapter with me.
But the number of people who own computers and cellphones who have NOT bought iPads is much much bigger than the number of people who have bought iPads. Think about why that might be, and here's a hint: it's not just about price.
Yes, there's also a lot of inertia. Many people don't like to try out new things or abandon their traditional way of working, even if the new way would be more enjoyable.
However, I generally agree with your statement. There's still a lot to be improved.
You want to design products or games or whatever that will make you feel good when people buy them, not ones that will make you feel like you're getting over on them. You'll be happier in the long run, friend.
I see two problems with that mindset: First, what I prefer isn't representative for the market at all. I could write exactly what I'd like, and nobody except me would use it. Second, to quote Steve Jobs (how fitting): "Real artists ship". Or another quote I heard recently supposedly by Reid Hoffman: "if you aren't embarrassed by what you launch with, you waited too long to launch". If I'd only release what I felt really good about, I'd never get anything finished. I've been there recently, and those three projects are still in my drawer waiting to be completed.
Imagine we were comparing different brands of hammers. Nobody would care much about the way the hammer was designed and engineered as long as it works well enough and doesn't break at an awkward moment (or preferably at all).
The difference is that the hammer design has been refined for many many millennia (starting from a simple rock you put into your fist), and so certain rules have emerged that work very well. For example, having a shaft helps in not banging your fingers. The head has to be heavier than the shaft, otherwise you couldn't build up as much inertia. The T-shape works pretty well for it, a (reversed) L-shape wouldn't, probably due to being imbalanced. There are soft heads and hard heads, depending on the use case, etc.
In computer interfaces, no such experience exists. We have been doing this in the modern style of interface for maybe 15-20 years. That's nothing in comparison. Thus, there's still things to try and experience to be collected.
That's why nobody cares about the hammer design, namely that it already works pretty optimally and nobody does anything in a noteworthily different way.
I guess I'm waiting for the company that will design a tablet.
Why would you need a tablet? You don't really need a tablet, you want a tool to help you do what you want to be done. User experience is just the fancy word for "the way someone does something".
I like to design my own experiences, thank you very much.
That's because you're technically minded (I can say that just by the fact that you are posting on/.). Technicians like to know how things work and like to tinker with it. Everybody else doesn't give a crap and just wants the work to be done. There's a market for both (think Debian vs. Mac OS X), but the former is tiny compared to the latter.
If I want someone to "design an experience" for me, I'll watch a movie, read a book or have dinner with my wife at a restaurant.
Why would that be any different?
I don't need a "user experience" to carry in my pocket or pack when I'm running around town trying to get something done.
Why not? Bad user experience means that you're standing for 1h in a store in front of a TV looking up the price on the Amazon webpage on a 2" display. Good user experience means that the phone scans in the barcode and tells you the price in a matter of seconds. Which one would you prefer?
I need a tool.
Then you're in luck, because that's what the iPad is. It's a tool where a lot of brainpower was invested in thinking about how it's going to be used (by Apple itself and all the app developers).
You make them sound more like a dungeon master than a tech company.
Well, I'm a desktop software developer, but in secret I'm also a game developer in training, and let me tell you that books about user experience design and game design are eerily similar to each other. The reason probably is that both are trying to generate enjoyable emotions in the user. There are huge overlaps, for example,/. karma points are just like experience points in roleplaying games. Did you know that Flickr was developed by a game company?
Maybe I'm just completely out of touch, but I'd much rather have a full-featured tablet than one that is 2mm thinner but doesn't have the features I want.
If you think that this is a competition about the feature-list, you're really completely out of touch. Apple designs a user experience, not a USB port or a front-facing camera. Note that they only added the latter after they had FaceTime to make it actually useful for the user.
I'm writing an app where the user can upload images to his/her facebook account. For this, I need the additional "post to wall"-permission. That's fine and understandable, but even the basic permissions every app has to get are already in the "rape their privacy" range. I don't need even need to know the user's name or anything from the friends list. However, there's nothing I can do about that, the permission is still given.
The exact wording is:
Access my basic information
Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone.
The engineers come from Stanford, but they are now full-time employees at Google.
Their base is in a Google building, too. How much more Google can you get?
It's precisely the 2D canvas that makes HTML5 game graphics practical.
Wrong, canvas isn't suited for games in current browsers. Moving around divs is much faster and much easier (no need to do image loading manually, no need to handle redraws, etc). The only issue is alpha-aware hit testing, that's actually impossible with divs.
See this presentation by Paul Backaus (the guy behind jQuery UI and a javascript game engine that was bought by Zynga) starting on slide 31.
WebGL will change a lot there, when it's finally working in all major browsers (except IE of course).
Slashdot Mirror
A Fujitsu P1610 ... weighs about 1 kg, on par with the iPad.
Uhhh... No? The iPad2 has 601g, which is a huge difference when you're holding it with one hand.
Microsoft continues to support tablet PCs in Windows 7.
Technically, yes. I recently tried using Windows 7 with a touchscreen monitor (by iiyama). Technically it worked (after fiddling around for 20mins), but I was unable to hit any menu on the screen, it was too small by far, even though I cranked the resolution down to unbearable levels. On the iPad, every dev knows that a touch area has to be at least 44x44px to be usable. On Windows 7, nobody cares (and the area required even depends on the device used, which makes it kinda impossible even if the dev wanted).
That's okay. In five years, computers will probably be shipping with full disk encryption enabled by default anyway.
Well, in 5 years all storage will probably be offsite on some storage cloud anyways. You notebook will only contain a bootloader with a 32MB SSD, just like the Google concept notebook.
Since Japanese specifies the type of number even in dates, you never have any doubt about whether that number is a day or month or year anyways...
Btw, the official ISO date format also is yyyy-mm-dd, which I switched to for any communication. Since the colon is only used for this format as a separator, there's no ambiguity.
Isn't the Queen above the law technically?
Well, there's one way: Construct a non-nuclear bomb that's easier and cheaper to build and has at least the same level of destruction.
As far as I can see at a first glance in the paper, they used a CPU-based implementation, so that benchmark wouldn't say anything about the GPU performance. Thanks for the reference though, that looks very cool!
Yep :)
Btw, that's how the marriage system works for the Denobulan species from Star Trek Enterprise.
A solution to that is to allow women to have multiple husbands as well.
Yeah, but that was Indie, not made by a big gaming company. There are completely different economics there.
I agree, Portal shows how it's done properly: Portal 1 was short & cheaper. Since it worked so well, Portal 2 is a regular AAA title with the very same concept (plus minor additions so the critics have something to ramble about).
Mirror's Edge? That was a pretty new concept, and I actually quite liked the game. However, apparently it tanked (like so many AAA games do), since Mirror's Edge 2 was canceled.
I can't talk about other fields of science, but German is my native language, and whenever in American movies/TV shows somebody pretends to be German, it's really really awful. Here's one example from Scrubs. Those two guys clearly are Americans who have spent maybe a year in a German language class, if even that. Sarah Chalke's (Elliot's) German is actually better than theirs.
One exception to this is Inglorious Basterds, where they actually used real native speakers.
You want to enhance my "user experience" when shopping? Price your products fairly.
Well, that's mostly outside of Apple's or the app developers' influence :)
Then let me give you some customer feedback: Forget the conventional wisdom about developing products for the market. Don't try to make people's decisions for them. Don't create a "user experience" for me. Make the game that you would want to play. That your friends would want to play.
That's actually pretty much what Apple does. They don't do market research.
Do you really think that people don't want to have a mini-USB port and an SD slot on their tablet?
Well, I as an iPad owner had quite a few occasions where I'd like to have been able to use a USB-stick for data transfer... SD slot isn't that much of an issue, since I have the SD-slot adapter (which I've yet to use for anything else than testing it). Mini-USB wouldn't help there though, or I'd have to carry yet another adapter with me.
But the number of people who own computers and cellphones who have NOT bought iPads is much much bigger than the number of people who have bought iPads. Think about why that might be, and here's a hint: it's not just about price.
Yes, there's also a lot of inertia. Many people don't like to try out new things or abandon their traditional way of working, even if the new way would be more enjoyable.
However, I generally agree with your statement. There's still a lot to be improved.
You want to design products or games or whatever that will make you feel good when people buy them, not ones that will make you feel like you're getting over on them. You'll be happier in the long run, friend.
I see two problems with that mindset: First, what I prefer isn't representative for the market at all. I could write exactly what I'd like, and nobody except me would use it. Second, to quote Steve Jobs (how fitting): "Real artists ship". Or another quote I heard recently supposedly by Reid Hoffman: "if you aren't embarrassed by what you launch with, you waited too long to launch". If I'd only release what I felt really good about, I'd never get anything finished. I've been there recently, and those three projects are still in my drawer waiting to be completed.
Imagine we were comparing different brands of hammers. Nobody would care much about the way the hammer was designed and engineered as long as it works well enough and doesn't break at an awkward moment (or preferably at all).
The difference is that the hammer design has been refined for many many millennia (starting from a simple rock you put into your fist), and so certain rules have emerged that work very well. For example, having a shaft helps in not banging your fingers. The head has to be heavier than the shaft, otherwise you couldn't build up as much inertia. The T-shape works pretty well for it, a (reversed) L-shape wouldn't, probably due to being imbalanced. There are soft heads and hard heads, depending on the use case, etc.
In computer interfaces, no such experience exists. We have been doing this in the modern style of interface for maybe 15-20 years. That's nothing in comparison. Thus, there's still things to try and experience to be collected.
That's why nobody cares about the hammer design, namely that it already works pretty optimally and nobody does anything in a noteworthily different way.
I guess I'm waiting for the company that will design a tablet.
Why would you need a tablet? You don't really need a tablet, you want a tool to help you do what you want to be done. User experience is just the fancy word for "the way someone does something".
I like to design my own experiences, thank you very much.
That's because you're technically minded (I can say that just by the fact that you are posting on /.). Technicians like to know how things work and like to tinker with it. Everybody else doesn't give a crap and just wants the work to be done. There's a market for both (think Debian vs. Mac OS X), but the former is tiny compared to the latter.
If I want someone to "design an experience" for me, I'll watch a movie, read a book or have dinner with my wife at a restaurant.
Why would that be any different?
I don't need a "user experience" to carry in my pocket or pack when I'm running around town trying to get something done.
Why not? Bad user experience means that you're standing for 1h in a store in front of a TV looking up the price on the Amazon webpage on a 2" display. Good user experience means that the phone scans in the barcode and tells you the price in a matter of seconds. Which one would you prefer?
I need a tool.
Then you're in luck, because that's what the iPad is. It's a tool where a lot of brainpower was invested in thinking about how it's going to be used (by Apple itself and all the app developers).
You make them sound more like a dungeon master than a tech company.
Well, I'm a desktop software developer, but in secret I'm also a game developer in training, and let me tell you that books about user experience design and game design are eerily similar to each other. The reason probably is that both are trying to generate enjoyable emotions in the user. There are huge overlaps, for example, /. karma points are just like experience points in roleplaying games. Did you know that Flickr was developed by a game company?
Maybe I'm just completely out of touch, but I'd much rather have a full-featured tablet than one that is 2mm thinner but doesn't have the features I want.
If you think that this is a competition about the feature-list, you're really completely out of touch. Apple designs a user experience, not a USB port or a front-facing camera. Note that they only added the latter after they had FaceTime to make it actually useful for the user.
So not ALLOWING Flash, even when Adobe does all the work is being good?
Considering how well Adobe is doing the work for every other platform they're on, yes that's good.
I'm writing an app where the user can upload images to his/her facebook account. For this, I need the additional "post to wall"-permission. That's fine and understandable, but even the basic permissions every app has to get are already in the "rape their privacy" range. I don't need even need to know the user's name or anything from the friends list. However, there's nothing I can do about that, the permission is still given.
The exact wording is:
Access my basic information
Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone.
The engineers come from Stanford, but they are now full-time employees at Google. Their base is in a Google building, too. How much more Google can you get?
By being born inside a Google building?
Well, newer than the desktop metaphor, as far as I know. Not that anything of that is really new.
There's a non-glossy screen option in the store. Also comes with a higher resolution.
Well, in Mac OS X the widgets are in a layer above the windows, and you can show/hide that layer with the push of a dedicated button on the keyboard.
My problem with that is that I never push that button, and so the thing is never shown.
In my opinion, the "single purpose device"-metaphor of iOS devices is a pretty neat new idea, and accepted to work very well in the broad public.
I'm not that sure that it works for desktop machines though, but we'll find out in summer when Mac OS X Lion is released.
It's precisely the 2D canvas that makes HTML5 game graphics practical.
Wrong, canvas isn't suited for games in current browsers. Moving around divs is much faster and much easier (no need to do image loading manually, no need to handle redraws, etc). The only issue is alpha-aware hit testing, that's actually impossible with divs.
See this presentation by Paul Backaus (the guy behind jQuery UI and a javascript game engine that was bought by Zynga) starting on slide 31.
WebGL will change a lot there, when it's finally working in all major browsers (except IE of course).
Actually it looks like they're going the ruby direction (via MacRuby). Perhaps, maybe.