There is nothing slightly different about a notch. It upends 40 years worth of standardised visual screen space design by introducing an unoperable area of the screen that extends into content areas.
Yes and no. We've typically used exactly rectangular screens on computers, TVs and more recently phones/laptops, but having irregular display areas and designing UIs to fit them isn't particularly unusual in more specialised devices. I haven't looked into how the displays in recent phones carve out the space for the notch, and perhaps there really is a change in the underlying technology if it's being done with a single panel, but to the user it's all a bit "meh, whatever".
I still find it bizarre that such a tiny change can attract so much attention in mobile device world. There is so little innovation that people will have passionate, heated discussions (and spend significant extra $$$) for this year's device that has a slightly different screen: a notch, a curve around the side, no fixed buttons at the bottom, 0.5mm less bezel. None of this makes your calls more reliable, or gets you faster mobile Internet, or lets you view stuff you couldn't see before in apps or on web sites, or lets you type faster when you're sending a message. It's just not that important.
At least having a significantly bigger battery or a particular physical connector can make a slight but noticeable difference to what you can actually do with your phone, so that kind of trade-off is worth considering. The other stuff is 99% marketing because otherwise phones are like laptops a few years ago: everybody who wants one already has one that is good enough, and the upgrade cycle is slowing down as a result.
Your last point is crucial, IMHO. Even if you do have content stored locally, that doesn't help you if it's locked up behind some sort of DRM system that requires the continued existence and consent of some remote party to use it.
The same argument holds for any online delivery service that uses a form of DRM where they can withdraw access. Amazon got caught doing similar things. Steam hasn't been without controversy either.
Obviously these kinds of actions make a mockery of copyright-based economics and the idea that you can buy your own copy of a work to keep, and at some point I suspect consumer protection laws in civilised countries will catch up, but probably not until enough people have been personally affected in a big enough way to be worth getting angry about it.
That doesn't necessarily follow at all. Just because one company can't provide a product profitably, that doesn't automatically mean no-one else could either.
In any case, any company that covers its costs is commercially viable. Beyond that, how much profit it makes is a different thing.
Well, that would break quite a lot of laws in quite a lot of countries, as well as putting them in direct conflict with quite a lot of governments. So no, I'm pretty sure Microsoft aren't really going to do that.
With Windows 7, you can choose not to install the spyware junk updates and get just security ones or even none at all. I imagine a lot of professionally managed organisations and a few power users have done exactly that.
You need a smart TV with no access to the internet.
With the number of devices that now contain their own communications gear, relying on that strategy seems unwise.
In any case, we tend to do much better when each device we have does one job well and those devices can talk to each other sensibly. Speakers in a TV are useful up to a point, but rarely as good as even entry-level dedicated speakers. Even tuners in a TV are mostly redundant now as the source for almost everything we watch comes via a separate PVR or Blu-Ray player or Chromecast/Fire stick or games console or some other box anyway. And most problems that make my TV and related devices slow, buggy and unreliable today in ways that would have been horrifying a decade or two ago are because someone's box is trying to be too damned clever and they aren't smart enough to make it actually work properly.
GP was basically right. What we need these days is good screens, good speakers, good sources, good connectivity between them, and good control systems to get the content you want from its source to the relevant output devices quickly and easily. There is very little reason except marketing and greed to bundle substandard, short-lived versions of these different elements together and sell self-contained, limited, non-futureproof devices with the technology we now have, but marketing and greed plague this industry.
Don't know where you live, but in most places I think developers are paid fairly well. We offer straight-out-of-school newbies $80-$90k, and still some turn us down for better offers.
Most places are not the Bay Area or a few big US cities. In most of the world, new starter salaries in software development are rarely more than 1/3 of that level, and in many places they are much lower.
That's what you're really saying when you decide that you'll use Windows (as opposed to macOS), but not Windows 10.
Except for the part where ink and measurement aids actually help you to do your job, while Windows 10 has no apparent advantage for anything we've ever wanted to do and comes with multiple serious disadvantages in terms of reliability, security and privacy.
I have no problem with making automatic updates the default if that is likely to be the best action for users. It might be a reasonable position to take with Home editions of Windows, for example.
It's the forced aspect and the lack of clear controls for those who do know what they're doing that I object to. Microsoft would have a lot more credibility in my eyes right now if they had defaulted to updates on for Home, security updates only for Pro and nothing automatically installed locally because you assume it will all be centrally managed for Enterprise, and if they offered a clear way to change that behaviour to any of the other relevant possibilities in all editions.
Of course. That's why no-one uses C or shell scripts or text editors for serious work any more. It also explains the radical difference in functionality between the word processors of 20 years ago and those of today, the game-changing new features of Creative Cloud compared to CS6 that was released more than six years ago, and why today's major desktop operating systems have all diverged so much from the WIMP presentation style.
The subscription model is what people want.
Of course it is. That's why no-one ever complains about subscription software working out more expensive or not being improved as fast or having lock-in effects that they don't want to risk or forcing unwanted changes on users.
Indeed, Creative Cloud is so popular that only a few entire businesses have appeared so far offering good quality graphics and design software on a non-subscription model. You can tell everyone hates that old-fashioned approach because at least 1% of comments when these packages are discussed in popular online forums aren't about how they're so much cheaper and more reliable than Creative Cloud.
But don't take my word for it. Look at Adobe's own published data to see how their subscription revenues are growing in all of their markets! Oh, wait, they seem to never publish enough data in their official reports that you can work out things like retention/churn in individual markets or whether they're increasing revenues by selling in more places and not by increasing subscriber numbers in existing markets. I'm sure that's just an accidental oversight, though.
And it's cheaper and more profitable and results in better software.
You don't really need to do any extra emulation work to run the CS5/6 generation products, though. You just keep running them.
Even you did need to do something extra to keep the older versions working, you only need it for as long as you're still dependent on the older product. Directly competing alternatives have been emerging and they're getting both better and more numerous all the time. We already use alternatives as our primary tools and keep an Adobe installation around just for the occasional compatibility issue, and this has caused us 0 problems working with anyone, ever. The idea that you can only do collaborative professional work in CC is as anachronistic today as the idea that everyone still writes their documents in Word so all new business PCs should have MS Office installed.
Aside from the usual FOSS options for the cheap-and-cheerful market, the likes of the Affinity range, Sketch and Pixelmator now directly compete for jobs you might otherwise have done in Photoshop, Illustrator, and soon InDesign. These are newer and much cheaper than CC, but already suitable for a lot of professional work and growing fast in every relevant sense.
The likes of Flash and Dreamweaver are essentially dead ends anyway now.
For motion graphics with AE and the like, I guess the market is smaller and we don't have the same kind of promising rivals springing up yet, but I suspect that is a matter of time.
Hi. I'm someone who runs businesses that use, among other things, high-end creative software.
We don't buy computers to run a single piece of software. The spec for the computers we buy takes the software we want to use into account, of course. But in all my time doing this, I have never met a professional in any role whose day-to-day work was so focussed on a single application that you'd buy a whole computer just for that. For everyone else, well, no-one wants three different computers filling up their desk/office/vehicle/laptop case.
When we buy a new computer, its specification will be sufficient to run everything its user is likely to need within its expected working lifetime (or, in a few limited cases, basically the highest spec you can get today for sane amounts of money). Then we install a useful combination of software so they can do their job.
We don't use Windows 10 for anything, so any software that only runs on Windows 10 is automatically excluded from things we'll consider buying. In today's online world, the amount of business software that is more-or-less essential and has no viable competition is getting smaller all the time anyway. The idea that you still have to have the latest version of any particular piece of software just for compatibility with everyone else you collaborate with is mostly an optimistic work of fiction promoted by the people who coincidentally sell the latest version of something.
No, they did it because all of the data they had showed that people never install updates, ever.
You think professional users never installed updates in earlier versions of Windows?
I mean, it's true, we stopped installing all non-security updates on Windows 7 at my office several years ago. I know some people who stopped installing even security updates earlier this year, after Microsoft borked their handling of some big vulnerabilities for an extended period.
The thing is, we all stopped installing those updates because they were bad updates. Being responsible professionals, we were weighing the risks of not installing them against the risks of installing them, and then we chose the better option. With earlier versions of Windows, at least you had that choice.
Working in or with IT and neither recognizing nor adapting to its pace of innovation is a phenomenal blunder and disqualifies them for being "professional".
Do you work, directly or indirectly, for Microsoft?
Because you seem to be the only one here who thinks that forced software updates, automatic reboots, built-in privacy and security risks, and other such "innovations" are desirable in a professional environment.
They'll surely leave the last working version for Windows 7 available for a while. What do you think happens to their recurring subscription revenues if they suddenly lose about half of all Windows users as potential customers?
The tech corporations are all turning into massive dick brains, with massive erections for infinite profits for nothing.
Not all of them are. There are now several alternative creative software products available that are already useful even for a lot of professional work and they are developing fast. Typically a full permanent licence for one of those costs about as much as a month or two of CC subscription. As always, there's a lot of momentum that supports the incumbent 800lb gorilla, but it's no longer the case that Adobe is the only serious game in town and the only alternatives are OSS products that lack the same breadth and polish.
But since Firefox extensions are broken to about the same degree anyway now, you might as well use the browser that is better in most other respects.
As sad as it is, we are rapidly heading back to a time when pages are written primarily for one specific browser, with perhaps a token nod to a couple of the smaller ones. That's where all the users are, and so that's what developers are targetting, and so the cycle continues.
I haven't worked on a single professional project in a while where Firefox has enough market share to justify more than a very basic level of testing. Everyone wants Chrome, Safari, and maybe Edge or IE11 for business applications if it's the standard desktop browser for some big business customers.
The Mozilla people promised they would match the old functionality wherever there was a clear need. Were they lying or have they just not finished yet?
There seems to be little evidence that they made any serious attempt at this at all, beyond the top N very high visibility extensions.
The main advantage of using Firefox, other than not using Google's browser with its questionable privacy implications, was how customisable it was. There have been five major releases with WebExtensions now, and after the first two, not a single thing I missed from before has been fixed. Being able to save files directly to places outside the downloads directory, customising parts of the UI like the bookmark dropdown so they're bigger than postage stamps, disabling things like JS or animated GIFs without reloading the whole page... I'm still waiting for a tab tree extension that actually works properly.
To add insult to injury, my previously 100% stable for years Firefox probably crashes out on startup every third or fourth time I load it, then does some half-baked restore of the tabs from the previous session that apparently closed down properly, then needs restarting again. Either Firefox itself is quite badly broken for the past couple of versions, or one of the much more limited number of extensions I now have installed is destabilising it, but wasn't the point of the new architecture that crippled all those extensions that at least they would be fast and reliable now?
Firefox is no longer my default browser for everyday use as a direct result of this farce, but since I still have to use all the major browsers professionally, it would be nice if they could at least undo some of the damage.
What kind of palaces do you people live in, where you have enough space to keep a family's worth of washing sorted into the separate types all the time, and you can run a washing machine overnight without it waking up everyone whose bedroom is above the kitchen? And how do you vacuum it properly while a cup of tea brews? Something about your claims doesn't add up.
You know nothing about my lifestyle and commitments, so it's odd that you feel yourself qualified to judge me. Certainly I am not alone in the concerns I have about these things; plenty of my friends and family seem to have the same view.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing slightly different about a notch. It upends 40 years worth of standardised visual screen space design by introducing an unoperable area of the screen that extends into content areas.
Yes and no. We've typically used exactly rectangular screens on computers, TVs and more recently phones/laptops, but having irregular display areas and designing UIs to fit them isn't particularly unusual in more specialised devices. I haven't looked into how the displays in recent phones carve out the space for the notch, and perhaps there really is a change in the underlying technology if it's being done with a single panel, but to the user it's all a bit "meh, whatever".
They had to make room for the notch.
I still find it bizarre that such a tiny change can attract so much attention in mobile device world. There is so little innovation that people will have passionate, heated discussions (and spend significant extra $$$) for this year's device that has a slightly different screen: a notch, a curve around the side, no fixed buttons at the bottom, 0.5mm less bezel. None of this makes your calls more reliable, or gets you faster mobile Internet, or lets you view stuff you couldn't see before in apps or on web sites, or lets you type faster when you're sending a message. It's just not that important.
At least having a significantly bigger battery or a particular physical connector can make a slight but noticeable difference to what you can actually do with your phone, so that kind of trade-off is worth considering. The other stuff is 99% marketing because otherwise phones are like laptops a few years ago: everybody who wants one already has one that is good enough, and the upgrade cycle is slowing down as a result.
Your last point is crucial, IMHO. Even if you do have content stored locally, that doesn't help you if it's locked up behind some sort of DRM system that requires the continued existence and consent of some remote party to use it.
The same argument holds for any online delivery service that uses a form of DRM where they can withdraw access. Amazon got caught doing similar things. Steam hasn't been without controversy either.
Obviously these kinds of actions make a mockery of copyright-based economics and the idea that you can buy your own copy of a work to keep, and at some point I suspect consumer protection laws in civilised countries will catch up, but probably not until enough people have been personally affected in a big enough way to be worth getting angry about it.
Those duties still don't include an absolute priority of making profit over all else.
That doesn't necessarily follow at all. Just because one company can't provide a product profitably, that doesn't automatically mean no-one else could either.
In any case, any company that covers its costs is commercially viable. Beyond that, how much profit it makes is a different thing.
Well, that would break quite a lot of laws in quite a lot of countries, as well as putting them in direct conflict with quite a lot of governments. So no, I'm pretty sure Microsoft aren't really going to do that.
With Windows 7, you can choose not to install the spyware junk updates and get just security ones or even none at all. I imagine a lot of professionally managed organisations and a few power users have done exactly that.
You need a smart TV with no access to the internet.
With the number of devices that now contain their own communications gear, relying on that strategy seems unwise.
In any case, we tend to do much better when each device we have does one job well and those devices can talk to each other sensibly. Speakers in a TV are useful up to a point, but rarely as good as even entry-level dedicated speakers. Even tuners in a TV are mostly redundant now as the source for almost everything we watch comes via a separate PVR or Blu-Ray player or Chromecast/Fire stick or games console or some other box anyway. And most problems that make my TV and related devices slow, buggy and unreliable today in ways that would have been horrifying a decade or two ago are because someone's box is trying to be too damned clever and they aren't smart enough to make it actually work properly.
GP was basically right. What we need these days is good screens, good speakers, good sources, good connectivity between them, and good control systems to get the content you want from its source to the relevant output devices quickly and easily. There is very little reason except marketing and greed to bundle substandard, short-lived versions of these different elements together and sell self-contained, limited, non-futureproof devices with the technology we now have, but marketing and greed plague this industry.
Don't know where you live, but in most places I think developers are paid fairly well. We offer straight-out-of-school newbies $80-$90k, and still some turn us down for better offers.
Most places are not the Bay Area or a few big US cities. In most of the world, new starter salaries in software development are rarely more than 1/3 of that level, and in many places they are much lower.
That's what you're really saying when you decide that you'll use Windows (as opposed to macOS), but not Windows 10.
Except for the part where ink and measurement aids actually help you to do your job, while Windows 10 has no apparent advantage for anything we've ever wanted to do and comes with multiple serious disadvantages in terms of reliability, security and privacy.
I have no problem with making automatic updates the default if that is likely to be the best action for users. It might be a reasonable position to take with Home editions of Windows, for example.
It's the forced aspect and the lack of clear controls for those who do know what they're doing that I object to. Microsoft would have a lot more credibility in my eyes right now if they had defaulted to updates on for Home, security updates only for Pro and nothing automatically installed locally because you assume it will all be centrally managed for Enterprise, and if they offered a clear way to change that behaviour to any of the other relevant possibilities in all editions.
Software is constantly worked or it dies.
Of course. That's why no-one uses C or shell scripts or text editors for serious work any more. It also explains the radical difference in functionality between the word processors of 20 years ago and those of today, the game-changing new features of Creative Cloud compared to CS6 that was released more than six years ago, and why today's major desktop operating systems have all diverged so much from the WIMP presentation style.
The subscription model is what people want.
Of course it is. That's why no-one ever complains about subscription software working out more expensive or not being improved as fast or having lock-in effects that they don't want to risk or forcing unwanted changes on users.
Indeed, Creative Cloud is so popular that only a few entire businesses have appeared so far offering good quality graphics and design software on a non-subscription model. You can tell everyone hates that old-fashioned approach because at least 1% of comments when these packages are discussed in popular online forums aren't about how they're so much cheaper and more reliable than Creative Cloud.
But don't take my word for it. Look at Adobe's own published data to see how their subscription revenues are growing in all of their markets! Oh, wait, they seem to never publish enough data in their official reports that you can work out things like retention/churn in individual markets or whether they're increasing revenues by selling in more places and not by increasing subscriber numbers in existing markets. I'm sure that's just an accidental oversight, though.
And it's cheaper and more profitable and results in better software.
(+1, Funny)
You don't really need to do any extra emulation work to run the CS5/6 generation products, though. You just keep running them.
Even you did need to do something extra to keep the older versions working, you only need it for as long as you're still dependent on the older product. Directly competing alternatives have been emerging and they're getting both better and more numerous all the time. We already use alternatives as our primary tools and keep an Adobe installation around just for the occasional compatibility issue, and this has caused us 0 problems working with anyone, ever. The idea that you can only do collaborative professional work in CC is as anachronistic today as the idea that everyone still writes their documents in Word so all new business PCs should have MS Office installed.
Aside from the usual FOSS options for the cheap-and-cheerful market, the likes of the Affinity range, Sketch and Pixelmator now directly compete for jobs you might otherwise have done in Photoshop, Illustrator, and soon InDesign. These are newer and much cheaper than CC, but already suitable for a lot of professional work and growing fast in every relevant sense.
The likes of Flash and Dreamweaver are essentially dead ends anyway now.
For motion graphics with AE and the like, I guess the market is smaller and we don't have the same kind of promising rivals springing up yet, but I suspect that is a matter of time.
So why would any new releases of any software try to serve a OS that's about done?
Well, let's think about that. First, how much is a subscription for CC from now until January 2020 worth?
Hi. I'm someone who runs businesses that use, among other things, high-end creative software.
We don't buy computers to run a single piece of software. The spec for the computers we buy takes the software we want to use into account, of course. But in all my time doing this, I have never met a professional in any role whose day-to-day work was so focussed on a single application that you'd buy a whole computer just for that. For everyone else, well, no-one wants three different computers filling up their desk/office/vehicle/laptop case.
When we buy a new computer, its specification will be sufficient to run everything its user is likely to need within its expected working lifetime (or, in a few limited cases, basically the highest spec you can get today for sane amounts of money). Then we install a useful combination of software so they can do their job.
We don't use Windows 10 for anything, so any software that only runs on Windows 10 is automatically excluded from things we'll consider buying. In today's online world, the amount of business software that is more-or-less essential and has no viable competition is getting smaller all the time anyway. The idea that you still have to have the latest version of any particular piece of software just for compatibility with everyone else you collaborate with is mostly an optimistic work of fiction promoted by the people who coincidentally sell the latest version of something.
No, they did it because all of the data they had showed that people never install updates, ever.
You think professional users never installed updates in earlier versions of Windows?
I mean, it's true, we stopped installing all non-security updates on Windows 7 at my office several years ago. I know some people who stopped installing even security updates earlier this year, after Microsoft borked their handling of some big vulnerabilities for an extended period.
The thing is, we all stopped installing those updates because they were bad updates. Being responsible professionals, we were weighing the risks of not installing them against the risks of installing them, and then we chose the better option. With earlier versions of Windows, at least you had that choice.
Working in or with IT and neither recognizing nor adapting to its pace of innovation is a phenomenal blunder and disqualifies them for being "professional".
Do you work, directly or indirectly, for Microsoft?
Because you seem to be the only one here who thinks that forced software updates, automatic reboots, built-in privacy and security risks, and other such "innovations" are desirable in a professional environment.
They'll surely leave the last working version for Windows 7 available for a while. What do you think happens to their recurring subscription revenues if they suddenly lose about half of all Windows users as potential customers?
The tech corporations are all turning into massive dick brains, with massive erections for infinite profits for nothing.
Not all of them are. There are now several alternative creative software products available that are already useful even for a lot of professional work and they are developing fast. Typically a full permanent licence for one of those costs about as much as a month or two of CC subscription. As always, there's a lot of momentum that supports the incumbent 800lb gorilla, but it's no longer the case that Adobe is the only serious game in town and the only alternatives are OSS products that lack the same breadth and polish.
"I told you so, and so did a lot of other people" about covers it.
Google still hasn't figured out Chrome yet.
But since Firefox extensions are broken to about the same degree anyway now, you might as well use the browser that is better in most other respects.
As sad as it is, we are rapidly heading back to a time when pages are written primarily for one specific browser, with perhaps a token nod to a couple of the smaller ones. That's where all the users are, and so that's what developers are targetting, and so the cycle continues.
I haven't worked on a single professional project in a while where Firefox has enough market share to justify more than a very basic level of testing. Everyone wants Chrome, Safari, and maybe Edge or IE11 for business applications if it's the standard desktop browser for some big business customers.
The Mozilla people promised they would match the old functionality wherever there was a clear need. Were they lying or have they just not finished yet?
There seems to be little evidence that they made any serious attempt at this at all, beyond the top N very high visibility extensions.
The main advantage of using Firefox, other than not using Google's browser with its questionable privacy implications, was how customisable it was. There have been five major releases with WebExtensions now, and after the first two, not a single thing I missed from before has been fixed. Being able to save files directly to places outside the downloads directory, customising parts of the UI like the bookmark dropdown so they're bigger than postage stamps, disabling things like JS or animated GIFs without reloading the whole page... I'm still waiting for a tab tree extension that actually works properly.
To add insult to injury, my previously 100% stable for years Firefox probably crashes out on startup every third or fourth time I load it, then does some half-baked restore of the tabs from the previous session that apparently closed down properly, then needs restarting again. Either Firefox itself is quite badly broken for the past couple of versions, or one of the much more limited number of extensions I now have installed is destabilising it, but wasn't the point of the new architecture that crippled all those extensions that at least they would be fast and reliable now?
Firefox is no longer my default browser for everyday use as a direct result of this farce, but since I still have to use all the major browsers professionally, it would be nice if they could at least undo some of the damage.
What kind of palaces do you people live in, where you have enough space to keep a family's worth of washing sorted into the separate types all the time, and you can run a washing machine overnight without it waking up everyone whose bedroom is above the kitchen? And how do you vacuum it properly while a cup of tea brews? Something about your claims doesn't add up.
You know nothing about my lifestyle and commitments, so it's odd that you feel yourself qualified to judge me. Certainly I am not alone in the concerns I have about these things; plenty of my friends and family seem to have the same view.