Maybe, but it's plateaued at a very good level. OCR is extremely useable. If there are errors they are more likely to be in the document that you scanned than in the scanning process.
That's provided the scan is good. OCR from a mobile phone photo is more challenging...
I've got a scansnap for the paperless office thing. The success rate is far greater than 96%. I recently scanned a whole book in, one with varying formatting tables etc, and the errors are one mistake every few pages, not several per page.
The software is ABBY Finereader.
On the other hand, this is the ideal scenario, a purpose made document scanner. A mobile phone photo with arbitrary lighting and possibly slightly out of focus probably would have a worse rate.
The other thing is that usually the occasional error doesn't usually matter is you're archiving as the document is saved as a PDF which displays the original scan as a graphic, and just uses the scanned text for searching or if you need to cut'n'paste.
No I'm saying exactly what I said. In a nutshell: "But once the concept is understood, the metaphor gets in the way and can only mislead or clutter."
BTW, I notice that you said there's nothing wrong with gentle gradients and animation. Well there's more animation in iOS 7+ than iOS 6-
And what are the gradients for? If it's just a subtle effect for a background that makes an app look pettier, OK, but when it's used as a pseudo 3D effect, it's likely to clash with the proper 3D transform based layer animation. Flip a screen with pseudo raised bits and shadows, and it becomes clear it's just a sham.
You also state that you hate the vast amount of white. But you're looking at larger expanses of white when looking at a website such as slashdot classic, or a word processor file. If it's too bright, turn down the brightness!
Oh, and if you're confused by the lack of outlines on buttons, there's an accessibility option to add them.
In the TFA case, apple has control over your keys.
False. The private keys are unique to the phone and the paired device. The public keys are shared between the two when they are paired. Apple doesn't have have the private keys (or the public keys for that matter), and thus cannot read either side of the communication.
Yes, because people not even being ever confronted with programming before enrolling into a university course is the optimal approach to STEM promotion.
Who told you you couldn't learn programming on an iPad?
Apple hasn't been able to provide programmers with a decent consistent and modern language for over a decade.
Objective-C and Cocoa continue to be great, and produces far better quality apps than on exist on Android. Swift one day might be better. But the "oh there's something new coming along so the old thing must be crap" game is juvenile.
No hacker tools is a major crippling factor in iOS in any educational settings. No in-process compilation => no JIT-equipped programming learning environments, no LuaJIT, no hosted Oberon or any similar environment, no nothing.
The topic is schools. Not computer science/software engineering at university.
Compared to the technical capabilities of iOS and OSX, Android and Chrome are the crapfest of the century.
...except consumer tablets aren't proper digitizers. This is especially true for platforms where a stylus is a banned option because it doesn't seem fashionable enough.
Even a mundane mouse is better at the "direct manipulation" stuff than what's provided on your average consumer tablet.
Ignorance again. A mouse cannot be direct manipulation. It's an indirect tool. You move your hand on one place, and a pointer moves in another. It's like the difference between piloting a plane, and controlling a model aircraft.
Lack of "hacker" tools is a disadvantage for any educational environment. Students might actually be expected to create something rather than just being mindless consumers.
You seem to be confusing schools with universities. Creating hacker tools is beyond school level education, and for the occasional over achiever who might want to try it on their own, will usually find it a disciplinary offence.
There have already been educational programs mired by patent attacks that have been pre-emptively banned from the iPad.
Terrible font - Helvetica Neue roman needs to die in a fire when compared to Helvetica medium or Lucida Grande. Font is too thin, spacing is too wide. Looks weak, girly, empty, frail. Ick.
Are you looking at it on Retina? That's what it's optimised for. The rest of us will have to put up with it until the time comes to upgrade hardware.
The distinction you draw is a non-standard one. http://alt-usage-english.org/a... You are fine to use it for yourself, but you are wrong to call other people's usage wrong.
Fuck these designers who have no idea how to make a good UI, but sure know how to destroy one.
Clearly they do. It's their specialism. Your disagreement is because people tend to be resistant to change - even when after a period of time they come to appreciate the improvement.
Chances are in the years to come you'll look back at pseudo 3D controls and think they look cheap and tacky. Just as 1990s GUIs now look grey and boxy.
A 'Notebook' that does not look anymore like a notebook is hard to find on the UI.
The icon still looks like a notebook, so how's it hard to find?The UI of the notes app itself doesn't need to look like a notebook. I'm more familiar with typing text into an app than writing text in a notebook, so I don't need the metaphor whilst using the app.
A calendar that does not look like a calendar but like a piece of paper coloured by a child, a bit like a copy of what our days MS Outlook looks like, is uncomprehendable, unuseable.
And yet the calendars on iOS7 and Yosemite both work better than their predecessors.
Anyone like seeing only 2 videos instead of 7 on youtube on our phones due to big fonts and flat elements?
If you're talking about iOS 7 or 8, ten the font sizes are adjustable for accessibility. Choose a smaller size.
There is a reason Skuemorphism was used. Namely... IT WORKS.
It works FOR BEGINNERS.
Skuemorphism is a visual metaphor. Metaphors can help introduce people to new concepts by referencing old familiar ones. But once the concept is understood, the metaphor gets in the way and can only mislead or clutter. Skuemorphic buttons were good for teaching computer newbies about mouse clicking on screen items. Skuemorphic buttons were good for easing phone users over from real buttons to touch screens. But people who know how to use computers or phones don't need them.
Notice that most clickable things on the web do not have Skuemorphic button chrome. In the beginning they used purple text and underlining to indicate which text was clickable. Even that is not needed any more as people have more experience of the web.
If IOS looked like it did in 2007 it frankly wouldn't sell.
Absolutely. But we're more sophisticated people than we were in 2007.
And yet you manage to work out which parts of a web page to click on, when most clickable elements are not simulations of physical buttons.
I've been using the XCode 6 beta every day since it came out, and I haven't experienced any of the things you complain about. I'm not saying your description is wrong, although they aren't specific enough for me to know what particular controls you're talking about. I'm saying that I've not had a single occasion when I've wondered what's clickable and what is not. Nor have I noticed a problem with items being invisible till being moused over.
I was dubious when this new style started with iOS 7. But once I realised it was closer to how web UIs work, I stopped worrying.
While I agree that skeumorphism may have gone too far in previous designs, the shift to flat UI takes away from functionality sometimes. I want to clearly tell if something is touchable/clickable as opposed to nonfunctional text/graphics.
People have got used to the idea that buttons in apps have borders (and often pseudo drop shadows). Yet on the web, people are perfectly capable of realising which elements are clickable, usually without these pretend buttons. Look around here. (I'm looking at the classic slashdot UI) there are buttons, but they are a rarity. Most clickable things are coloured text, with no borders or shadows. Simply the highlight colour and the positioning related to other items gives the clue that it's a clickable item.
You'll get used to modern app guis exactly the same way you got used to hypertext content.
The benefits are a lighter feel and more focus on the content rather than the chrome.
Well said. Also the different forms of education are better at different ages. The typing advantage only kicks in once students are writing long essays. At Kindergarten, the educational activities possible with a touch screen tablet are much more rich. Between the two, there's a changing dynamic of advantages.
It's hardly surprising that schools would prefer laptops with keyboards, since students are expected to do a lot of writing.
It would be hardly surprising if schools prefer tablets with touch screens, as students are expected to do a lot of drawing and diagramming.
Whilst you can type modest amounts of text on a touch screen, drawing with a keyboard and trackpad or mouse is not practical.
Further: Keyboards are only better for typing. The direct manipulation of objects that a touch screen enables is far better for most kinds of educational software.
When kids get to college, and they have to write long essays, then the laptop becomes better. But for most of the school years, a tablet is a better machine.
Don't blame it on the writing. There was a chart, and a table at the end, both perfectly clear. And terseness means they were both very easy to find. I expect slashdotters to be able to read a simple bar chart - to read the labels as well as the length of the bars. If they can't, GTFO.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but it's plateaued at a very good level. OCR is extremely useable. If there are errors they are more likely to be in the document that you scanned than in the scanning process.
That's provided the scan is good. OCR from a mobile phone photo is more challenging...
I've got a scansnap for the paperless office thing. The success rate is far greater than 96%. I recently scanned a whole book in, one with varying formatting tables etc, and the errors are one mistake every few pages, not several per page.
The software is ABBY Finereader.
On the other hand, this is the ideal scenario, a purpose made document scanner. A mobile phone photo with arbitrary lighting and possibly slightly out of focus probably would have a worse rate.
The other thing is that usually the occasional error doesn't usually matter is you're archiving as the document is saved as a PDF which displays the original scan as a graphic, and just uses the scanned text for searching or if you need to cut'n'paste.
No I'm saying exactly what I said. In a nutshell: "But once the concept is understood, the metaphor gets in the way and can only mislead or clutter."
BTW, I notice that you said there's nothing wrong with gentle gradients and animation. Well there's more animation in iOS 7+ than iOS 6-
And what are the gradients for? If it's just a subtle effect for a background that makes an app look pettier, OK, but when it's used as a pseudo 3D effect, it's likely to clash with the proper 3D transform based layer animation. Flip a screen with pseudo raised bits and shadows, and it becomes clear it's just a sham.
You also state that you hate the vast amount of white. But you're looking at larger expanses of white when looking at a website such as slashdot classic, or a word processor file. If it's too bright, turn down the brightness!
Oh, and if you're confused by the lack of outlines on buttons, there's an accessibility option to add them.
What did you expect from a hipster marketing company?
I know! Look at this sad sack showing off his iPhone:
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-...
Wait a sec... that's an Android, and that's Google's VP of design, responsible for Android's latest makeover. My mistake.
In the TFA case, apple has control over your keys.
False. The private keys are unique to the phone and the paired device. The public keys are shared between the two when they are paired. Apple doesn't have have the private keys (or the public keys for that matter), and thus cannot read either side of the communication.
I'd argue that engineers provide quality apps for iOS despite Objective-C, and not because of it.
How many iOS apps have you worked on?
Except the "old thing" is practically from the 1980s.
C is even older. As is the Unix model (programs, shell, POSIX) that Linux users swear by.
I'd agree that Objective-Cs deficiencies are in the C parts. The good "Objective" parts are being retained in Swift.
I'd still rather have Objective-C even with the C baggage than Java. I did a course once that used Java as the language, and I hated it.
Anyhow, this is rapidly becoming an obsolete debate with Swift 1.0 approaching rapidly.
Yes, because people not even being ever confronted with programming before enrolling into a university course is the optimal approach to STEM promotion.
Who told you you couldn't learn programming on an iPad?
https://www.google.co.uk/webhp...
Apple hasn't been able to provide programmers with a decent consistent and modern language for over a decade.
Objective-C and Cocoa continue to be great, and produces far better quality apps than on exist on Android. Swift one day might be better. But the "oh there's something new coming along so the old thing must be crap" game is juvenile.
Porn is viewable in the browser these days.
Not on school networks it's not.
No hacker tools is a major crippling factor in iOS in any educational settings. No in-process compilation => no JIT-equipped programming learning environments, no LuaJIT, no hosted Oberon or any similar environment, no nothing.
The topic is schools. Not computer science/software engineering at university.
Compared to the technical capabilities of iOS and OSX, Android and Chrome are the crapfest of the century.
...except consumer tablets aren't proper digitizers. This is especially true for platforms where a stylus is a banned option because it doesn't seem fashionable enough.
Your ignorance is showing.
https://www.fiftythree.com/pen...
Even a mundane mouse is better at the "direct manipulation" stuff than what's provided on your average consumer tablet.
Ignorance again. A mouse cannot be direct manipulation. It's an indirect tool. You move your hand on one place, and a pointer moves in another. It's like the difference between piloting a plane, and controlling a model aircraft.
Lack of "hacker" tools is a disadvantage for any educational environment. Students might actually be expected to create something rather than just being mindless consumers.
You seem to be confusing schools with universities. Creating hacker tools is beyond school level education, and for the occasional over achiever who might want to try it on their own, will usually find it a disciplinary offence.
There have already been educational programs mired by patent attacks that have been pre-emptively banned from the iPad.
If it breaks IP law it shouldn't be in schools.
The number of vulnerabilities per time has, but the number has not. Both numbers are 10. 10 is 0% more than 10.
Yeah, that's what a rate is.
They're making a prediction on the total number of vulnerabilities based on the rate of vulnerabilities.
No they're not. You are. There is a point at which language pedantry becomes idiocy you know.
Terrible font - Helvetica Neue roman needs to die in a fire when compared to Helvetica medium or Lucida Grande.
Font is too thin, spacing is too wide. Looks weak, girly, empty, frail. Ick.
Are you looking at it on Retina? That's what it's optimised for. The rest of us will have to put up with it until the time comes to upgrade hardware.
Of course you can use ImageMagick if you want to manipulate pictures from the command line.
Wow, that's the perfect quote to illustrate the stupidity of the command line crowd.
Next: Who needs a piano keyboard? I can type note hex-codes into this midi utility.
Surely that's "Yes, I'm a Linux programmer".
And "charge" is a verb to which it applies.
The distinction you draw is a non-standard one. http://alt-usage-english.org/a...
You are fine to use it for yourself, but you are wrong to call other people's usage wrong.
Fuck these designers who have no idea how to make a good UI, but sure know how to destroy one.
Clearly they do. It's their specialism. Your disagreement is because people tend to be resistant to change - even when after a period of time they come to appreciate the improvement.
Chances are in the years to come you'll look back at pseudo 3D controls and think they look cheap and tacky. Just as 1990s GUIs now look grey and boxy.
A 'Notebook' that does not look anymore like a notebook is hard to find on the UI.
The icon still looks like a notebook, so how's it hard to find?The UI of the notes app itself doesn't need to look like a notebook. I'm more familiar with typing text into an app than writing text in a notebook, so I don't need the metaphor whilst using the app.
A calendar that does not look like a calendar but like a piece of paper coloured by a child, a bit like a copy of what our days MS Outlook looks like, is uncomprehendable, unuseable.
And yet the calendars on iOS7 and Yosemite both work better than their predecessors.
Anyone like seeing only 2 videos instead of 7 on youtube on our phones due to big fonts and flat elements?
If you're talking about iOS 7 or 8, ten the font sizes are adjustable for accessibility. Choose a smaller size.
There is a reason Skuemorphism was used. Namely ... IT WORKS.
It works FOR BEGINNERS.
Skuemorphism is a visual metaphor. Metaphors can help introduce people to new concepts by referencing old familiar ones. But once the concept is understood, the metaphor gets in the way and can only mislead or clutter. Skuemorphic buttons were good for teaching computer newbies about mouse clicking on screen items. Skuemorphic buttons were good for easing phone users over from real buttons to touch screens. But people who know how to use computers or phones don't need them.
Notice that most clickable things on the web do not have Skuemorphic button chrome. In the beginning they used purple text and underlining to indicate which text was clickable. Even that is not needed any more as people have more experience of the web.
If IOS looked like it did in 2007 it frankly wouldn't sell.
Absolutely. But we're more sophisticated people than we were in 2007.
And yet you manage to work out which parts of a web page to click on, when most clickable elements are not simulations of physical buttons.
I've been using the XCode 6 beta every day since it came out, and I haven't experienced any of the things you complain about. I'm not saying your description is wrong, although they aren't specific enough for me to know what particular controls you're talking about. I'm saying that I've not had a single occasion when I've wondered what's clickable and what is not. Nor have I noticed a problem with items being invisible till being moused over.
I was dubious when this new style started with iOS 7. But once I realised it was closer to how web UIs work, I stopped worrying.
And it's likely done by the GPU anyway, so no real CPU cost.
While I agree that skeumorphism may have gone too far in previous designs, the shift to flat UI takes away from functionality sometimes. I want to clearly tell if something is touchable/clickable as opposed to nonfunctional text/graphics.
People have got used to the idea that buttons in apps have borders (and often pseudo drop shadows). Yet on the web, people are perfectly capable of realising which elements are clickable, usually without these pretend buttons. Look around here. (I'm looking at the classic slashdot UI) there are buttons, but they are a rarity. Most clickable things are coloured text, with no borders or shadows. Simply the highlight colour and the positioning related to other items gives the clue that it's a clickable item.
You'll get used to modern app guis exactly the same way you got used to hypertext content.
The benefits are a lighter feel and more focus on the content rather than the chrome.
No porn and no torrenting, and no hacker tools are not a disadvantage for schools use.
Well said. Also the different forms of education are better at different ages. The typing advantage only kicks in once students are writing long essays. At Kindergarten, the educational activities possible with a touch screen tablet are much more rich. Between the two, there's a changing dynamic of advantages.
It's hardly surprising that schools would prefer laptops with keyboards, since students are expected to do a lot of writing.
It would be hardly surprising if schools prefer tablets with touch screens, as students are expected to do a lot of drawing and diagramming.
Whilst you can type modest amounts of text on a touch screen, drawing with a keyboard and trackpad or mouse is not practical.
Further: Keyboards are only better for typing. The direct manipulation of objects that a touch screen enables is far better for most kinds of educational software.
When kids get to college, and they have to write long essays, then the laptop becomes better. But for most of the school years, a tablet is a better machine.
Don't blame it on the writing. There was a chart, and a table at the end, both perfectly clear. And terseness means they were both very easy to find. I expect slashdotters to be able to read a simple bar chart - to read the labels as well as the length of the bars. If they can't, GTFO.