Yes, yes, I apologise. After Kroc's story earlier today, and together with this one, we now have three stories in a row on the 
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Member since:2006-10-28
I agree that a tactile keyboard is ergonomically better than a touchscreen, but use a larger touchscreen for a day and you'll find its not half as bad as you felt it was at first. I could barely type a word when I first tried an iPhone but within 15 minutes, I was able to do 15 wpm with my thumb on that tiny keyboard. I'm certain a larger one would be much easier.
Format support for media is quite wide, and transcoding doesn't take that long on a modern computer. It's absurd to suggest that it doesn't support non-apple media.
It does support any software in the app store, including educational apps.
No drivers are needed for the multi touch styluses, and there are already handwriting recognition apps in the app store (e.g. WritePad).
One area I where strongly agree with you is the need for a File Manager. If you plan on making many documents, it'll be much better to have a centralized file manager rather than having a unique list of documents for each app. Support for wireless file transfer will be good to. For now, Olive Toast's Files will have to do, but a proper integrated file manager would be much preferred [provided that it's not crippled in some way].
Member since:2008-03-17
It must be just me, but I hate touchscreen keyboards no matter the size. Sure, after a while I do speed up, but it is nowhere near as pleasant and I make far more errors on touchscreen keyboards than regular physical keyboards.
Does it support wmv,divx or h.264 containers other than QT? Doubtful. Could I install an app that does support these formats? Doubtful.
When I say educational software I mean stuff institutions buy in bulk, usually with only windows versions. Require installations other than through the app store.
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2008-03-17
-That keyboard definitely sucks. It is absolute insanity to expect essays or even a medium sized email to be typed up on this thing. It isn't about the size but about the more direct feedback you get from pressing keys and not to mention the shock absorption that comes from pressing buttons.
-There are no apps and no methods to deal with direct input from a pen (specifically designed for it or no).
So some enterprising developer comes along and says yup I have a pen based handwriting solution but i need to sell the pen and install drivers....wait not gonna happen because apple will probably deny it in the app store, let alone trying to install it by other means.
Managing documents is a no go as this device needs to b-e synced (no file manager here).
-It is too expensive to be used in education, which requires much more flexibility in a device...for starters the ability to install educational software.
-What the device does do well is play and view APPLE'S MEDIA because I can't see apple allowing any old format to work with this thing.
For audio it isn't that big a deal due to the ubiquity of mp3, ease and speed of transcoding etc. But for video it is plain silly as video takes too long to transcode and the market is too fractured under competing implementations e.g. hulu,itunes netflix and not to mention divx etc.