"I was prepared to write that the Windows 8 interface was forcing unnecessary touchscreen controls on people who wouldn't appreciate them, particularly if they were simply grafted onto a traditional laptop. But the more I've used Windows 8, despite its faults, the more I've become convinced that touchscreens are the future - even vertical ones." I can see his point. I, too, have often felt the desire to touch regular and laptop displays, especially when doing things like photo and video.
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Member since:2006-03-03
Point, and sliding your finger, your hand hiding the screen. To that extend, the Android keyboard is one of the worst stuff ever, even in its 4.2.1 Jelly Bean incarnation.
Correctly selecting a portion of text, especially in the edge of the screen/text is getting ridiculously hard.
Placing the cursor with no arrow keys, on a Retina-like display (Nexus 7) is a matter of a quarter of a millimeter. Just your breathing or even your earth beat can make the whole process rather spurious, you have to have sniper's abilities to remove your finger when the cursor, located beneath your finger, is located at the very location you were trying to reach.
Because like I said, with no arrow keys, you have to repeat the whole process just to get the cursor a character back or forth. Stunning that such an incredibly anti ergonomic keyboard is fitted into a mass product is beyond despair.
Not to speak about the auto-correction "features" that do not select the word you are currently typing but almost always select a wrong alternative with characters selected from the opposite side of the keyboard of the one you actually typed in, especially in landscape mode. Unbelievable.
Kochise
Member since:2011-01-28
Kochise,
"Correctly selecting a portion of text, especially in the edge of the screen/text is getting ridiculously hard."
I find that to be the case too! URLs can be all but impossible to type, autocorrect doesn't help. Since virtual keyboards aren't touch typed, ones eyes have to leave the text field to look at the keys, but if we only look at the keys and assume the entered text is correct, it becomes a futile task to correct a typo without backing out all the characters after it. The touchscreen is much too blunt of an input device for selecting characters. Sometimes I even think having arrow keys on the keyboard would help text editing.
I fully welcome the reintroduction of the traditional tablets form factors with real keyboards. They were always too expensive, but now with more competitive products we might finally see a real emergence of good hybrid tablets.
At an event earlier today, Microsoft unveiled the next Xbox - the third model, but confusingly named Xbox One. The big focus was TV, integrated Kinect, and all the other stuff we all expected to be forced down our throats. I think it took them 25 minutes to actually come to what should be the core of the story: gaming. Nothing groundbreaking in the gaming department, except for how Microsoft intends to handle the used games market and borrowing games from friends: pay up, buddy!
The day has finally come! Jolla has finally announced the launch device for its Sailfish operating system - and by god this is a looker. It's decidedly different from other phones out there, but it has good specifications and carries a relatively reasonably price tag - EUR 399, and it's up for pre-order today, shipping in the fourth quarter of this year.
Why does Google get so much credit in the technology industry? Why, despite the company's many obvious failings, do many geeks and enthusiasts still hold a somewhat positive view on the all-knowing technology giant? A specific talk at Google I/O this week provides the answer.
OSNews is a sponsor of this year's O'Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSNews reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We'll pick a winner at random next week. If you don't have an OSNews account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you'd like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSNews readers is "OSN."
"Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening." That's one way to start an insider explanation of why Windows' performance isn't up to snuff. Written by someone who actually contributes code to the Windows NT kernel, the comment on Hacker News, later deleted but reposted with permission on Marc Bevand's blog, paints a very dreary picture of the state of Windows development. The root issue? Think of how Linux is developed, and you'll know the answer.
This is one of those news items that's fun to write, fun to read, fun to comment on, and where no one will be able to say anything unkind. It's all just one big ball of awesome fluffiness. TuneTracker, the BeOS radio automation software, has just released something very special: TuneTracker System 5, the first version designed entirely and specifically for Haiku. In fact, it actually includes Haiku in the software package. Better yet, TuneTracker also unveiled several system-in-a-box products - which have Haiku and TuneTracker pre-installed.
Exactly twenty years ago, a document was published that played a huge role in establishing the web as we know it today. Twenty years later, and this simple and straightforward document is proof of an irrefutable fact: while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world.Oh multitasking. That staple of computing that got thrown out the window with many modern smartphones. We got some rudimentary thing in its place - but even as multitasking on phone and tablets improves, its user-visible side remains cumbersome. Windows 8 has a neat implementation, and now it's time Android follows in it footsteps.They're here! Whether that excites you or not remains to be seen, but the Galaxy S4, which will most likely become the best selling Android smartphone of the year by a huge margin, has been reviewed by all the major sites, and there's lots of interesting conclusions in there - although I think most of you will get the gist.Nokia has posted its quarterly results for the first quarter of 2013, and just like the quarters that came before, there's not a whole lot of good news in there. The rise in Lumia sales still can't even dream of making up for the sales drop in Symbian phones, and when broken down in versions, the sales figures for Windows Phone 8 Lumias in particular are very disappointing. In North America, Nokia is getting slaughtered.
Member since:
2005-07-06
That's no surprise. I think the point is that I don't need to read the screen through a dirty keyboard; finger marks all over the screen make it more difficult to read.