Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 6th Mar 2013 19:00 UTC
One of the major lacking features in the newest Office: no Metro applications. In fact, the only reason Windows RT has a desktop at all is because the Office team was unable to create Metro applications in time for the release of Windows RT. I often thought this was a classic case of two important divisions within Microsoft not getting along and not being aligned, but now that I have my own Surface RT, I'm starting to realise that there's a far simpler, and thus more likely, explanation: Metro is simply not ready for anything serious - or for anything at all, really.
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RE[2]: At least they look nice...
by Bill Shooter of Bul on Wed 6th Mar 2013 20:54
in reply to "RE: At least they look nice..."
Member since:2006-07-14
Instability and cooperative multitasking aside, the UI just had so much work put into it before Jobs started making changes by fiat.
Other way around. OSX was NextStep. Jobs didn't remove things from Mac OS, he gradually added them back from Mac OS to OSX. Until there came a point where people had been living for years without certain Classic features and no one complained about them missing ( except john siracusa and you), so they stopped.
Stability and multitasking are much more important than the neat little UI flourishes that Mac OS had.
RE[3]: At least they look nice...
by tylerdurden on Wed 6th Mar 2013 22:56
in reply to "RE[2]: At least they look nice..."
Member since:2009-03-17
RE[3]: At least they look nice...
by ssokolow on Thu 7th Mar 2013 07:58
in reply to "RE[2]: At least they look nice..."
Member since:2010-01-21
Other way around. OSX was NextStep. Jobs didn't remove things from Mac OS, he gradually added them back from Mac OS to OSX. Until there came a point where people had been living for years without certain Classic features and no one complained about them missing ( except john siracusa and you), so they stopped.
Stability and multitasking are much more important than the neat little UI flourishes that Mac OS had.
Stability and multitasking are much more important than the neat little UI flourishes that Mac OS had.
I didn't say he removed things. I said he changed them.
I'm talking about things like replacing semi-iconographic titlebar buttons in a layout that inspired Windows 3.1 with gumdrop buttons or making irritating minor adjustments to how Finder works.
...the sort of things that irritate not just me but also my Mac-using friends.
As for stability and multitasking being important, why do you think I run a Lubuntu LTS release? I get a desktop that's stable once I update away known crashers in the 12.04 versions of PCManFM and LXPanel but also doesn't fight attempts to get the desktop i want the way OSX does.
Pre-OSX MacOS is downright primitive. What I'm saying is that, when I'm encountering it sparingly to play games like Escape Velocity in BasiliskII, I don't trip over the crashes or run into the shortcomings and I end up really feeling the polish and consistency in the UI that OSX has piddled away.
Edited 2013-03-07 08:14 UTC
RE[2]: At least they look nice...
by kryogenix on Thu 7th Mar 2013 19:00
in reply to "RE: At least they look nice..."
Member since:2008-01-06
A matter of taste somewhat. I personally think MacOS's usability took a nosedive with OSX and never fully recovered.
To a degree I think you're right. MacOS Classic had a very simple, elegant, sensible UI.
I think they should have simply refined the initial pre-aqua MacOS X Server release. It was more Mac-like but still had the NeXT awesomeness under the hood.
Instability and cooperative multitasking aside, the UI just had so much work put into it before Jobs started making changes by fiat.
Some changes weren't so bad. I liked the addition of the NeXT-style dock. The interface decorations were terribly ugly until 10.5. They made it look like a child's toy but the underlying concepts were great.
Nobody was complaining about the MacOS GUI in those days, it was the crufty OS underneath we wanted gone.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"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.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"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.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
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."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
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."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"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."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"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.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
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.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"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.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"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.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"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.More News »
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Member since:
2010-01-21
A matter of taste somewhat. I personally think MacOS's usability took a nosedive with OSX and never fully recovered.
I run Lubuntu for my day-to-day work and find it very comfortable, but I still find myself looking fondly at the copy of System 7.5.3 (not even Platinum) running in my BasiliskII.
Instability and cooperative multitasking aside, the UI just had so much work put into it before Jobs started making changes by fiat.