Jump to content

Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions


JorgeA

Recommended Posts


That's why I use Winamp with my iPod! :lol:

I'd honestly rather use WMP (or pretty much anything else) than Winamp. However next time we buy new mp3 players it'll likely be iPods. That will pretty much force me away from WMP, especially since I'm getting tired of its not-so-smart playlists (it's such a pain to make it sync exactly what I want) and its inability to handle different formats (like FLAC) intelligently... WMP was already a terrible video player (the absolute, very worst I've tried in ages, by a quite long shot) and its ability to share stuff with media center just lost the last little bit of relevance it might have had with Win8. To be honest, I'm not even sure why I'm still using it today. Lots of people say foobar is better (it looks like it has real potential) but it feels like way too much work to hunt for skins, try to set it up to use ratings, etc. It feels more of a construction kit than ready-to-use software.

On a totally different note, developers everywhere are really angered about MS' latest moves. So many articles on so many different sites, and thousands of comments... MS trying to force terrible stuff onto its users and developers, hoping they all bend over and take it. This can't end well for them, unless they do a quick about turn with Win9.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ars Technica is reporting that another business-oriented tablet has bit the dust.

Cius wasn't killed by the market-leading iPad and Kindle Fire; it was killed by consumers. While work laptops and desktops are still primarily provisioned to employees by corporate IT shops, mobile devices follow the opposite path, being brought into work environments by employees. Smartphones shifted from a business-driven model dependent on the BlackBerry to a consumer-driven one focused on the iPhone and Android devices, but tablets have never been a business-first device (with the exception of some Windows tablets deployed for industry-specific use cases).

What (if anything) does this say about the prospects of Windows 8 tablets? One might speculate that employees will be taking their tablets into the office, but in combination with what we've seen about the comparative production costs and price of iPads vs. Windows tablets, it doesn't look that hard to predict which tablet brands people will be taking to work.

--JorgeA

Edited by JorgeA
Link to comment
Share on other sites

it doesn't look that hard to predict which tablet brands people will be taking to work

iOS and Android devices are all that rage. The answer to that is pretty obvious.

Another proof that MS couldn't sell mobile devices even if they came with a free gold ingot.

The smartphone shipments have gone up 50% in one year, from 101.6M units to 152.3M units. Both iOS and Android devices saw tremendous growth (145% and 88.7%). Despite MS doing their best to promote their stuff in a market that's rapidly expanding (it should be easy to sell your stuff when there's so much demand), they managed to lose 0.4% of the market (from 2.6% down to 2.2%). I can see Windows tablets selling almost as well. And I expect Metro to be almost as successful on desktops as Silverlight has been on the web.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

it doesn't look that hard to predict which tablet brands people will be taking to work

iOS and Android devices are all that rage. The answer to that is pretty obvious.

Another proof that MS couldn't sell mobile devices even if they came with a free gold ingot.

The smartphone shipments have gone up 50% in one year, from 101.6M units to 152.3M units. Both iOS and Android devices saw tremendous growth (145% and 88.7%). Despite MS doing their best to promote their stuff in a market that's rapidly expanding (it should be easy to sell your stuff when there's so much demand), they managed to lose 0.4% of the market (from 2.6% down to 2.2%). I can see Windows tablets selling almost as well. And I expect Metro to be almost as successful on desktops as Silverlight has been on the web.

So, basically, this is more evidence of how Microsoft may be letting its tablet tail wag the PC dog: in other words, inconvenience the vast majority of its customers (not to say, outright p*ss off lots of them) to pursue the chimera of explosive success in the tablet market.

Meanwhile, I'm wondering if an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week (May 21; I took too long to get around to posting about it and the full text was no longer available at the WSJ site when I checked) might help to explain Microsoft's behavior around Windows 8:

A race to liberate computer users from the mouse is kicking into high gear, inspired by the potential of turning hands and other body parts into digital controllers.

The goal: to manage computers and other devices with gestures rather than pointing and clicking a mouse or touching a display directly. Backers believe that the approach can make it not ony easier to carry out many existing chores but also take on trickier tasks such as creating 3-D models, verifying whether clothes fit, training athletes and browsing medical imagery during surgery without touching anything.

...Microsoft, which helped ignite the action with the 2010 introduction of its Kinect accessory for gaming consoles, on Monday is updating the software that allows developers to build applications for the PC version of the product.

...

Later on, the article gives the name of this MS software as, Kinect for Windows.

Any thoughts, speculation, educated guesses?

--JorgeA

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Kinect for Windows.

Any thoughts, speculation, educated guesses?

I've heard about this stuff a while ago. I can't see any practical uses for it. Far too imprecise, and gesticulating all day sounds even worse than using touch monitors (not that we'll have them) all day. The only place it might have had a chance is games, but with publishers caring more about consoles lately, and the very low odds of having such a device on the PC makes it a waste of time to develop for, especially when that group of gamers is well known to be mouse/keyboard addicts.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Later on' date=' the article gives the name of this MS software as, Kinect for Windows.

Any thoughts, speculation, educated guesses?

[/quote']

__________________

I was reading an article recently about a new kinetic control device, an invisible keyboard and mouse if you will, which was 100X more precise than any existing game console.

Cool stuff!

The problem with such interface is the unintended gestures interpretated as a command by the machine. When all your moves are watched by the machine, the machine tries to catch commands from you eventhought you didn't want to. Inadvertant mistakes may happen much more often.

You scratch an itch on your back and Oooops, the software closed the file without saving!

What happens if another person is next to you and also move his or her hands in all directions?

Poeple will need a real button control, to turn on and off the gesture detection.

It's still not clear how often office workers will have to turn it on anf off but it can be pretty often, to the point a mouse may still be the most convenient device.

For having worked on a drawing tablet, my experience with non-mouse pointing devices tells me that you must have a large area of maneuvre to enjoy precision on the screen. If you area is not larger than that of the mouse, it's pointless, no pun intended.

It would be cool to work on a gesture detection area half the size of your both arms spread left and right, and verticaly the same ratio as for your monitor screen.

Large gesture in reality for small pointer moves on the screen. But designer and manufacturer always want to do things cheaper and they don't understand this need for large areas.

It's also not obvious to click, let alone to right-click or middle click or double-click with all the variants, when it's not a mouse.

The mouse was designed especialy for easy clicking. Not a pen. And definetly not your empty hands.

How will you click without a material cick-button, I don't know. You won't have the material feel of it at your fingertips. It will look wierd.

Aigain, with my experience with drawing tablet, I never get used to clicking easily with the pen. I always switch to the mouse for click-intensive tasks.

It's not sure if this device will be needed on all computers. If your main job is typing on a keyboard, what for?

What is the real time-saving advantage of poiting your finger toward the screen versus fetching your mouse and moving it?

There certainly must be, but one cannot predict that it will replace the mouse totaly.

I don't think we will get such device out of the box working in an ideal manner immediately.

The wow! effect yes, but real efficiency, maybe not.

It will take years of improvements for the millions users to use aerial area instead of the mouse and its carpet.

Edited by Fredledingue
Link to comment
Share on other sites

why do you start a new thread?

Andre,

I thought that the news might be more visible (seen by more MSFN visitors) if it stood out in its own thread, instead of being buried in the middle of this long one.

But if you think that it will be seen by more people if we make it part of this thread, then I'll be happy to ask the moderators to merge it into this one.

--JorgeA

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Large gesture in reality for small pointer moves on the screen

But then again, your precision on those larger moves is far lesser than what you have with your wrists and fingers, negating any possible gain.

Combine that with the poor precision/accuracy of such hardware (unlike expensive time-of-flight cameras) and you most likely have quite a bit less precision than with a mouse.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Fredledingue,

+1 on everything you said.

Later on' date=' the article gives the name of this MS software as, Kinect for Windows.

Any thoughts, speculation, educated guesses?

[/quote']

__________________

I was reading an article recently about a new kinetic control device, an invisible keyboard and mouse if you will, which was 100X more precise than any existing game console.

Cool stuff!

The problem with such interface is the unintended gestures interpretated as a command by the machine. When all your moves are watched by the machine, the machine tries to catch commands from you eventhought you didn't want to. Inadvertant mistakes may happen much more often.

You scratch an itch on your back and Oooops, the software closed the file without saving!

What happens if another person is next to you and also move his or her hands in all directions?

Poeple will need a real button control, to turn on and off the gesture detection.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Such a kinetic control device does sound really cool, but it could easily end up causing more work (undoing unintended commands) than it saves.

It's also not obvious to click, let alone to right-click or middle click or double-click with all the variants, when it's not a mouse.

For use on a Metro UI device, there's one particular gesture that I can think of for middle-clicking. ;)

--JorgeA

Link to comment
Share on other sites

All this gesture talk reminds me of the YEARS they spent talking about utilizing voice input for the same kind of supposed gains in ease of use and efficiency. Besides in movies from the imagination of Hollywood, anybody see those in widespread use today? I guess Siri comes closest, but for regular office work?

Cheers and Regards

Link to comment
Share on other sites

that reminds me, i remember playing some games that utilize scrolling the mouse-wheel while moving the mouse.

what the touch-based metro equivalent for that kind of gestures?

Gosh, I can't begin to imagine what sort of combination of touch gestures would be used for that. Maybe it's too complicated a move for the supposed dummies that MS seems to envision will now be rushing out to live in the lobotomized Metro immersion.

--JorgeA

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...