Your video, Awesome Touch Screen Universe Map, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

I was all set to purchase Windows 8 until i actually tried it. It's utterly awful. Spent all their time of the stupid Metro bullshit, which is only suitable for touch screens, and generally ruined the Desktop by adding shit like the retarded hot spots, which are a massive pain the arse for anyone with dual monitors, while improving nothing.

Well done Microsoft, you utter morons.

From what I've heard it's geared stupendously heavy towards tablet-PCs / small touch screens without a "normal" desktop PC UI.

I already threw a fit when I plugged my wacom tablet into my Win7 desktop for the first time and it assumed to be a tablet-PC and I had to slap that stupid idea right out of its memory (which is something your run-of-the-mill user would have problems with).
If it stays that way I'll pass on Win8 like I passed on Vista... don't want to rage every time I use my PC.

Imagine this with three mics, so you could triangulate the touch position, and a projector (or AR glasses) that sync to the position of the mics.

Instant touch screen interface on almost any surface.

@spoco2

I have to disagree and it comes from someone who was in a very similar position to you when the first iPad was announced and came out. I've worked 13 years in IT and have a pretty good feel for technology and I was CONVINCED there was no real market for a device larger than a smartphone, but smaller than say an airbook. In my mind, the macbook air would have been something 100x better than an iPad for a lot of reasons.

When the iPad hit, I watched and initially felt vindicated because I felt it was just a larger iPhone that just didn't do all the things an iPhone did.

Over the following year though, I saw (at least in my office environment) a very clear niche that it fit far better than a laptop. While it is not as powerful, it was impressively useful in meetings. What people don't seem to get is that when you have a bunch of people with laptops in a meeting, it can actually get quite loud and distracting. There is also the physical barrier of the screen which seems to put people behind a wall in a subtle way. The iPad sits almost flush against the table, allows you to take notes silently and really reduces the distractions of larger laptops.

What impresses me so much about it as a productivity tool is that it doesn't replace a laptop or a phone, but allows for a very specific type of subtlety when in meetings specifically. A year later I got it to replace a macbook air and I'm VERY pleased with how good it is, specifically for meetings. The fact that you can turn it on and off quickly and the battery life is pretty damned good for all it does, I'm really sold for my own business purposes.

This said, I do have some major problems with the way that tablets are being pushed for things they absolutely SUCK at. I'm an avid gamer and I feel that while the iPad has been good with games that work in a touch-screen environment (puzzle games, rpgs, etc.) the insistence that apple and game developers have to try to shove motion/tilt control down my throat, or really shitty third/first-person shooter control is really really annoying. Puzzle Quest 2 - perfect on the iPad, Dead Space - unplayable on the iPad.

As for this video, he really didn't have a choice. Absolutely anything he said would have turned into a giant front-page BS article that would have hurt MS... I'm not surprised at all that he went with no-comment.

friz, learn to quote, then work on your flaming. The numbers I threw around was indeed significant to show that despite so many modern touch screen users, the complaint about smudging is rather low and not really an issue that comes up.

And yes the era of the keyboard as we know it will come to an end. An onscreen keyboard may not have the nice tactile feedback, however it will generally become moot when the display and the controller become one and the touchscreen will work hand in hand with 3d object detection (ala kinect). The onscreen keyboard will consist of a small subset of buttons with specific task that can quickly appear and disappear on the display. Even data entry will replace the keyboard with voice recognition one day.

Also getting back to the game, the battlefield navigation system is not really something you could use a keyboard for. The whole purpose of it is to be able to visualize and manipulate the battle field up close.

so this is a google tablet... half the price of an ipad.. rad.
does it do what i need it to do?
seriously, i ask you guys because the lay out of amazon and other sites like it drives my dyslexia/dyscalculia CRAZY. my brain thinks im trying to decipher hieroglyphics. >> ^KnivesOut:

I bought a Nook Color, and rooted it, which for non-nerds means I replaced the Barnes & Noble default OS with a standard Android ROM. This means I can load regular 'droid apps on it, by accessing the Amazon App-Store and Android Market.
Why? Because it was only $250, compared to the $500+ for an iPad. Yes, it's not as "nice" as an iPad, but:
A. I hate apple.
B. I like saving money.
C. Droid is cooler, and easier to code against than iOS, but that's just my opinion.
There are other options in a similar price range (this one is pretty nice.)
I just have a hard time with the $500 price-point on an iPad.

I bought a Nook Color, and rooted it, which for non-nerds means I replaced the Barnes & Noble default OS with a standard Android ROM. This means I can load regular 'droid apps on it, by accessing the Amazon App-Store and Android Market.

Why? Because it was only $250, compared to the $500+ for an iPad. Yes, it's not as "nice" as an iPad, but:

A. I hate apple.
B. I like saving money.
C. Droid is cooler, and easier to code against than iOS, but that's just my opinion.

There are other options in a similar price range (this one is pretty nice.)

I just have a hard time with the $500 price-point on an iPad.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

iPad 2 glass is definitely fragile. I dropped it on linoneleum and it cracked in the corner - Apple store did do an instant refurb swap for me though. Is it possible to make a plastic capactive touch screen?

I'm really not a big fan of a touch screen unless it's on a small cell phone screen. It's just sort of a pain in the ass. Everyone has been trying to create a new control scheme away from mouse/keyboard with stupid little console controllers, touch screens, joysticks, WoW mice, but until I can control the computer with my god damn mind I'm sticking with the mouse and keyboard.

>> ^ForgedReality:

>> ^grinter:
Man I hate touch screens. Has the world gone mad?!

You obviously don't own an HTC Evo.


Touch works for mobile devices, cars and horizontal surfaces, but it's less good on vertical or workstations like desktops and laptops.
here is a test, reach out and touch your monitor, now as you surf the web for an hour tap everything you click on, then tell me how your arm feels after that.

>> ^grinter:

Man I hate touch screens. Has the world gone mad?!


You obviously don't own an HTC Evo.

Man I hate touch screens. Has the world gone mad?!

You have been awarded 1 Power Point for fixing the embed code for Dead Pool video multi touch screen. Thank you for helping maintain VideoSift's reliability.

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

So what your saying is it's more like a PC and less like a console. As such, there is always give and take...the give being you can buy more and, more importantly, less phone. The analogy caries on as doing graphics on that scale is still relatively expensive in terms of hardware cost, much akin to the early days of consoles and computers. Non-standardized hardware usually means wider adoption rates enabling people to reach different platforms of performance for their need. It is the reason we don't all compute on Nintendo powered hardware, PCs won the technology arms race. Moreover, being that phones aren't really designed with gaming solely in mind, they resemble PCs, more than consoles even more so. There will always be a market for "one simple hardware configuration", but I think the market is larger for people who want tiered models

Right and it makes life hell for developers. Having previously developed for Symbian and WM, and recently starting with Android, I have experience with this.

In the PC market, you can assume that there will be at least a keyboard and mouse as input. On Android, you can only assume a single-touch screen. There may be a trackball, or an optical trackball (ick), but no guarantees. The people with these devices want applications that will use the input methods on their devices. Not easy to test as a developer.

Reviews regularly request multitouch despite few Android devices supporting it, especially those of HTC. Nexus One and Desire multitouch is a nightmare to try and implement, due to the semi-broken hardware. Note that even Google Maps, the poster child for Android, isn't using multi-touch correctly on Android (i.e. if you put 2 fingers on points on the map and pinch, those 2 points aren't in the same place at the end, and you can't pinch and drag at the same time either).

I haven't tried iPhone development, perhaps with the new resolution and hardware specs, it's starting to suffer from the same issues. Selecting the target market for Android is certainly difficult though unless you target the lowest common denominator, which will rarely have a "wow" factor.