[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

Nick Sabalausky SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com
Mon Sep 17 16:33:44 PDT 2012


On Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:35:53 -0700
Ali Çehreli <acehreli at yahoo.com> wrote:

> On 09/17/2012 03:08 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>  > On Mon, 17 Sep 2012 13:18:51 -0700
>  > "H. S. Teoh"<hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx>  wrote:
> 
>  >> Any time you hear "smart" and "software" in the same sentence, be
>  >> prepared for something dumb.
>  >>
>  >
>  > Heh, I actually say pretty much the same thing myself very often.
>  > Couldn't agree more. If you were around me in person, you'd
>  > frequently hear "I hate when (devices|programs) try to be smart."
>  > Smart(.*) is a red flag for "badly designed" or "unreliable".
>  >
>  > That's actually been an even bigger thing with me lately than ever
>  > before since, because of work, I have a call phone for the first
>  > time now - two actually, an iPhone and an Android - and I
>  > absolutely *HATE* both the damn things (with the iPhone being
>  > slightly worse). *Everything* about them is just wrong, backwards,
>  > idiotic. They even managed to take something as trivial to get
>  > right as volume controls and *completely* fuck it up in every
>  > imaginable way. And of course, Android aped Apple's idiotic lead
>  > on that, as usual.
> 
> I have to jump in on this discussion: Those have been exactly my 
> feelings since I've gotten my "smart" phone about two years ago. I 
> cannot believe the lack of usability! :) I have an Android but of
> course I have played with iPhones as well. Let me tell you: the
> emperor has no clothes! :)
> 

Finally, someone who's with me on that! I thought I was the only one!

> They have imagined a "phone", where being able to answer the call is 
> completely by luck if the phone has been in your pocket when the call 
> arrived! Chances are, you will touch something on the "smart" screen
> and reject the call by some random reason like "I am in class." (No,
> I am not a student or a teacher at this time; but that exact scenario 
> happened to me multiple times.)
> 

Oh man, I could go on for pages listing the issues I have with them.

> Imagine a device where the *entire* screen is touchable with
> different areas meaning different things depending on context! The
> users can only cradle it gently but they can't hold it firmly! Wow! I
> can't believe how this whole idea took off. Later generations will
> have a good laugh at these devices.
> 

And worse: When you *do* want to interact with it, you can't do so
accurately, because it's *completely unresponsive* to anything even
remotely accurate like a fingernail or stylus. Not that they even
*have* any place to keep a stylus. And the idiotic claim rationalizing
that is that capacitive touchscreens are supposedly "more accurate" than
resistive. Which is bullshit because a finger can *never* be sanely
considered even remotely as accurate as a fingernail or a
non-capacitive stylus. Like you said: No clothes on this emperor.

Speaking of resistive touchscreens and stylus, that reminds me: I miss
the PalmOS devices. I loved my Visor and Zire71. If they hadn't killed
them off with that WebOS junk (and if the assholes at Xerox hadn't
helped by killing off the *good* version of Grafitti with their goddamn
software patents), then I think a modern PalmOS incarnation would have
been a fantastic alternative to iOS/Android. PalmOS 6 was looking
great, but never materialized due to the one thing that made it so
great: It wasn't trying to ape Apple's moronic ideas.

Hell, that's why it's impossible to get a good portable
music player: They all decided they *had* to ape Apple. Shit,
if I wanted a portable music player with minimal storage, proprietary
communications, and a non-tactile poorly-designed interface, I'd
have actually *gotten* an iPod (either iTouch or pre-iTouch, they're
both junk). I *don't* want that Apple-style junk, that's *why* I went
looking for non-Apple devices! The best I could find was a Toshiba
Gigabeat F hacked up with the Rockbox firmware, but even that could have
been a lot better by toning down the Apple-envy (damn touch-sensitive
"buttons"). (Incidentally, the Zune 1 would have been *perfect* if MS's
insistence on aping Apple's "Don't let anyone access it like the USB
HDD it literally is" hadn't single-handedly rendered it useless. Well,
and if MS knew how to make non-trivial hardware that didn't break down
at the drop of a hat. Zune 2 was junk, though.)

> Thanks for letting me vent. :)
> 

Heh. One thing I've learned about myself: I love to complain :) I don't
like having things *to* complain about, but when I do...




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