[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[H. S. Teoh]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 07:33:44PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:35:53 -0700
> Ali Çehreli <acehreli at yahoo.com> wrote:
[...]
> > 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.

Yeah, I spent the better part of a few *weeks* just to get my finger to
land in the right spots for iSilo to open a link correctly. Even now,
YEARS later, sometimes I still have to stand there like an idiot tapping
the same spot 50 times before it will go, because the link is 2
characters wide, and the stupid software can't figure out that since the
finger landed closest to a 5x7 pixel link, the user probably meant to
hit that link instead of empty space. Like you said, fingers are totally
inaccurate. And a fingernail or stylus doesn't work because of the
capacitative surface.


[...]
> (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. [...])

Hear, hear! The one thing that irks me the most is this whole "you
can't access your own files 'cos we decided that you just can't"
nonsense. Like you said, it's essentially a USB HDD. Now I have a bunch
of files on my iPod that I accidentally corrupted on my PC, and I can't
copy them back because I can't access them from outside! Grrrrrr...

And don't get me started on the straitjacketed app store that has the
full freedom to kill off Apple competition at a whim. Oh yes, lest you
have any illusion that the app store's policies are for "protecting the
user", let's face the fact that there is a long history of USEFUL apps
that got blocked because they competed with Apple's own inferior
offerings. VLC player, for one. Opera Mobile. And countless others. The
official reason? They competed with Apple's own offerings. Yes, that's
the *official* reason. And if you were lucky enough to install them
before they got taken off, you'd quickly realize that they are far
superior to what Apple has to offer. In the meantime, totally worthless
apps and $0.99 scams that do *nothing* except pocket your dollar are
left free to roam. Does this remind you of "DOS ain't done until Lotus
won't run"?

I was looking forward to getting an Android when my current precambrian
non-smart phone finally breathes its last... but it looks like it's just
going to be Apple Hell, Version 2 "we just changed the props but the
annoying misfeatures are exactly the same as you experienced before
(tm)".  :-(


T

-- 
What do you get if you drop a piano down a mineshaft? A flat minor.