Comment by mattiask | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattiask | Hacker News Reader

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I'm actually a Windows user (although I own an iPad), but you have to be a bit humored by all this. As usual where Apple has used a feather Microsoft have used the whole chicken with keyboards, screws, different versions, the whole enchilada. I'm only surprised there's no stickers. "ClearType display"? really, you felt you had to brand it just to compete with "Retina display".

Despite all this the tablet might actually be good, and seeing another quality tablet contender is always good for competition. I am however getting a bit worried by Microsofts "me too"-attitude and the reek of desperation these days. They could be making awesome stuff but they lack follow-through and the finer points of taste

It's a pity they won't put their chips down on things that actually were original, like the courier or mainstreaming the surface (the table). In the end they didn't have any choice since they couldn't surrender their enterprise tablet/smartphone customers to Apple. The Courier was innovative but perhaps too niche so its not even sure that was a bad call.

I guess I'm just arguing about the finer points about their attitude and execution, with Microsoft I'm always afraid that in-company bureaucracy will manifest itself into some stupid decision on the consumers behalf. Apple are fanatics (and splending assholes in some cases), but atleast you feel they pretty much set the consumer first and have some taste

Having said all this I'm still kinda rooting for MS since they ironically enough seem to be the underdog nowadays, how the tables have turned...

ClearType has been around for a very long time. It's basically subpixel-rendering that improves the visual quality of text (sort of effectively tripling the LCD resolution). Last I checked, Microsoft had patented the hell out of it (and I last checked a few years ago).

I think they're right about touting a technology that effectively triples text-display resolution.

And for your other observation about the whole enchilada, look around you-- do you see people that use external keyboards with their iPad? These would be willing customers for a tablet that is actually is pen+touch+type (ditto with people who try and augment their iPad with screen pens, even on a screen that has trouble with palm touches).

Lastly, I'm skeptical about "companies-with-taste". Steve Jobs certainly had good taste, but I'm not sure the whole of Apple is comparably good. I think, sans Jobs, Microsoft is doing the best they can-- prototyping for months and trying to understand where they fit into a market.

I don't know how they're going to make subpixel anti-aliasing work if you can rotate the display. I wouldn't be surprised if they just are re-using the ClearType name and it's not actually sub-pixel anti-aliased, just regular anti-aliased (like the iPad).

The OS knows, at some level, the orientation it's displaying the screen in. So in principle, there's no reason it can't use subpixel rendering appropriately. Although it might be hard to achieve - I don't know how the graphics stack works.

Good point, since most pixels are taller than wide (it'd suck even more if they can't sub-pixel render in portrait mode, as it seems the more natural reading position).

Very true, big companies are usually as good as their despot. At least when it comes to taking risks and "saying no". Apple could go all-in because Jobs had the clout to give marching orders to the whole company. Microsoft has Ballmer, who is more of a salesman/business guy and probably with less clout (perhaps fortunately)

I too have a bit of worry for Apple now that Jobs is gone. Ive has taste and seems to have gotten some power to go with it. However, the next time it is time to go from evolution to revolution they won't have Jobs to kick them there.

If it makes you feel better, ClearType was a brand Microsoft has used since the late 90's/early 00's. I know it as some weird pixel display thing designed to make text look sharper in WinXP. But, it was a hidden option that required third-party software to reveal to me.

In Microsoft's world, they assume themselves to be the sun and thereby everything revolves around them and their cheesy need to synergize jargony things. Too bad momentum isn't in Microsoft's favor these days.

Thats what made it so funny. I can see the Microsoft meeting:

-Hey so everyone talking about this Retina thing how are we going to compete? -Let's make up our own word! Do we have anything lying around we can use? -Developer: Well, we have this ClearType thing but it's really more about software... -Marketing Guy: Software Hardware, what's the difference. ClearType Display it is! -Developer: I quit

They've also co-opted the five-year-old "Surface" trademark, which is now called PixelSense: http://www.pixelsense.com

dafuq. I wondered what was going to happen to the original surface. pixelsense is an awful name.

It is, but no end-user is going to buy one of those giant devices. They're marketed to corporate customers, for whom PixelSense is probably just fine.

They turned .NET into damn near everything, and jam Windows in where it doesn't make sense (e.g. a tablet where apps run full-screen).

which redirects to http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/pixelsense/default.aspx

I see the old Surface is now known as the Samsung SUR40

Or as I call it "BlurryType". The color fringing drives me nuts.

Whenever I do a fresh windows install, it's a race to turn off cleartype before I get a headache.

Don't turn it off. Go into Color settings (or whatever they call it) and use the ClearType tuning wizard to sharpen it.

All-in-all, it's a big, big play on Windows 8/RT. A kernel that can perform optimally on ARM/Intel on mobile devices and also support PC devices is a huge achievement - the entire thread-library would have to be one super-cool piece of software engineering. That and elsewhere within the OS, is where the innovation lies, in my opinion.

And now you can see why JavaScript was made a first-class language for the WinRT (not Windows RT) API - content-consumption via touch is now going to be a big feature for Win 8 and nothing serves this better than HTML5/JavaScript.

I'm kinda sad though, in a way, I always considered MS an engineering company - now it's gone the Apple way (which for all its merits is technologically ok-ish if not boring).

DOES it perform well though? And by that I mean things like native hardware video decompression without having too much impact on the battery, real-timeyness of the touch UI and overall low power consumption. These are IMO the underlying technologies where Apple innovated the most with their iOS platform and these metrics are yet to beat by others. Do we already have hands on tests with windows 8 on ARM? I at least haven't seen any.

"native hardware video decompression without having too much impact on the battery" - that's actually where ARM and Intel innovated, not Apple - MS is probably mature enough to deal with processors at least as well as, if not better than, Apple.

As regarding tests, I haven't had access to devices running Windows on ARM - WOA is something of a mystery - they haven't released a full WOA SDK as far as I'm aware - although they do provide a cross-compiler for ARM in the upcoming Visual Studio. So yes, no concrete numbers here.

IIRC, they aren't letting devs use Win32 on WOA, only WinRT and .NET.

Yes, they're discouraging Win32 use overall (even in the x86/x64 space). But that does not mean you can't build native apps (ie non .NET) for WOA - you can use C/C++ out of the box. You are just bound to use MetroUI and WinRT as your primary APIs - both of which are native subsystems.

Steven Sinofsky: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/09/building-windo...

Yup, they let you use C++ I think... which is nice since MS have been putting work into C++11 lately.

> And now you can see why JavaScript was made a first-class language for the WinRT (not Windows RT) API - content-consumption via touch is now going to be a big feature for Win 8 and nothing serves this better than HTML5/JavaScript.

I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. I race for a native app when it comes to content consumption, and native is also required to provide the requisite stream DRM used by Netflix, HBO GO, etc.

Heck, I wish Netflix would hire a better development team and stop trying to do their app in HTML. It's poorly designed and frustrating to use.

That's because usually there is a browser-based layer which runs that HTML/JavaScript.

Here it is Metro UI (via HTML5) powered using JavaScript (running natively on Windows) - equivalent to a C++ native app with a Metro UI.

I don't really understand why this provides a better environment for producing top-quality media applications over the platforms on the market today.

It doesn't - it provides a perfectly equivalent platform.

In all cases, it will be the codecs registered with the OS that would be used - so the quality of the media cannot be better/worse.

Where this differs is from a developer perspective - you don't have to learn a non-standard UI API (XAML/WinForms/MFC/COM/ATL/Qt/Gtk/Swing/awt/whatever) or a language you're not familiar with (C#/C++/Java - pick any). But you can be sure that the experience will be precisely the same - no API hacks to achieve something specific, nothing at all.

It's perfectly equivalently poor.

What makes those platform APIs useful are all the tools they provide to simplify the creation of great, well-performing UIs that exceed the user's expectations.

Well, MS provides Visual Studio for this - which isn't a bad toolchain, in my opinion.

The moment Retina displays came out was the moment ClearType died. They're thrashing a dead horse.

It's an intriguing assertion, but there are too many variables. Which would really look better for rendering video or text at sub-optimal resolutions? 1920x1080 video or desktop stretched on the RD? Surface RT? It seems to me the safer bet would be that it depends on the task and the context. I'd bet money someone will do an appropriate comprehensive usability study within a year.

You mean how like Apple was so original with an MP3 player?

You mean a compact music player with a 2.5" HDD, room for 5GB of music, with 20 minutes of skip protection, a FireWire port for 50MB per second transfer, a click wheel for navigation, and a user friendly interface?

Yes, that was pretty novel in 2002.

1.8" HD. All of the other MP3 players on the market until then had been using 2.5", which was why the iPod seemed so much smaller at launch.

You're right! I remember it being one size smaller than the other HDD players at the time. I thought it was the 2.5" that had just come out, but it was 1.8".

My iPaq had a 1.8" HD sleeve, played mp3s, and browed the web (with a different wifi sleeve..). Plus it had a sunlight readable display.

And where is it now?

Yes, Apple is more about "making the first one that doesn't suck" than "making the first one".

The first ipod kinda sucked.

Yeah... No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...

I had an Archos before the iPod came out. A tiny bit bigger than the iPod would be, but a 30gb hard drive, usb 2.0, and a much better way to find music than a wheel.

Archos killed the iPod. The iPod was one of the first times I distinctly recall thinking that actual fashion (like Vogue magazine) could trump pragmatics and technology in the tech sector.

A lot of people try to compete against Apple in design. Wrong. Apple isn't doing design, as much as they're doing fashion.

If they were doing fashion, they would change to a new look every year. Remember the disappointment when the iPhone 4S kept the iPhone 4 design? Apple doesn't care about fashion, they care about good design.

The first generations used what's called a touch wheel and buttons. The click wheel wasn't introduced until the 4th generation iPod.

I'm not going into an originality discussion, certainly that argument has been made thousand of thousand times on forums all over the internet.

Very few companies are truly original. Even fewer are successful while being truly original. But having the guts to go all in, be consistent and going that little extra mile will get you pretty far.

I agree with your thoughts about originality, but people always saying Apple does everything original is wrong. For both Microsoft, Apple and others they'll rarely ever launch something that's truly original.

Apple's timeline was iPod > iPhone > iPad (You could even argue that without the theft of millions of songs aka MP3's Apple wouldn't be bankrupt).

Microsoft's timeline was DOS > Windows > Server Products > Dynamics etc.

I would say it's very rare that doing something completely different than your baseline business is going to work. For that reason and the fact that the shareholders want you to be profitable is why you'll not see very many established companies pushing the edge.

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