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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

> at the heart of convergence lies the fact that you want to scale across different form factors

I have this feeling one day we'll look back at this and laugh. "Do you remember when they all tried to shove the same interface on all devices? What were they thinking?!"

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We might want different interfaces for different devices, but it's still preferable to have a uniform API across these devices at the level of display server.

I don't think this is that silly. For example, tiling window managers scale extremely well all the way from a small netbook with 8 or 9 inches to multiple 27 or 30 inch monitors.

The problem isn't so much the 8 to 80 inch gap. We've solved that problem. The problem is the 8 to 1 inch gap. Tilling window managers start to fail on smart phone/tablet size screens.

Phones and tablets just run all windows full screen, each on their own workspace. A few let you split the screen in half and run one app each. Sounds like a tiling window manager to me.

A few apps -- on Android anyway -- have a floating mode, where they occupy some space over other apps, always on top. This is another thing tiling window managers do.

Indeed. In fact, that's one of the reasons I switched to Windows Phone 8: It was the closest I could get to the linux+dwm environment where I do most of my computing. Why would anyone want a desktop metaphor on a phone, complete with tiny icons and illegible drop-shadowed text?

I agree, but I don't think Canonical is really trying to do that. Ubuntu Touch, besides the side taskbar, has quite different interface than desktop Ubuntu. But there should be a common design language across platforms, even if they are optimized differently to take advantage of the screen size or form factor.

I'm still hoping it won't be long until "Remember when computers had physical interfaces, we didn't just think about what we wanted and had it happen?"...

"Remember when every thing was 2D, and you had to put all those huge monitors on desks?"

Remember the Internet? Wow that was great.

Well, we're already saying the second part.

The bow in my desk remembers.

>> toyg 3 hours ago | link

> at the heart of convergence lies the fact that you want to scale across different form factors

I have this feeling one day we'll look back at this and laugh. "Do you remember when they all tried to shove the same interface on all devices? What were they thinking?!"

Umm but even phones have HD displays and 1GHz 64bit processors. Why should that be any different that a desktop system with a 5K display these days?

Have you seen Windows 10? It looks doable. Windows 8 is just the confused mid-step.

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