mitjak

I didn't even notice there's a new AppleTV. Superb news!

The colourful buttons, with their cheesy 2006 aqua reflection; near invisibly thin highlighting of the current section; too many colours not inline with Apple's increasingly monochrome designs; the reflective posters from the same era etc.. There's a lot of things not to like about that UI. It definitely feels like another Apple knockoff.

But it won't play 1080p, correct?

I think the author was referring to C and all the other popular languages that similarly enforce the brackets for expressions.

I don't know how others prefer to drag, but I have the three-finger gesture enabled: holding down the fingers counts as a dragging motion, and if you release the fingers, it gives you about a second to lift the fingers, move them elsewhere, and continue the dragging motion. This way you can drag infinitely if you so desire, without a hardware button.

Precisely! But it is how it could become a replacement, eventually. The hardware is becoming increasingly capable.

"Push It" by Garbage. Also, I don't think I could work at a startup that would place me in an environment where I would hear "The final countdown" more than once a year.

I like to think of myself as more technologically aware than an average consumer, and I've never heard of PowerVR. The manufacturers of graphics hardware I do know never use cores in their marketing.

I've been using Vim exclusively for about 2 years now, and I don't even want to begin to know what the hell is going on in that diagram. It was clearly not created for the purpose of teaching Vim but probably as an exercise of mapping out all the possible transitions between various modes and motions. Cool beans, but I hope the novices don't mistake it for something else.

If you're still on the edge about Vim, there have been a few good articles on how to begin learning it. What worked for me personally was learning the very basics, how to enter insert mode, how to save and quit, and starting to use Vim as a regular mode-less editor while slowly learning about various useful things you can do in normal mode ("hey, I can delete a word or a line with two key presses"). That way you can begin to extract use out of it immediately while growing increasingly efficient with other modes.

If you're on a Mac, MacVim gives you native OS X shortcuts for things like Copy/Paste, and maps selecting text with the mouse to visual mode which, combined with using insert mode, gives you the same functionality as a regular mode less editor would.

Good point. Perhaps the problem is the work station and not the device itself. Still, the way tablets work now, they have to be at a fairly low angle, or one's hands will quickly get tired. That coupled with lack of real world applications doesn't seem to align very well with tablet's possible ubiquitous future.

Maybe it's better the way it is. Maybe having a machine for "work" and machine for "play" is how we keep things intuitive, modular, and clean.

> it's like saying that the microwave will kill off the oven

Great analogy. Unless tablets grow in terms of connectable peripherals, I can't imagine secretaries, programmers, accountants, or anybody else spend 8 hours staring down their desk on a 7" screen poking fingers at a virtual keyboard.

> Find me an office suite that does (2) that interops basically seamlessly across other businesses and old versions of my own business.

This is the key point here: there are many other office suites out there, but no other will provide a) as much compatibility with MS Office (anybody who had to ever receive any kind of important document as a .doc or .docx, and had it inevitably not open correctly in anything but Word, will agree) and b) as much familiarity with the UI than MS Office.

I'd like to say that Office is around because everyone is too used to it, but Microsoft has, indeed, taken many right steps to make it even better (I do think the ribbon was a step in the right direction, but that's subjective), except maybe not making the Mac version look anything like its Windows counterpart.

Either way, MS has pretty well cemented its position in "work" software. IMO, there's still no good office suite on any of the mobile OS's, so I don't see how MS had missed the boat there yet. If anything, it's one area where Windows 8 could succeed: the first tablet OS which actually lets you get some work done. Time will tell.

I quite like Safari myself, save for the visible tab limit (8 or 9 on my monitor, and have to use the drop down on right hand side to get to other tabs; what year is this?!) and no favicons. Do you or anyone else happen to know of any remedies for those?

I suppose you are an exception then, because the traffic problems, at least here in Toronto, arise from a large majority of people who positively do not need a personal vehicle for their day-to-day activities.

And right there you define where you should and shouldn't use roll-over based UI elements: if a UI element is only useful as part of interacting with another, then hiding it in other situations makes sense (e.g., clearing a text field as part of editing the text in the field).

Pretty cool indeed. A question though: how much of a need is there for a service like this? Beyond the more mainstream artists and festivals, most of the artists whose shows I've seen have typically had more respectful audience members who didnt put recording with their cellphones ahead of enjoying the show.

* "Without this third party package there is a high chance of getting a virus or getting hacked"

* "More expensive HDMI cables produce a better quality image"

* "Higher megapixel cameras produce higher quality pictures"

Etc. Those are the ones I came up with off the top of my head that I was personally enlightened with at one point or another.

I'm personally afraid of the more likely possibility of networks spinning off their own Netflix clones which is arguably even worse: to watch an NBC show you would need an nbc.com subscription, a CBS one for CBS shows etc.

There is no way to view your links outside of the Apple's browsers, it automatically archives links you click on even once, even if just to peak, and it's entirely locked to the Mac and iOS devices. For the target audience the feature was designed for (clearly not my mom), it falls short in many ways. I don't think anything's killing anything quite yet.

I guess it really was taken for granted until closed systems like iOS came along. A closed operating system from Microsoft prior to Apple would be very difficult to image indeed.

It was frustrating to me personally. Of the 4 sharks, EMI was the most forward thinking one, at least to a degree a major label can be. If commenters recall, they were the first to jump onboard with iTunes, and explore other digital delivery avenues. They also tended to sign promising artists that graduated from smaller labels. A lot of artists and fans considered EMI the "biggest indie label".

I'd argue otherwise, in any other case, but since a label's success solely depends on the success of its artists, which isn't always predictable, and considering the shrinking number of artists wishing to be signed onto a major label, there's a possibility of the music labels consolidating even more.

Then again, by the time they do, they just might stop mattering altogether. I keep hoping for self-implosion, anyhow.

Why are you assuming small labels want to grow bigger? Many indie labels are owned by or have contracts with larger labels to provide wider avenues of distribution. Alongside with those, there are plenty of small labels and small artists, verging on your "schmucks" definition, that are perfectly content with their sales and the size of the fan base they have.

These are small artists and small labels who often record music because they love to do it, and they chose to do it in whatever way is most comfortable for them. Not everyone in the music industry is in it for the profit.

Which is completely unfounded given that, with Spotify, one pays a flat fee to listen to as much music as one can; there is nothing stopping him or her from listening to the entire album.

I think if that ever happens, we will basically have iOS X on our hands. Unless they want to completely merge the two operating systems, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

I had to go back and re-read but couldn't find anything relating to it: why did you assume they used hours of usage as a metric versus the number of visits to the site?

All the more puzzling is that they waited so long to do it. There has always been dissatisfaction with Mail.app but it's taken them 3+ years since the launch of the iPhone SDK to come up with a half-assed wrapper around a website that performs more poorly than running it in WebKit.

The problem is, IMO, that it is a very narrow use case with a very specific user base that is willing to be very very flexible with this particular user interface (apps timing out when backgrounded, swiping instead of switching via Command+Tab, the low viewing angle etc). It is an interesting preview of what a 'cloud terminal' future could look like but I can't help wondering if the vast majority of viewers on HN are cringing at the thought of just how many backwards steps in UI evolution they would have to take from the familiar desktop and laptop PCs.

And yet the most major popular MP3 player on the market can't play FLAC, which will probably mean it will remain as obscure as it is now (i.e., mostly used among audiophiles).

> maximizing the interactions...optimizing it to be viral..

You lost me.