Microsoft has not announced any Windows features that would be specific to their own hardware. And there are other manufacturers gearing up their own Win8 tablets (Acer comes to mind). As a consumer we'll have a choice as to what we feel is the best Win8 tablet. Microsoft doesn't care as long as we're buying Win8 in some form and ensuring their long-term survival.
Microsoft likely wants to ensure Metro app functionality, inking, etc are all available on great hardware. Microsoft is entering the realm of the iPad, and to quickly gain traction in this space they will need to ensure they have a fantastic hardware experience to go along with (what they believe) will be a fantastic software experience. They could leave that to 3rd party manufacturers - and they are certainly giving those manufacturers a chance - but they must feel it's necessary to create something themselves to help lead the way.
I'm intrigued. Let's hope this works out better for them than the Zune did :)
Does not really work. Because it just renders stuff in an iframe. But actual devices behave quite differently. For example an ipad fools the website about its pixel size. So it renders very different from how its displayed here.
For example meteor.com fits nicely into my ipad and even into my android phone. But this page makes it look like it does not fit at all.
Also tried other sites and had the same effect. Sites that have no magic css/js to cope with different screen sizes or devices. They work on the devices and not on this website.
Maybe I understood it wrong, but, wasn't the point of this showcase to show how it should look rather than how to make it look like that in all of the devices?
I think it wasn't meant to be the kind of thing you open in your different devices and look how it looks rather, this is how content should adapt, does it make any sense?
The tool is for demonstrating what's meant by "responsive design" to lay/non-web people. So it isn't trying to show how a non-responsive site without any "magic css/js" like meteor.com might display, or replicate the behaviour of any specific device or mobile browser. It's specifically NOT designed for actually testing designs - you need to do that with actual mobiles and tablets.
That's why you set the initial scale to 1.0 when you're designing a responsive website. This disables the default iOS behaviour to scale a website to fit within the screen.
One thing in favour of the idea of professional-body approved programming qualifications is that we could take them away from people who do this. Anyone who implements "no-scaling" and anyone who worked on a browser that pays attention to it.
It's awful for usability, and behaviourally as obnoxious as letting the caller decide what ringtone a callee's phone should play and how loudly, or breaking the 'back' button, or having a 'you can't close your browser or power off your device while looking at this website' option.
The scaling behaviour can be just as bad for usability on a site that's been well optimized already for mobile display.
As an example, iOS zooms when you select a text input field. If I've already adjusted the design to work nicely at 320px wide, the zooming is unnecessary, makes the page look odd, and the user has to manually zoom back out when they dismiss the keyboard. Another problem example is where the "zoom" multi-touch events conflict with something like Google Maps - should the browser zoom the page, or the map div?
Disabling zooming just makes it function more like a dedicated app - they don't zoom either. If you want to take away people's programming qualifications for making positive steps towards usability, I'm glad you're not in charge of the professional standards.
If you've fixed the design to 320px that's about half the width of my phone screen and a quarter of a portrait tablet screen.
Dedicated Apps are dedicated to my device, mobile web pages aren't.
Mobile Safari doesn't automatically zoom because Apple were to rushed to take that feature out, it auto zooms because Apple went out of their way to add it. Same with the phone/tablet/whatever. You don't know why I'm zooming either, maybe I'm in a moving vehicle or using it at night in low brightness and can't see well, or without glasses or when tired or while holding something else and viewing at a distance or anything.
As a principle, content is there to be used not to be aesthetically perfect, and content overriding the local display device is giving control to someone without the context to make useful decisions.
I know apps don't zoom - haven't we been complaining about resolution independence in desktops and implementing magnifiers and ctrl-scroll and other clunky workarounds because of this for many many years?
> If you've fixed the design to 320px that's about half the width of my phone screen and a quarter of a portrait tablet screen.
Take a look at Twitter's Bootstrap. It has a variety of different responsive design levels, not just one at 320px. Great example of how a design can fit many different devices.
> Mobile Safari doesn't automatically zoom because Apple were to rushed to take that feature out, it auto zooms because Apple went out of their way to add it.
Yes, and the reasons they did are good ones - many sites don't have a responsive design.
You know what else Apple went out of their way to add? The ability for a web developer to disable the zooming feature!
> ... maybe I'm in a moving vehicle or using it at night in low brightness and can't see well, or without glasses or when tired or while holding something else and viewing at a distance or anything ...
A trade-off I'm willing to deal with. There are accessibility features in iOS and Android for most of those situations, so I'm fairly comfortable making the site work best for most people instead of the small number edge cases.
You know what else Apple went out of their way to add? The ability for a web developer to disable the zooming feature!
Implementing a complete specification isn't "going out of your way", it's very much in your way. It's also not saying you endorse every feature therein. (From a quick search, this appears to be a part of CSS specifications: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-device-adapt/#the-lsquouser-zoom... ). Creating features from scratch is going out of your way. And creating features which allow you to zoom in on any site feels like a strong endoresement that zooming in is generally useful.
Take a look at Twitter's Bootstrap. It has a variety of different responsive design levels, not just one at 320px. Great example of how a design can fit many different devices.
More sites aren't designed well than sites which are designed well. I'd rather put my moment by momnent usability of something ahead of the designer's musing about what "should be more usable" any day. And the abuse of such a thing is to disable zoom for the designer's sense of aesthetics over the user's sense of usability, and I suggest that happens much more than the designer using it to increase usability. And that's a trade-off I dislike having to deal with.
It's a proposed part of the CSS spec because Apple created the viewport meta tag. I'd call that "creating features from scratch". Go on, find an example of the viewport tag prior to the implementation in iOS.
The differential. It's an operator meaning "infinitely small slice of ..."
Since the Integral symbol represents an infinite sum, Integral( (f(x)*dx) ) is an infinite sum of infinitely small x-wise slices of f(x), thus giving you the area under the curve f(x).
Thanks -- I track these errors and fix them within a day or two. It's a side-effect of how the search works. Over time the number of results that throw this error should drop close to zero.
You may not mean to, but this is a perfect example of a trolling comment. It has high emotional leverage, but is not actually on-topic for this particular post about Apple. Think of it this way: Is there something about this comment that can only make sense to this post? Or could it really be made on practically any post abaout Apple?
I suspect you could say this whenever Apple comes up. iPad 3 retina display? "Amazing because you can clearly see the individual ropes in the nets on buildings..."
This comment could easily end up generating 50% of the comments here, while adding nothing new that hasn't been said before, just the same old accusations and defences. Would that really be signal? Or noise?
There could be something here, perhaps instead of trotting out a sound bite, you could present a theory of how ideals become corrupted by money, or how idealism is blind to consequences. I'm still waiting for someone to unify the way Google and Apple behave with a common narrative.
This comment could easily end up generating 50% of the comments here, while adding nothing new that hasn't been said before, just the same old accusations and defences. Would that really be signal? Or noise?
And does this pompous letter from Jobs add anything new that hasn't been said before? This post is the same as any other Apple aggrandizing post here, of course the comments will fall into the same old tropes, but I hardly think icode is the one opening those floodgates.
Here's a thought: is that bad? I mean, isn't this exactly what HN does? If we actually wanted to hear something that hadn't been said time and time again, we sure wouldn't be looking for it on HN (unless we found HN in the last month or so).
Your remark on signal v noise really got me thinking. I think my time here has expired, there is no more new signal to be found, just the same old same old framed in whatever current event or blog post we're talking about. I came to HN this morning to kill time while my roommate is using the shower, but now I'm going for a bike ride instead and stop visiting this website anymore. Bye, Hacker News, it was fun while it lasted!
The article refers to changing the world and is illustrated with a photo of Ghandi. I don't know about you, but I get a strange feeling when Ghandi is used to illustrate the values of a company that is exploiting poor people to make toys for rich people.
NB: The Golden Gate Bridge is not municipally owned. It's owned and managed by a public agency associated with multiple counties in northern California.
in a world where fox news is taken for face value by many people, credibility is losing its credibility. at least someone is looking for more information.
You mean there are some Windows specific features in their tablet? Which? And why couldnt they have asked the other manufacturers to implement them?