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[TempAcc]

Being able to feel your way around the keys is basically what allows most people to type without even taking a glimpse at the keyboard.

That's not the only purpose - being able to feel where a given key ends (and thus being sure you are pushing the right key), and having tactile feedback (so you know you actually hit the damn key) are critically important, and the reason why -for example- there's such a large and growing market for phone-compatible gamepads.

Honestly touch screen keyboards are - like hiding all of a TV or monitor's controls, inputs, and headphone jack on the back of the thing where they're nigh-impossible to get at - yet another example of minimalist design making things much harder to use.

Cue to why I still wonder why people even worship Steve Jobs that much :v, I mean sure, he was responsible for Apple's critical business manuevers (which in several points of Apple's history, were considered highly questionable) and most of the design choices (which, while looking pretty, pretty much defenestrated user friendlyness). He never actualy made an important contribution to the actual programming of the Mac OS and other software innovations attributed to Apple.

[Frumple]

... if the screen's a decent enough size -- the kindle family threw at me, ferex -- it's... really kinda' painless, personally. I barely use it for typing and can already almost touch-type the thing. Generally they replace tactile feedback with audio feedback, and make sure the button thingies are big enough you don't have much trouble with fatfingering. Add in using the standard <local default> keyboard layout and it's... not that bad. Not bad at all, really. Bit slower and less comfortable than a normal keyboard, but it's also taking up about half the space one of those does and being an entire (albeit weak) computer.

Those phone ones are a massive pain the ass, though. Way too small and cramped. Nearly as bad as the keypad ones that don't even bother with an onscreen keyboard.

[Lord Shonus]

Being able to feel your way around the keys is basically what allows most people to type without even taking a glimpse at the keyboard.

That's not the only purpose - being able to feel where a given key ends (and thus being sure you are pushing the right key), and having tactile feedback (so you know you actually hit the damn key) are critically important, and the reason why -for example- there's such a large and growing market for phone-compatible gamepads.

Honestly touch screen keyboards are - like hiding all of a TV or monitor's controls, inputs, and headphone jack on the back of the thing where they're nigh-impossible to get at - yet another example of minimalist design making things much harder to use.

Cue to why I still wonder why people even worship Steve Jobs that much :v, I mean sure, he was responsible for Apple's critical business manuevers (which in several points of Apple's history, were considered highly questionable) and most of the design choices (which, while looking pretty, pretty much defenestrated user friendlyness). He never actualy made an important contribution to the actual programming of the Mac OS and other software innovations attributed to Apple.

Steve Jobs, either due to maelevolence or idiocy, greatly impeded every genuine technical innovation Apple ever produced - he tried very, very hard to kill the Apple II (because he wanted to make machines for normal people, not filthy nerds, and the expandable, tinkerable Apple II line was a hacker's paradise), doomed the Apple III to failure (by flatly forbidding it to have proper cooling because nobody wants to hear fans or see ugly vents - the machine got so hot chips would pop out of their sockets, and the first troubleshooting step was to pick it up and drop it to reseat them), doomed the Lisa (by pushing very hard for a shiny, idiot-proof interface that the hardware simply couldn't handle and insisting on using proprietary disk drives that were expensive, unreliable, and wouldn't work with standard disks), and would have killed the Mac if the design team hadn't mutinied (he refused to allow them space for a hard drive (like with the Apple II, he viewed this as a useless toy to pander to nerds), once again tried to prevent them from cooling it (for the same reasons as the Apple III), starved the system of RAM (most of the applications for increased RAM at the time were games (the era of business graphics and such had not yet arrived), which he scorned) and tried very hard to make Operating System much flashier than it needed to be - when the first-gen Mac had barely enough resources in the first place.) Not to mention cheating Wozniak out of most of his share of the profits (when Wozniak did nearly all the work, and was solely responsible for the capabilities that made the Apple II a juggernaut in the first place), verbally abusing his associates and subordinates, and presenting an "I'm better than you" attitude that rivaled the most arrogant people around today.

Job's later success with the iPod and iPhone weren't really technological advances either - portable .mp3 players were already on the market, and the smartphone was a natural and obvious extrapolation of what was already out there - it was little more than slapping a touchscreen on a Blackberry. The only "brilliance" was putting them in a shiny minimalist case, as technolgy had finally allowed Jobs to successfully aim products at the idiots "normal people" that he considered his true market the entire time.

For all the praise Jobs gets as a technical Messiah, he's more fitting in the Satan role.

[Bohandas]

Honestly touch screen keyboards are - like hiding all of a TV or monitor's controls, inputs, and headphone jack on the back of the thing where they're nigh-impossible to get at - yet another example of minimalist design making things much harder to use.

Oh god, I hate that too. Why can't they just put controls and jacks on the goddamn front!?

[Bohandas]

Being able to feel your way around the keys is basically what allows most people to type without even taking a glimpse at the keyboard.

That's not the only purpose - being able to feel where a given key ends (and thus being sure you are pushing the right key), and having tactile feedback (so you know you actually hit the damn key) are critically important, and the reason why -for example- there's such a large and growing market for phone-compatible gamepads.

Honestly touch screen keyboards are - like hiding all of a TV or monitor's controls, inputs, and headphone jack on the back of the thing where they're nigh-impossible to get at - yet another example of minimalist design making things much harder to use.

Cue to why I still wonder why people even worship Steve Jobs that much :v, I mean sure, he was responsible for Apple's critical business manuevers (which in several points of Apple's history, were considered highly questionable) and most of the design choices (which, while looking pretty, pretty much defenestrated user friendlyness). He never actualy made an important contribution to the actual programming of the Mac OS and other software innovations attributed to Apple.

Because, like Thomas Edison, he was an almost unparelled genius in the fields of self-aggrandizing PR and being a scientific fraud.

[Descan]

I just had an idea to write a book called 50 Shades of Skin so people would think it was an cheap rip-off of 50 Shades of Grey.
And then actually have the book be about fifty different shades of skin, have information on each tone and what their names are in each type of paint, what its values are in computer color systems, and tips on how to use each one properly across the mediums (the many physical kinds of art, computer art, etc.)

WTF, brain?

There's a joke running around about a book that is literally just fifty different shades of the colour gray.

[Eric Blank]

So I've called tech support folks for my laptop, got someone in India whom I could barely understand. Told me to send it to Texas to actually get an inspection done. Warned me that I need to backup my data before sending it in because they might suddenly decide the hardrives busted and throw it in the trash or whatever; but hold on it doesn't start so how am I supposed to do that? I'll have to remove the harddrive. But in order to do that, I have to pay a technician (and it'll cost me about $70), because if I try to do it myself I'll scratch the paint or bend a plastic bit and immediately void the warranty... I hate having to deal with tech support and warranties and crap. I have a $600 paperweight now and there's nothing I can do about that but throw money at it.

[Lord Shonus]

I just had an idea to write a book called 50 Shades of Skin so people would think it was an cheap rip-off of 50 Shades of Grey.
And then actually have the book be about fifty different shades of skin, have information on each tone and what their names are in each type of paint, what its values are in computer color systems, and tips on how to use each one properly across the mediums (the many physical kinds of art, computer art, etc.)

WTF, brain?

There's a joke running around about a book that is literally just fifty different shades of the colour gray.

Then there's Fifty Thousand Shades Of Grey, a gag book Ashens made up for one of his videos, which he wound up selling because people (for some reason) wanted to buy it. It is the words "shades of grey" printed fifty thousand times.

[penguinofhonor]

.

[Lord Shonus]

Job's later success with the iPod and iPhone weren't really technological advances either - portable .mp3 players were already on the market, and the smartphone was a natural and obvious extrapolation of what was already out there - it was little more than slapping a touchscreen on a Blackberry. The only "brilliance" was putting them in a shiny minimalist case, as technolgy had finally allowed Jobs to successfully aim products at the idiots "normal people" that he considered his true market the entire time.

For all the praise Jobs gets as a technical Messiah, he's more fitting in the Satan role.

That's really understating Apple's design successes. Yes, the fact that they're an electronics company means people give them more credit for technological advances than they deserve. But denying them (or Jobs) any credit for their success because of a lack of technological advancement is making the same mistake in the opposite direction. Some of the best products have been existing technologies presented in a better way, and when that happens there is typically a lot of work and research put into finding the most usable presentation.

That's not what I said - I said that the iPhone nor the iPod were not technical innovators the way apple cultists claim they are - they were successful because they fit into the design paradigm that Jobs had been obsessively chasing for decades. This is entirely true - there is not a single technological innovation in either.

[Bohandas]

Job's later success with the iPod and iPhone weren't really technological advances either - portable .mp3 players were already on the market, and the smartphone was a natural and obvious extrapolation of what was already out there - it was little more than slapping a touchscreen on a Blackberry. The only "brilliance" was putting them in a shiny minimalist case, as technolgy had finally allowed Jobs to successfully aim products at the idiots "normal people" that he considered his true market the entire time.

For all the praise Jobs gets as a technical Messiah, he's more fitting in the Satan role.

That's really understating Apple's design successes. Yes, the fact that they're an electronics company means people give them more credit for technological advances than they deserve. But denying them (or Jobs) any credit for their success because of a lack of technological advancement is making the same mistake in the opposite direction. Some of the best products have been existing technologies presented in a better way, and when that happens there is typically a lot of work and research put into finding the most usable presentation.

Oh, Apple has come up with some good stuff, but (much like Thomas Edison before him) Steve Jobs' only talent is in the field of taking credit for other people's work.

[penguinofhonor]

.

[Lord Shonus]

Job's later success with the iPod and iPhone weren't really technological advances either - portable .mp3 players were already on the market, and the smartphone was a natural and obvious extrapolation of what was already out there - it was little more than slapping a touchscreen on a Blackberry. The only "brilliance" was putting them in a shiny minimalist case, as technolgy had finally allowed Jobs to successfully aim products at the idiots "normal people" that he considered his true market the entire time.

For all the praise Jobs gets as a technical Messiah, he's more fitting in the Satan role.

That's really understating Apple's design successes. Yes, the fact that they're an electronics company means people give them more credit for technological advances than they deserve. But denying them (or Jobs) any credit for their success because of a lack of technological advancement is making the same mistake in the opposite direction. Some of the best products have been existing technologies presented in a better way, and when that happens there is typically a lot of work and research put into finding the most usable presentation.

Oh, Apple has come up with some good stuff, but (much like Thomas Edison before him) Steve Jobs' only talent is in the field of taking credit for other people's work.

Indeed. Jobs was a charlatan, a hack, and a con man. The world is richer for having lost him.

[nenjin]

Frankly I think "Jobs The Man" has more to do with the people writing about him than anything he did himself. The media is always wanting to fucking lionize public figures because they want to say something epic, and Jobs pretty much fit the bill.

It's especially bad in the tech industry, where everyone is waiting to proclaim "THE NEXT BIG PIECE OF SHIT NO ONE NEEDS BUT NO ONE WILL SHUT ABOUT." Guy from the 70s suddenly gets to be in charge, and his design aesthetic is successful? WORLD CHANGER, ZOMG. GENIUS, VISIONARY, PROPHET.

The media is basically incapable of understanding or communicating nuance, instead opting for the easiest consumable explanation: Steve Jobs is god, and Apple's success happened overnight in a vacuum because Jobs willed it to be.

I think the world would be a better place if 70% of tech media writers were electrocuted by their devices. Although I'm sure that would just cause another multi-million dollar start up to be created, to design a piece of rubber to stop you from being electrocuted by your own device. They'd probably call it something stupid like "iLIVE!"

[Orange Wizard]

* Orange Wizard fitfully waggles his iPad candle.

Nah, I don't really care one way or the other.