Upgrade to Lion

[Jeff Reynolds]

Kay,

You make some good points here, but there is one thing missing in this ipad only vision. its hard to do a lot of work on an ipad. yes its great to read stuff and do stuff on the fly, but its just not a good productive environment for heavy duty work. ive used the ipad a lot since it has come out but the keyboard, ergonomics, size, and such just dont make it something you are going to do heavy duty work on. yes you can do heavy duty work on, but you are not going to do it for 8-12 hrs a day. point on a touch surface works well when things are in your hands or you just need to hit a button now and then if you raise your arm, but trying to work for long periods with your arms outstretched just does not cut it. and removing your hand from the keyboard to touch the screen is more of a distraction than grabbing the mouse. then you have the big fingertips that get in the way of seeing what you are doing. i can go on, ive worked on touch screen interfaces for exhibits for 20 years and looked a lot over the years at how folks interact with them in various situations. its a great device but not perfect for everything.

this is all to say that the workstation environment will always be with us in one way or another. for many folks this usually means typing and editing stuff. again if you are doing buckets of this a traditional workstation is the most efficient still. we are going to be a long way from the digital desktop and even then its not a great solution as trying to look down on a horizontal work surface is not very ergonomic for long periods. even the task of working on photos (something always demoed in those digital desktops) is very tiring on a horizontal surface for very long, i know i use to do a lot of that years ago in the old fashion way on a light table with prints and slides -- we usually went vertical when we could!

so having the options of the workstation OS to function best for this form of workflow is important to not go backwards in ease and efficiency of doing large amounts of work. having everything be iOS that is optimized for the casual and on the go workflow just ruins the experience for the more sit down and focused workflow. each need to interact and have as much UI look and feel as possible to make things as seamless as possible, but each need to do what they do best. even going down to phone sized creates issues with the UI and workflow from the ipad.

I did a very similar job as your wife at my old high school where i ran a multimedia lab, taught multimedia and developed curriculum. yes for students most of their computing needs is probably better wtih an ipad to do research, read textbooks, do simple assignment stuff. but their workflows are in very short bursts and in small bits. many folks working on a computer all day are not. many jobs have replaced laptops and workstations with ipads, but again their workflows were very short and defined computer interactions, not longer, more complex workflows. again just saying each tool has its place and saying that one size can fit all is almost never the case.

its silly to just toss things like save as because the version creators thinks you should do it only its way. both are great and have their strengths and weaknesses and places, so why not have them both to allow for folks to decide what they need to use in what they are doing at any particular time. its not like there are hundreds of things that are like this but there are a few that will really muck things up w/o providing an adequate work around.

progress is great and i have been progressing along with computers for over 39 years now. the vast majority has made things better and more efficient, but now and then there are things that are done to just make a new version or a new way that is not necessarily better. bloatware is still alive and well.

cheers

jeff

On May 29, 2012, at 1:00 PM, use-livecode-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:

> My vision of the future is that there is no such thing (except for small
> pockets of revolutionaries ;-) as a 'local user' - everyone will be Cloud
> users, whether it's Apple's version, Google's or someone else's.
> 
> In this vision of the future everything you do on your Computer (Mac or
> otherwise), not just photos, emails and music, will be available
> 'immediately' on every other device you have. For this to be possible it is
> imperative that some kind of Low Bandwidth Network File System is used,
> that the system be able to track what are changes and what is content that
> is remaining the same. This is what Versions is based on.