I'm not much of an Apple fan, but I do have a used MBA and I have to say, the old style magsafe adapter is one of the greatest features of any laptop I've ever seen. If having a laptop that is 10mm thicker meant leaving this brilliant bit of engineering alone than it's no question to go with the thicker machine.
Mixed sizes of scaled-up pixels bug me, especially pixels not at power-of-2 scalings to each other, but I think the contrast between obviously scaled-up pixel graphics and native resolution antialiased graphics can sometimes be useful, e.g. smooth for text and UI elements, pixel for the actual game graphics.
I guess as with many things the rule is: try it and see what works. That or I'm just a pixel philistine.
I was really interested to see this data until I saw that they use the BMI; possibly the dumbest and most loudly touted measure of health. According to these numbers I am overweight, heading towards obese, and I don't think any doctor on Earth would say I was overweight if they looked at me.
The main complaint I hear is the change of start menu behavior, but most people I know use a keyboard based launcher anyway. If you're typing the name of the thing you want does it matter if it's going into Launchy, the Win7 start menu or the Metro interface? As long as you quickly get to the app or file you want, the interaction (typing) is pretty much identical.
It's not the most frequent method for launching. According to MS, their metrics indicate pinned task bar items are, or are trending to be, the most frequent method.
When I don't remember the name of the thing I want to launch (which is quite frequent), I rely mostly on positional navigation through a customized start menu. That is, I don't remember programs by name, I remember them by where I left them. Windows Vista / 7's start menu was a major regression for my use case (the scrollable treeview with expandable items destroyed absolute screen positioning); I had to replace it with Classic Shell to get usability back.
For most people the "All Programs" menu quickly turns into a circus. Curating it is a chore.
They are messing this up in Windows 8, as every time you install a application, including desktop applications, all of its start menu items get pinned onto the start screen. I'm afraid most users will never bother to unpin them.
I used to curate the All Programs menu. What that did was mess up uninstallers, because they could no longer find shortcuts to delete them, so I ended up with lots of dead shortcuts that needed clearing out.
So now, I create a bunch of category folders (Work, Development, Entertainment, you get the idea) in the Start Menu profile folder (rather than the Start Menu\Programs folder), and copy the handful of app and applet shortcuts that I actually need in. I leave the All Programs menu to fester and ignore it. With Classic Shell, this works well; the classic start menu, in XP mode, shows my folders as top-level expanding menu items.
Windows 8 start screen right now has a sideways scrollbar scrolled by the mousewheel! It's a sad joke. But I'm sure that aspect will be cleaned up somewhat before release.
I'm not looking forward to Windows 8 because it's a mess; it jams together two completely different idioms, tablet-oriented full-screen apps with legacy desktop apps. But as it is with Windows 7, I don't run any - none at all - applications maximized, not even VNC or RDP connections. I have a minimum of 5 windows open at all times across multiple monitors, in a cascaded configuration for quick access. The idea that a maximum of two apps with a fixed split position is workable? Only for tablets and, maybe, laptops. The full-screen idiom is a complete non-starter.
So I'll be spending most of my time in Windows 8 in the legacy desktop. I don't think it would be a big development hardship to have a floating start menu emulator in the lower left corner to avoid doing a big dramatic transition to a full-screen menu just for launching an app. So I'm not too concerned about my personal productivity.
But I am concerned for MS. I don't think Windows 8 is going to work. It's a classic power-play; trying to leverage an existing monopoly to invade a new market. By forcing a tablet UI on all desktop users despite their protests, MS hopes to prime the market somehow for their tablet (Surface etc.) offering. But I think it's a step too far; I don't think they have the leverage they think they have. They certainly have built up contempt for their users to try and pull it off, though.
(Have you tried the preview in a VM? It's shockingly bad for something allegedly going to run on people's desktops. The discoverability of the Metro UI is abysmal. I was in the IE browser, it took me a good 5 minutes to figure out how to enter a URL, because "helpfully" everything was hidden. It was complete desperation that I right-clicked!)
It's certainly not the most common method; I'm sure point-and-click is. But the kind of people who use keyboard launchers, the ones who are sounding off the loudest on their tech blogs and sites like HN and Reddit, surprise me. I'm sure the average user might be confused, but for me at least, I'll do what I do with Win7, OSX, or Ubuntu: Super + typing + Enter.
Any love for those of us who already bought this? I don't want to pay twice, especially considering the only other game I want that I don't already have is Super Meat Boy.
I just checked my download page, and the new additions are showing up even though I bought several days ago.
According to the front page, the new ones are for people that paid more than the average. If you have bastion but not the new three, then perhaps they were based on the average when added to the bundle. That's likely gone up, so if you paid less than the current average but more than the average when you paid you might not have gotten them.
You get the new games if you paid more than the average when you originally purchased. I paid $7, which was a bit more the average when I originally bought the bundle (day 1), and the new games show up in my account.
No. You get them if you paid any amount before they were added. I had payed well below average (buying foreign currency is currently very hard in my country) and I got the games added.
Also, from a recent interview with the guys from the bundle[1]:
RPS: Is there any temptation to have it be so you only get the extra games if you up your payment to above the average?
Richard Esguerra: No, I don’t think so. That’s not been discussed as an option, but it has been communicated internally that that would be gross. It feels like a bait and switch, you get penalised for buying earlier. That doesn’t make any sense for customers. If there’s anything that we’re super-rabid about, it’s about gamers – it’s about the gamers’ experience, about how awesome the experience of participating in a bundle is. Getting to pay what you want, getting to choose where the money goes. We want all that to be as awesome as possible, so we really try to avoid experiences where people will feel like, “Oh, why did I buy this when I did.”
I'm writing a little Sinatra app for my fiancee's birthday. It's nothing complicated, it just displays a different reason I love her each time the page loads (or you can permalink to a specific reason).
You know, that’s not such an outlandish claim. CSS is accumulating features that seem to me completely out of place in a styling language. Then again, HTML isn’t perfect, nor JavaScript, nor PHP or any language—but we still get stuff done with them, so who am I to complain?
