On Sep 25, 2012, at 11:11 PM, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 09:42:26PM -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 9/25/12 7:24 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>> Me too. My wife has FB, and that's good enough for me.
>>> 
>>> Sad to say, though, I got suckered into signing up for Google+.
>> 
>> No Facebook but Google+? That's it. You're out. Use Go.
> [...]
> 
> Heh heh... I was half-expecting you'd show up in this thread after all the anti-FB sentiment, and sure enough you did. ;-)
> 
> Seriously, though, no offense intended, but I find FB's privacy policy rather ... lacking for my tastes. That's not to say G+ isn't susceptible to Big Brotherisms, of course, Google being what it is, but at least it gives you the illusion of control, like controlling who sees which posts (which FB imitated after the fact, if you allow me to say so), easier management of friends with the circles system, being able to delete your account data without caveats and jumping through hoops, etc..

Google+ is an opt-out service rather than an opt-in service if you have a gmail account, so that you have G+ isn't surprising.  Personally, I really like the G+ interface.  It does exactly what I want simply and succinctly, which is shocking from a Google product as typically, I'd hold up their apps as examples of terrible UI designs.  Facebook has the community though, so that's what I actually use despite not really liking the interface or anything else.

On Sep 26, 2012, at 7:44 AM, Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 18:59:55 -0400, Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe@semitwist.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> Ugh, yea, exactly. I can't do a normal file copy? I can't email them? The way apple handled photo orientation is just terrible. Like the one guy said in there, at the very *least*, they should have allowed an option to actually store them rotated since there's obviously so damn much that doesn't support that metadata flag.
> 
> I think you can do a normal file copy.  But it seems like many photo viewing applications (Including explorer apparently, which surprises me) does not support the rotation data that your file copy won't look right on those.
> 
> There are probably some applications that support the rotation flag.
> 
> It kind of makes sense to me.  You are getting a raster image from the camera, and obviously the hardware doesn't do the rotation, so to be as efficient as possible, instead of doing a transformation in software, which might also require moving the data to places it doesn't have to go, it simply stores a few bits different in the image.
> 
> From that thread, I could see that Apple is not the first nor only one to do that -- cameras which have accelerometers also do it.

I think you're talking about the EXIF Orientation tag.  Picasa used to use this and other flags so when an image was saved, instead of rewriting the image itself it would attach a bunch of EXIF tags to say how the viewer should display the image.  But enough viewers ignored the flags that Picasa added an "export" option to rewrite the actual image as desired sans tags.  Browsers seem to ignore these tags as well for some reason, so fixing the display of the image may have to happen at the server side or CSS has to be used to tell the browser how to orient the image.  In short, it's kind of a bad situation despite EXIF having been around for ages now.

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 05:19:16AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote: [...]
> Most GUIs are made of common re-usable widgets, right? The "button" widget, the "checkbox" or "radio box" widgets, the "menu bar" widget, the "text box" widget, "image", "list", "grid", "treeview", etc. So then you make a GUI by plopping those widgets into a window, adjusting their exposed properties, and providing actions for stuff like "onClick". Basic stuff, right?
> 
> So if I take a text-edit control and plop it onto a window, I haven't recreated the entire GUI and functionality of Windows Notepad or Kate or Gedit or Eclipse or whatever. It's just a text box. No menu bar, no toolbar, no "save button", no "currently opened files list", no status indicators, no nothing. Just a box you can type into. You have to add those widgets in, and add code to make them cause the right things to happen to the text box widget (or as a result of the text box widget).

Ah I see. That sounds a bit closer to what I have in mind.


[...]
> > You're doing better than I am. :-P  I whine and groan about it, but then very often my own programs are monolithic monsters. Hopefully once I start having more D projects replace my C/C++ ones, I'll improve in this area. D does make it a lot easier to design software in this way, which is one of the reasons I like it so much in spite of the current implementation flaws.
> > 
> 
> D is seriously so awesome. I had to go back to C++ for the iOS/Andorid game I'm doing, and man do I miss D <http://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/top-d-features-i-miss-in-c>.

I have one objection to your list though: although _for the most part_ AA's can work with any kind of key, there are a lot of bugs in that area. The language itself, of course, in theory supports any kind of key, but the current implementation is honestly a mess. I've tried fixing things but one thing leads to another and nothing short of a total overhaul will completely address all of the problems.

But still, for most common cases, D's built-in AA's are a big factor in convincing me to switch to D. In this day and age, a language that doesn't have AA's of some sort (that doesn't require 3rd party libraries) is simply unforgiveable. (*ahem**cough*C++ prior to C++11*cough* Can you believe that prior to C++11, true AA's weren't even a part of the standard library? You had to use non-standard vendor-dependent hashes, or settle with tree-based substitutes which is NOT the same thing. What kind of idiocy is that?!)


> I miss D whenever I do maintenance on my Haxe-based webapp (one of my real-world projects). I miss D like crazy anytime I have to use any language other than D. It's so totally spoiled me :)

Haha yeah. In spite of all the current implementation flaws, D is still the best language out there.


[...]
> > My own take on it is this: LaTeX itself is quite old, and its age is starting to show. There are many things about its implementation details that I don't quite like. Lack of native UTF support is one major flaw (though there are imperfect workarounds).  Also some holdovers from the bad old days of trying to squeeze out every last byte from something, causing a zoo of command names that you pretty much have to memorize.
> 
> Might be fun to make a front-end for it. Something that spits out raw latex given a modernized equivalent.

Well, there's a GUI front-end for it (LyX), I don't know if that handles things like native UTF support. I was thinking more of a 21st century rewrite of LaTeX that has modern support like native UTF, revamped syntax to replace anachronisms, etc., but adhering to the original design principles. Sorta like what Knuth & Lamport would've come up with, if they had developed TeX/LaTeX in 2012.


[...]
> > > I do like HTML/CSS for documents, could be less verbose, could use to not suck at diagrams and math formulas,
> > 
> > Once you've tasted the power of math layout in LaTeX, you wouldn't want to go near HTML math formulas with a 20-foot sterilized asbestos-lined titanium pole. It's *that* bad by comparison.
> > 
> 
> Even now I wouldn't even bother. I'd just use an image, or if not that, then maybe try pre-baked MathML output. But you have convinced me to get around to trying latex when I get a chance.

Sites like Wikipedia use LaTeX to generate math formula images by passing embedded <math> tags through LaTeX for formatting. :) Seriously, that's what makes math even remotely tolerable to write in Wikipedia. It's imperfect, though, 'cos the baseline of the formatted text in the image often doesn't line up with the baseline of the surrounding HTML text. And font sizes don't always match up. But it's better than the horror of attempting to write math in HTML.


[...]
> > What never made any sense to me was the use of HTML for what amounts to a GUI (*cough*form elements*cough*JS/CSS popup dialogs*cough*).
> 
> *Exactly*
> 
> The "JS/CSS popup dialogs" (I call them "pop-ins") are probably the #1 thing that irritates me most on the web. Everything about it is wrong. Not just the technical things you describe, but the whole user experience even when it's *not* buggy. I mean, here we have a *popup*, that *can't* be killed by popup blockers, *and* makes the page underneath inaccessible! *And* it breaks the "back" button! Plus, on top of all that, it's completely unnecessary 100% of the time and does *nothing* to improve the user experience.

This is one of the things I like about Opera: I can switch to author mode which I configured to override all CSS with my own. When I hit a site with a CSS popup, either I just close it outright, or if I care enough about the content, I'll either turn off javascript (which is usually the culprit behind the CSS popup) or switch to author mode and read it in what's essentially a poor man's version of plaintext.

This also works very well with sites with horrific choices of background/foreground colors (like red on grey or yellow on neon green) that make your eyes bleed, or microscopic font sizes, or b0rken styles that assume specific font/screen pixel sizes that breaks on every system except the author's.


> I had a *cough*fun experience with them recently, too:
> 
> I wanted to check the availability of some item at my local library system, but their site insists on showing the availability info in one of those "pop-ins". Ok, annoying normally, but I was out of the house so I was doing this on the iPhone (which took forever due to the barely-usable text-entry on the thing). So I finally get to what I want, get to the "item availability" pop-in, and it's too big to fit on the screen. Ok, to be expected, it *is* a phone. So I try to scroll...and the pop-in *stays in place* as I scroll around the faded-out page underneath. So I can't scroll the pop-in. So I try to zoom out. Oh, it zooms out ok, but the part that was offscreen *stays* offscreen, so that doesn't help either. Go landscape - that just makes it worse because it everything scales up to keep the page width the same, so I just loose vertical real estate.
> 
> Funny thing is, it works fine (ie without using pop-ins) when JS is off. But I can't turn JS off in iPhone Safari.

Argh... iPhone/iPod Safari is one of the worst horrors there are. The UI is simplistic to the point of daimbramage, which makes it unusable for anything but the most trivial of tasks. Nothing is configurable, no privacy settings, can't control Javascript, the maximum number of tabs is ridiculously small, scrolling a long page is really horrible, wide images get clipped with no way to unclip them when using the mobile stylesheet (probably the same bug you describe above), etc.. And Apple has the audacity of forcefully banning all other browsers from the app store, for the simple reason that they are superior browsers, and oh no, we simply can't allow customers to have a superior experience!

About the only commendable thing with iPod Safari is the lack of Flash
(good riddance!).


[...]
> > I'm on the fence about multi-column though. I find that an unfortunately large percentage of websites out there are overly wide, with text that stretch way past your eye's natural comfortable reading width, making reading said text a very tiring experience. OTOH if you just clip the width to a more natural width you have the problem that most screen these days are too lacking in the height department^W^W^W^W^W^W overly endowed in the width department, so you end up with large swaths of empty spaces on either side, which looks awful.  Standard support for multi-columns would be a big help here. (Preferably one that's decided by the *browser* instead of hard-coded by some silly HTML hack with tables or what-not.) I think CSS3 has (some) support for this.
> > 
> 
> The problem with that is you're creating excess vertical scrolling. Just to read linearly it's "scroll down, scroll up, scroll down", etc. (Of course, that pain is hugely compounded when the multi-columns are on page-based PDFs, like academic research papers.)

That's why I said that multicolumn support needs to be natively supported in the browser, NOT hardcoded into the page itself. It should be the browser that decides whether something should be multicolumn, and how tall the columns should be. There's no way the author can possibly account for every possible browser configuration out there to make this kind of decisions.


> The root problem there is that the need for multi-column on the web is artificially created by manufacturers and consumers who have collectively decided that watching movies is by far the #1 most important thing for anyone to ever be doing on a computer. Hence, "decapitated fat midget" 16:9 screens for everyone! No matter how bad it is for...just about everything *but* movies and certain games. Which, I suspect, is also the main reason we can't have browsers anymore with nice traditional UIs - because they have to be shoe-horned into a movie-oriented half-screen.
[...]

I avoid those height-truncated monitors like the plague. I only ever buy monitors with 4:3 aspect ratio. Seriously, if all I wanted to do was to watch movies, I wouldn't be using a PC in the first place.

But still. Sometimes you have a long list of narrow items, and multi-column makes it more readable without excessive scrolling.

Maybe I should start a new trend: side-scrolling webpages with *multi*-columns. :) (Though this probably only makes sense with vertical writing systems, like the vertical variant of Chinese writing. Which is in vertical columns *and* read right-to-left. Bwahahahaha...)


T

-- 
It said to install Windows 2000 or better, so I installed Linux instead.

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 09:30:43AM -0700, Sean Kelly wrote:
> On Sep 25, 2012, at 11:11 PM, H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 09:42:26PM -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> >> On 9/25/12 7:24 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >>> Me too. My wife has FB, and that's good enough for me.
> >>> 
> >>> Sad to say, though, I got suckered into signing up for Google+.
> >> 
> >> No Facebook but Google+? That's it. You're out. Use Go.
> > [...]
> > 
> > Heh heh... I was half-expecting you'd show up in this thread after all the anti-FB sentiment, and sure enough you did. ;-)
> > 
> > Seriously, though, no offense intended, but I find FB's privacy policy rather ... lacking for my tastes. That's not to say G+ isn't susceptible to Big Brotherisms, of course, Google being what it is, but at least it gives you the illusion of control, like controlling who sees which posts (which FB imitated after the fact, if you allow me to say so), easier management of friends with the circles system, being able to delete your account data without caveats and jumping through hoops, etc..
> 
> Google+ is an opt-out service rather than an opt-in service if you have a gmail account, so that you have G+ isn't surprising.

I don't have a gmail account, though. I hate webmails with a passion.


> Personally, I really like the G+ interface.  It does exactly what I want simply and succinctly, which is shocking from a Google product as typically, I'd hold up their apps as examples of terrible UI designs.

Haha, yeah, I like the G+ interface better than FB, too.


> Facebook has the community though, so that's what I actually use despite not really liking the interface or anything else.

True, but I've always liked rooting for the underdog, so I like to promote non-FB to all my contacts. :)


T

-- 
Your inconsistency is the only consistent thing about you! -- KD

On Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:44:34 -0400
"Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy@yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Sep 2012 18:59:55 -0400, Nick Sabalausky
> >
> > I miss words. I didn't mind non-word toolbar buttons on the desktop, because then you have the concept of "hover" which will trigger the words until you learn the icons (and then get annoyed because you usually can't turn off the tooltips once you no longer need them...).
> 
>  From my software design class in college, I learned that pictures
> are actually better *if* they are obviously intuitive.
> 

Oh I agree. It's just that iOS/Android devices seem to be breeding grounds for obscure non-intuitive ones, from what I've seen. :(

> 
> I can't understand the lack of love for physical buttons these days. There are some things that need real buttons.
> 

That was one of the first things that turned me off of the iOS devices (and the Android ones which followed the same design): My Zire 71 had dedicated directional controls, dedicated shutter button, and four other re-purposable buttons that defaulted to opening commonly-used programs. I *never* found the existence of those to be a downside. And the only reason the lack of physical keyboard didn't bother me was that Grafitti was actually pretty good (although not *nearly* as good as the original Grafitti which was killed off thanks to the patent trolls at Xerox.) I didn't want to, and saw absolutely no legitimate reason to, give that up.

What Palm did to make a good handheld interface is start with a
touchscreen, which is totally general and repurposable, but frequently
less than ideal, AND THEN identify the most common needs, both high- and
low-level (ex: "use as a camera", "directional controls") and provide
better, even if less general, controls for those. That's how you
make a good convergence device. Apple, OTOH, only did that first half
and then just stopped. And then Andorid came and copied that, but with
four physical (and non-direction) buttons which they ended up getting
rid of anyway.


> > I do wish tilting scroll wheels were more common though.
> 
> I had one of those.  the issue is, the software has to support it. Not all do.
> 

Yea, the damn chicken-and-egg. People need to be willing to just break that damn cycle.

> >> > Yea, "Show hidden files" is one of the first things I do when I install a new OS. And "Show my f*** extensions" on windows.
> >>
> >> Hells yeah!  It always strikes me as comical that MS created that "feature" and it created a whole class of openme.txt.exe viruses. Yet instead of just removing that misfeature, they built legions of extra CPU-consuming mail filtering and anti-virus software to prevent people from having any files with multiple extensions, only to piss off people who tried to use .tar.gz files :)
> >>
> >
> > Yup :)
> >
> > They seem to think their "Type" field solves the issue, and maybe that works fine for average Joes, but I'm not an average Joe and I don't want to be playing guessing games about "Ok, what's the Microsoft term for a .XXXXX file?" Or "What the hell file type is a 'Configuration settings' again?" And then there's different file types that will have the *same* Microsoft "Type".
> 
> No, it's not that!  Just *SHOW THE EXTENSION*.  I don't understand how they think people's brains are so fragile that they wouldn't be able to handle seeing the extensions.
> 
> It's like Microsoft thought that was an ugly wart and fought to cover it up at all costs -- including spawning viruses.
> 

Well, even when showing the extension, you still can't get an actual *column* of the extensions, nor can you sort by them. You can only do that with the type. I did manage to find an add-on that adds an Ext column, but it has a couple little issues (conflict with TortoiseSVN, and ZIP files are always-at-the-top together with folders, instead of sorted alphabetically).

I've been meaning to make a little tool I can periodically run that just goes into the registry and sets all of the "Type" names to be the same as the extension they're mapped to. It should be pretty trivial, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.

> I actually don't think that is the case.  There seems to be this common view that people who aren't computer savvy need icons and GUIs and whatever to be able to use them.  If you want to see proof that this is false, go to any Sears store, and buy something, then watch the salesperson (whom I don't consider a tech guru) breeze through the terminal-powered curses interface to enter your order -- using F keys and everything else.
> 
> I think tech-unsavvy people just take more training, but they certainly can use any interface you give them.
> 

They're definitely able to, yes (and you provide a great example), but the problem is they're not willing to unless it's mandatory to get their wage/salary.


> >> What I like about the 2-finger scroll is that it goes all 4 directions, it's like panning.  And I don't have to move my finger to a certain spot.
> >>
> >
> > I'm not sure this one does that (although in some apps I can do that by middle-dragging on my trackball - I wish it was all though).
> >
> > But, and maybe I'm being paranoid, I have a very strong suspicion
> > that limitation is due to an apple patent. They *have* been
> > very patent-litigious in recent years, and it doesn't seem like the
> > kind of feature anyone would actually have any trouble getting
> > right.
> 
> Meh, if Apple wants to sue someone like HP over PC features, I'm sure HP can shoot back.  I don't think that's the issue.  Remember, most companies hold patents so that they don't get sued, not so that they sue others.
> 

Usually yes, but look at Jobs's famed "going thermo-nuclear" on Android. He was out for blood (figuratively, at least I assume), and it's pretty well established that they were taking their patents on the offensive, contrary to usual industry practice.


> It's probably more of the case that Windows apps just aren't built to handle it.
> 

I don't think they need to be. As long as they're using the standard OS
scrollbars, that's all the driver needs to hook into. It might
not work in skinned apps, but that's the inherent problem with skinned
apps anyway, they can't always work right.


> > Yea, sounds like the one I tried years ago at some apple store. IIRC, you couldn't even rest your fingers on the mouse because that would be a "click". You had to hover *over* the "button".
> 
> Hm... I don't think it has to be configured that way.  The whole mouse "clicks" when you push it.  But you could configure just a tap on the surface to be a click.
> 
> In any case, not worth having IMO.
> 

It's possible we might not even be talking about the same mouse. Like I said, the one I used was at least five years ago.

> 
> I begrudgingly signed up for twitter, so I could send a message to a radio host (who is a twitter fanatic, so I knew he would read it).
> 
> Since then, I've tweeted a few things, but I'm not crazy about it. At least you aren't expected to "follow" everyone you met for 5 minutes.
> 

Before I finally switched to linode and VPS-hosting, my last shared web-host at one point made the decision to *only* send out import maintenance notices to twitter. Nevermind that they actually *had* support contact emails from me and the rest of their users. Nevermind that not everyone's interested in following twitter, contrary to popular beleif. That pissed me off. Actually that was one of the first in a series of blunders that marked their downfall, IMO. About a year later they went under and got bought out. Right as I was fed up and about to switch to a linode VPS anyway :)

On Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:40:13 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 09:30:43AM -0700, Sean Kelly wrote:
> > 
> > Google+ is an opt-out service rather than an opt-in service if you have a gmail account, so that you have G+ isn't surprising.
> 
> I don't have a gmail account, though. I hate webmails with a passion.
> 

I have a gmail account as a backup in case my mail server goes down. I only ever access it via POP3/SMTP. (I probably hate webmails every bit as much as you.)

I've never even touched G+.

On Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:37:10 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> I have one objection to your list though: although _for the most part_ AA's can work with any kind of key, there are a lot of bugs in that area. The language itself, of course, in theory supports any kind of key, but the current implementation is honestly a mess. I've tried fixing things but one thing leads to another and nothing short of a total overhaul will completely address all of the problems.
> 

There is that, however, it beats the hell out of what I've seen in other languages, like Haxe, where the *value* is generic or templated, but the key is a string. Period. (And then I think Haxe also has a IntHash type now, too, but that's...a signal of not quite *getting* generic code.)

> Can you believe that prior to C++11, true AA's weren't
> even a part of the standard library?

Yes, I can believe that very easily. :/


> 
> Well, there's a GUI front-end for it (LyX), I don't know if that handles things like native UTF support. I was thinking more of a 21st century rewrite of LaTeX that has modern support like native UTF, revamped syntax to replace anachronisms, etc., but adhering to the original design principles. Sorta like what Knuth & Lamport would've come up with, if they had developed TeX/LaTeX in 2012.
> 

Right. I mean like what CoffeeScript does for JavaScript. But then I don't know if you'd would be able to solve all of latex's issues that way, mostly just syntactic ones.

> Sites like Wikipedia use LaTeX to generate math formula images by passing embedded <math> tags through LaTeX for formatting. :) Seriously, that's what makes math even remotely tolerable to write in Wikipedia. It's imperfect, though, 'cos the baseline of the formatted text in the image often doesn't line up with the baseline of the surrounding HTML text. And font sizes don't always match up. But it's better than the horror of attempting to write math in HTML.
> 

Interesting.


> > 
> > Funny thing is, it works fine (ie without using pop-ins) when JS is off. But I can't turn JS off in iPhone Safari.
> 
> Argh... iPhone/iPod Safari is one of the worst horrors there are. The UI is simplistic to the point of daimbramage, which makes it unusable for anything but the most trivial of tasks. Nothing is configurable, no privacy settings, can't control Javascript, the maximum number of tabs is ridiculously small,

You can't tell it to override all "target:blank" (I think that's what it's called, I never make them, so I don't remember) and always open in the same tab unless *I* say otherwise. That's one of my biggest annoyances with it so far.


> scrolling a long page is really horrible,

Yea. Needs directional buttons. Swipe is overrated and only suitable for minor infrequent uses.

> wide images get clipped with no way to unclip them when using the mobile stylesheet (probably the same bug you describe above), etc.. And Apple has the audacity of forcefully banning all other browsers from the app store, for the simple reason that they are superior browsers, and oh no, we simply can't allow customers to have a superior experience!

I thought Chrome was available for iOS?

But if what you say is true, then that's interesting to compare to "evil M$":

Microsoft: Installs their browser by default. Allows any other browser to be installed and set as default. People are pissed. Gates is demonized. DOJ sues.

Apple: Installs their browser by default. Bans other browsers entirely. Everybody's happy and praises Jobs as a great designer and savvy businessman. No lawsuit.


> 
> About the only commendable thing with iPod Safari is the lack of Flash
> (good riddance!).
> 

Yea, I was always ambivalent about that. On one had, I felt it was a bone-headed decision and that it should be left up to the user. OTOH, I can get behind almost anything that helps bring an end to Flash. So I've always been torn ;)


> > 
> > The problem with that is you're creating excess vertical scrolling. Just to read linearly it's "scroll down, scroll up, scroll down", etc. (Of course, that pain is hugely compounded when the multi-columns are on page-based PDFs, like academic research papers.)
> 
> That's why I said that multicolumn support needs to be natively supported in the browser, NOT hardcoded into the page itself. It should be the browser that decides whether something should be multicolumn, and how tall the columns should be. There's no way the author can possibly account for every possible browser configuration out there to make this kind of decisions.
> 

I see. I'm not sure how even the browser would really make it work though, unless maybe you make the whole page scroll horizontally with as many columns as it takes?

> 
> > The root problem there is that the need for multi-column on the web is artificially created by manufacturers and consumers who have collectively decided that watching movies is by far the #1 most important thing for anyone to ever be doing on a computer. Hence, "decapitated fat midget" 16:9 screens for everyone! No matter how bad it is for...just about everything *but* movies and certain games. Which, I suspect, is also the main reason we can't have browsers anymore with nice traditional UIs - because they have to be shoe-horned into a movie-oriented half-screen.
> [...]
> 
> I avoid those height-truncated monitors like the plague. I only ever buy monitors with 4:3 aspect ratio. Seriously, if all I wanted to do was to watch movies, I wouldn't be using a PC in the first place.
> 

I would do the same thing. In fact I had sworn I would
never get anything wider than 5:4 (and even then I prefer 4:3).
Unfortunately, when I was shopping for a laptop, there was *nothing*
but 16:9. Not one single model, in or out of my price range. So it was
16:9 or no portability :(

At least this has VGA output though (and HDMI, but anything that
takes HDMI is going to be 16:9).


> But still. Sometimes you have a long list of narrow items, and multi-column makes it more readable without excessive scrolling.
> 
> Maybe I should start a new trend: side-scrolling webpages with *multi*-columns. :) (Though this probably only makes sense with vertical writing systems, like the vertical variant of Chinese writing. Which is in vertical columns *and* read right-to-left. Bwahahahaha...)
> 

Heh :) Traditional Japanese is like that, too. (Not surprising since their writing system is derived from Chinese.) Weird thing is, after studying that, and reading a lot of manga, anytime I see vertical English text, I keep trying to read it right-to-left out of habit :)

On Wednesday, 26 September 2012 at 22:23:00 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:37:10 -0700
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
>> 
>> wide images get clipped with no way to unclip them when using the
>> mobile stylesheet (probably the same bug you describe above), etc..
>> And Apple has the audacity of forcefully banning all other browsers
>> from the app store, for the simple reason that they are superior
>> browsers, and oh no, we simply can't allow customers to have a
>> superior experience!
>
> I thought Chrome was available for iOS?
>
> But if what you say is true, then that's interesting to compare to
> "evil M$":
>
> Microsoft: Installs their browser by default. Allows any other browser
> to be installed and set as default. People are pissed. Gates is
> demonized. DOJ sues.
>
> Apple: Installs their browser by default. Bans other browsers
> entirely. Everybody's happy and praises Jobs as a great designer and
> savvy businessman. No lawsuit.
>
>

You are forbidden to use other rendering engines. So what browsers for iOS do, is to have their own network stack, but the rendering has to go via UIWebView.

Safari has special rights, being the only application allowed to generate native code via JIT.

For me this makes it rather pointless to install any other browser.

Many young geeks only know Apple from Mac OS X onwards, but the new secretive Apple is actually the old Apple.

Apple used to have it own standards for everything, NuBus, AppleTalk, QuickDraw 3D, QT, etc. APIs were a mix of C and Pascal code, without any proper POSIX support.

Apple only became a bit more friendly to open source, after the NeXTStep guys got on board. Specially, because they needed a quick way out of two failed OS projects.

Now that Apple hardware sells like hot pancakes in many countries, they are back to their old self.

--
Paulo