Apple kills it with new iPad lineup - Page 4

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  1. #46
    "Watches You Sleep" Shark taggart6's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ImaNihilist View Post
    Wow. That's rough. I'm looking for that GIF where the guy takes a hammer to his computer, then lights it on fire, then shoots himself in the head—but I can't find it.
    I'm an engineer and my company is very strongly tied with MS. Our intranet is really just MS Sharepoint with our logo placed on top. In fact, I might as well add Infopath to my list of apps if you want to be comprehensive. i don't really think highly of our IT group.

    My wife is a business consultant. All she needs is Excel for "data", Word to type up reports, and Powerpoint to make pretty slides to help promote synergy, strategy, and *INSERT BUZZ WORD HERE*. Her company's IT is locked down hard and they can't use non-MS apps. I think they prohibit their work laptops from working with USB drives.

    I figure start-ups have a lot more flexibility.
    Last edited by taggart6; 03-13-2012 at 03:44 PM.
    If we hit that bull's eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

  2. #47
    "Watches You Sleep" Shark taggart6's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ImaNihilist View Post
    Wow. That's rough. I'm looking for that GIF where the guy takes a hammer to his computer, then lights it on fire, then shoots himself in the head—but I can't find it.

    http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j1...e/13086218.gif
    If we hit that bull's eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

  3. #48
    Reef Shark
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    Quote Originally Posted by ImaNihilist View Post
    When people say "office apps" what they really mean is Excel, Visio and Sharepoint—but mostly Excel. Reality is, working on a spreadsheet at 1024x768 is like working with Excel 95 with a 15" monitor. Even on tablets with 720p-ish resolutions is still kind of hard with all the UI elements and the onscreen keyboard.

    I'll reserve judgement until I see how Google Docs works at 2048x1536 with a BT keyboard.
    It won't make much of a difference I think. The retina display makes stuff look a lot nicer, but it doesn't increase the actual size of the screen.

  4. #49
    LOLWUT ImaNihilist's Avatar
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    That even more aptly describes how I feel about today's Microsoft Office.

    The amount of time WASTED with Microsoft Office today is staggering. Technical problems, formatting, version conflicts, "How do I use obscure feature 'x'?"


    I like my emails in plain text, my documents in rich text, my slides in PDF and my spreadsheets in CSV.

  5. #50
    "Watches You Sleep" Shark taggart6's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ImaNihilist View Post
    That even more aptly describes how I feel about today's Microsoft Office.

    The amount of time WASTED with Microsoft Office today is staggering. Technical problems, formatting, version conflicts, "How do I use obscure feature 'x'?"


    I like my emails in plain text, my documents in rich text, my slides in PDF and my spreadsheets in CSV.
    I have templates all set up for everything I need so its not a issue but I get where you're coming from.

    In the defense of MS Office (wait did I honestly just type that?)I do like Excel and it's a pretty easy tool to use for integrating large amounts of multi-format 3rd party generated data into a single cohesive reporting package. It's no perfect but I've rarely had any rage face issues.

    How they handle protection is is still a pain in the *** IMHO.
    If we hit that bull's eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

  6. #51
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    Excel is the only "good" program in the Office suite for which there really isn't much of a suitable replacement, at least at the low end. But that's mainly because people need a program that lets them put a bunch of numbers in a grid and add some of them up, maybe sort them or look for really basic trends, and Excel is OK for that. I would wager that the majority of Excel files churned out at large corporations will never be viewed by anyone except the author. That certainly was the case when I worked for large companies. I doubt many people use any of Excel's advanced features as by that point they're much better off with other software.

    Word is a terrible program that tries to be everything for everybody and instead really isn't good at anything. The only feature of Word that I actually "like" is that if you format your headers properly you can navigate a document by having the outline view on the side of the screen. Other than that most of the stuff it does is completely useless.

    PowerPoint is OK I guess if you want to make some slides with text and maybe a few pictures on them and need to be sure that they will play nicely with someone else's computer.

    I haven't used any of the other Office stuff for more than a few hours, but judging by reports from friends who have, it's all pretty atrocious.


    Microsoft has a lot of great technologies (though they currently lack the vision to actually implement them in a way that is compelling for anyone but corporate IT guys), but Office is not one of them. The greatest example of this is their purchase of Skype - they already had their own VOIP technology that was just as good as if not better than Skype's, but they had never given it a real chance to become anything.

    Lotus Notes is in the same position - it has a lot of really good features/ideas that were once WAY ahead of their time, but they were buried under a layer of crap so everybody just used it as a shitty email program.
    Last edited by Steven P Jobs; 03-13-2012 at 06:12 PM.

  7. #52
    LOLWUT ImaNihilist's Avatar
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    Office had it's place in the 90's. It was a productivity suite, and it made people more productive. Word created documents that didn't look like they came off a typewriter. Excel did fancy math that before was only possible with a graphing calculator no one knew how to use. Outlook was unmatched for email. PowerPoint let you create a slideshow without having to make slides or print out 20 copies of something. All of these things are now irrelevant.

    Now it's very much the opposite. People use it because they have to, not because it does anything for productivity.

    I don't really see Microsoft doing much to keep up to be honest. The web apps do 95% of what everyone would need Office for, but MS doesn't really draw attention to them because it's hard to get people to pay for something so lightweight.

    Here in the Bay Area no one uses Office outside of the big corps, and even then only if you actually work for corporate. Last time I really used Office for anything other than opening a file was 2008.

  8. #53
    Snarky Quorums MrDigital's Avatar
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    I love MS Office. Everything else feels mediocre and unpolished to me. And I doubt iPad Office will be gimped. The iPad has like 75% market share and every poll shows corporate purchase plans to be increasing that number due to the continued failure of Android and Blackberry (and everyone else). The entire US government is switching to iPhones and iPads and likely so is every Fortune 500 company. It's in Microsoft's best interests to make a proper iPad Office or their reputation will take a massive hit and open the door for another player.
    There is the theory of the moebius. A twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop.

  9. #54
    I don't roll on Shabbos! Timman_24's Avatar
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    I dislike MS Word. I had to learn Latex to do my Master's thesis and find myself using it all the time to write documents. Once I learned the key features, it is much faster than having to click icons and scroll through lists and windows to format, especially when writing equations.

    I rarely use excel. I use xlsx files to input and output data, but hardly ever look at them. Lately I've gone to simply using .dat or .txt to reduce file size and compatibility issues.

    I use thunderbird instead of Outlook. Power Point is rarely used, but I don't do many presentations. I've used Visio to make flow charts and such, but not often.

    My most used productivity software is Mathematica and Miktex by far.
    Last edited by Timman_24; 03-13-2012 at 09:13 PM.
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  10. #55
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    Quote Originally Posted by Timman_24 View Post
    I use thunderbird instead of Outlook.
    Random rant:

    I hate that Exchange can't handle PGP/GPG encrypted email at an inherent level. One of the things I love most about Thunderbird is enigmail. If you ever wanted to have your mom/grandma/etc. be able to use encryption without any muss or fuss, that's how you do it. If they had something like that for Outlook/Exchange, or if Thunderbird had proper Exchange/Calendar support, it would be a perfect email client. Which creates a new question, why does lightning suck so bad? (Thunderbird calendar application).

    /rant

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  11. #56
    nuclear launch detected kpxgq's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ImaNihilist View Post
    The amount of time WASTED with Microsoft Office today is staggering. Technical problems, formatting, version conflicts, "How do I use obscure feature 'x'?"

    lol, reminds me of last year our HR sent out forms for all the employees to fill (i think they were some 401k stuff all in a word doc)... no one could open the work docs because they were docx and all the company machines had outdated versions of office... not to mention the design dept who were using office98 or something on their macs
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  12. #57
    Raaawwwrrrrr Squirrel Meat's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by kpxgq View Post
    lol, reminds me of last year our HR sent out forms for all the employees to fill (i think they were some 401k stuff all in a word doc)... no one could open the work docs because they were docx and all the company machines had outdated versions of office... not to mention the design dept who were using office98 or something on their macs
    haha, that sorta happened to me. Last quarter I took a logic class and the teacher used outlook for his emails and every time someone sent him a word document in came up as a wordpad and the format was all messed up and he kept getting super pissed. I ended up figuring out (pretty obvious lol) that it was because everyone was sending him docx papers "instead" of just doc files. so we all had to make sure we saved our papers to him in .doc instead of .docx lol. it was kinda annoying because I always forgot. way easier to just save my file and attach it to an email but I always had to save as and then save as word 2003 or earlier...
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  13. #58
    Raaawwwrrrrr Squirrel Meat's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MrDigital View Post
    I love MS Office. Everything else feels mediocre and unpolished to me. And I doubt iPad Office will be gimped. The iPad has like 75% market share and every poll shows corporate purchase plans to be increasing that number due to the continued failure of Android and Blackberry (and everyone else). The entire US government is switching to iPhones and iPads and likely so is every Fortune 500 company. It's in Microsoft's best interests to make a proper iPad Office or their reputation will take a massive hit and open the door for another player.
    As much as I dislike apple, they have done a tremendos job with the ipad. Those things are selling like hotcakes at a fatclub. Any big movie has apple products littered all over the movie as well. I really do hope android and microsoft get their crap together soon. Android is doing pretty good I feel so I dont quite agree with "the continued failure" part but they definetly have some work to do. Like I mentioned before, if all the tablets just had a few more features....they would be awesome. But for the workforce, they have more than enough features.

    I use kingsoft office on my tablet. Its free and seems to work pretty well. Has anyone tried quickoffice pro? I really didnt think it was necessary to spring $20 for it when there are plenty of free office apps out there.
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  14. #59
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    Now that I've had some time to play with the new iPhoto app, I'm actually quite disappointed by it. It's very powerful and shows why tablets will take over a large chunk of the PC market over the next few years, but I feel like Apple broke many of their own touch UI conventions that are the backbone of why the iPhone and iPad work so well. This guy explains it better than I could:

    http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2012/0...y_meat_iphoto/

  15. #60
    LOLWUT ImaNihilist's Avatar
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    I picked up a new iPad and I'm a bit conflicted about it. It is such a huge leap forward for the way we create content, and I'm not quite sure we are ready for it. It might not seem like that big of a leap, but it is.

    I never quite understood what these Retina displays were doing, but basically it's this: All images are scaled 2x. It has a resolution of 2048x1536 but reports a resolution of 1024x768 to the web server. So EVERY image is doubled and looks fuzzy. You can't view a 400x400px image at 400x400 pixels. Instead you view a 400x400px image in 800x800 pixel space. The only way to view a 400x400px image in real space is to set it's dimensions to 200x200px—50%. Now you have a "Retina" image.

    I didn't quite pick this up on the iPhone's Retina display because the screen is so small you can't really tell, but on the iPad it's clear that there is a serious problem. It's a great display, but there is no content for it. All content is technically "backwards compatible" so to speak, but it's just wonky. It's going to be YEARS before things change. Think about what this is saying for a moment. If you upload an image to a blog, or inline an image ANYWHERE (say in an email), in order to make it look good on the new iPad you have to upload that image at 2x the size you would normally, and then constrain it's proportions via HTML or CSS to 50%.

    Retina has no real definition, and it's just going to get more and more distorted as this technology gets pushed to more and more displays. What if someone creates a display and decides that they can get away with 1.5x? A 1920x1080 display that reports 1280x720, which upscales a 400x400px image to 600x600px? I'm sure that would look good. And how long are we going to do this gimmicky thing where the display is one size but it lies to the webserver? Are we just going to set all JPGs to 50% dimensions from now on? That just seems like a hack. Is Flickr going to pull larger thumbnails for EVERY image on their site, then constrain them at 50% for the iPad? I think not. Even the Google logo looks fuzzy. That can be fixed by moving to SVG, but I duhno…the whole thing is weird.

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