Apple kills it with new iPad lineup

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Originally Posted by Timman_24

I use thunderbird instead of Outlook.

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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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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

The amount of time WASTED with Microsoft Office today is staggering. Technical problems, formatting, version conflicts, "How do I use obscure feature 'x'?"
http://alltheragefaces.com/img/faces...al-whyyyyy.png

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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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Originally Posted by kpxgq

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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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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Originally Posted by MrDigital

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.

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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.

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/

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.

There is a much simpler fix. Report the full res to the webserver. I've noticed this on the iPhone actually. Go to google images and look through them, most look horrible.

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Originally Posted by Timman_24

There is a much simpler fix. Report the full res to the webserver. I've noticed this on the iPhone actually. Go to google images and look through them, most look horrible.

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The problem is that if you report the full resolution then everything looks too small for most people—thus a bad experience for most.

If you try the Opera browser you'll notice that all the UI elements are rendered in "real" pixels, and not 2x. Unfortunately, web pages themselves are also doubled in Opera.

The more I use it, the more I realize how truly weird this makes everything. Even simple things like avatars and icons. A 100x100 avatar is no longer 100x100px. The most immediate problem is that, for sites/platforms where you must use JPG/GIF/PNG and you can't do something like set the dimensions to 50%, you are pretty much SOL for making something look good on the iPad. Have a Facebook Page? Yeah, it's going to look like crap and there is NOTHING you can do. Tumblr? WordPress? NOPE.

What do you about sprites? Most websites use a CSS sprite map for UI elements. Do we move to individual SVG files and increase bandwidth costs? Do we create 2x sprite maps and then use JavaScript to determine when to show them, then distort their dimensions?

And then there are ads. Does the 300x250 medium rectangle become 600x500? Are we going to re-render the old ads or create new ads with tiny copy that's readable at 600x500 constrained to 50%? Do we use anti-aliasing, or just assume that pixel compression takes care of that for us?

Going to be really interesting to see what happens this summer with the new MacBooks. I mean, are they going to try to cram a 2560x1440 display into a 13" MBP? Or go with something like 1920x1080 and then rescale for 960x540? Or introduce some new non 2x ratio? 1.5?

I'm designing a new website right now and this whole thing is making my head spin. Logos area easy enough, re-draw in SVG, but all the little details…WHAT DO?

So, they updated Modern Combat 3 to support the new iPad and…wow. I've never been a fan of Gameloft because they mostly just rip IP, but the graphics this thing is capable of are something else. The texture resolution is off the hook.

Check it out: http://imgur.com/a/CaxHt#w2Rra

The quality doesn't quite translate on a normal monitor. At 9.7" though, it's something to be seen. Smooth as can be. If I tried to do this on my MacBook Pro (320M) at that resolution the machine would choke. Source could EASILY be ported to the iPad, which would be awesome. I had the suspicion this may happen back when Valve ported Source to OS X.

This is the new gaming platform. Resolution isn't going to change, but if they refresh this thing every year adding new layers of OpenGL support it's just going to get better and better. Someone needs to make a Bluetooth controller that works with iOS games immediately.

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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

The problem is that if you report the full resolution then everything looks too small for most people—thus a bad experience for most.

If you try the Opera browser you'll notice that all the UI elements are rendered in "real" pixels, and not 2x. Unfortunately, web pages themselves are also doubled in Opera.

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I see what you mean. Too bad they can't do something about it internally. Make two calls to the servers at two different reses, one for images and the other for everything else. Then scale the images to fit the other.

IMO we will probably need new webcode. Web 3.0. It should be very scalable, perhaps vector based like .eps.

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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

So, they updated Modern Combat 3 to support the new iPad and…wow. I've never been a fan of Gameloft because they mostly just rip IP, but the graphics this thing is capable of are something else. The texture resolution is off the hook.

Check it out: http://imgur.com/a/CaxHt#w2Rra

The quality doesn't quite translate on a normal monitor. At 9.7" though, it's something to be seen. Smooth as can be. If I tried to do this on my MacBook Pro (320M) at that resolution the machine would choke. Source could EASILY be ported to the iPad, which would be awesome. I had the suspicion this may happen back when Valve ported Source to OS X.

This is the new gaming platform. Resolution isn't going to change, but if they refresh this thing every year adding new layers of OpenGL support it's just going to get better and better. Someone needs to make a Bluetooth controller that works with iOS games immediately.

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Looks like COD1, which is quite a feat on a tablet and would stand up well. Jeff Gerstmann said on the latest Bombcast that the iPad3 games look better than PS Vita games. He said the controls are rubbish and he'd rather play a Vita though.

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Originally Posted by Timman_24

Looks like COD1, which is quite a feat on a tablet and would stand up well. Jeff Gerstmann said on the latest Bombcast that the iPad3 games look better than PS Vita games. He said the controls are rubbish and he'd rather play a Vita though.

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It's way better than COD1. When you see what pixel compression does to the quality of the graphics, it's intense.

The controls are hit and miss. FPS games aren't that great, control wise. What someone needs to do is create a BT module for an Xbox controller and open the API so developers can map to it.

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Originally Posted by Timman_24

I see what you mean. Too bad they can't do something about it internally. Make two calls to the servers at two different reses, one for images and the other for everything else. Then scale the images to fit the other.

IMO we will probably need new webcode. Web 3.0. It should be very scalable, perhaps vector based like .eps.

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Yeah, that's what people are saying—move to SVG. Makes sense. It breaks compatibility for older browsers though. That's a big issue. We never quite moved from JPG/GIF to PNG because different browsers handled PNG transparency differently. A JPG has always been a JPG—until now.

Still, I feel like there should be a slider or an option. Perhaps 768 should be the default, but If I want to "zoom out" and see the whole 1536 pixel map I should be able to. There are a lot of cases where I want to.

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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

Yeah, that's what people are saying—move to SVG. Makes sense. It breaks compatibility for older browsers though. That's a big issue. We never quite moved from JPG/GIF to PNG because different browsers handled PNG transparency differently. A JPG has always been a JPG—until now.

Still, I feel like there should be a slider or an option. Perhaps 768 should be the default, but If I want to "zoom out" and see the whole 1536 pixel map I should be able to. There are a lot of cases where I want to.

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I don't know how it will handle RAW images or photos that people upload. Can you even convert a jpg to a vector format? I know bitmap images can be, but what about complex images such as photography? I use vector graphics for reports in latex because of how the PDF converter works, it just looks better. I don't know how they would work if used for general tasks. They are good for logos and such, but photography?

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Originally Posted by Timman_24

I don't know how it will handle RAW images or photos that people upload. Can you even convert a jpg to a vector format? I know bitmap images can be, but what about complex images such as photography? I use vector graphics for reports in latex because of how the PDF converter works, it just looks better. I don't know how they would work if used for general tasks. They are good for logos and such, but photography?

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There is no vector or dynamic format for bitmaps, as far as I know. Bitmaps will always have to be 2X, then restrained by 50%. You could link a bitmap within an SVG (and then you wouldn't have to restrain with CSS), but it would just add more overhead because the XML for the SVG is going to be more than the CSS. Either way you have to serve the original bitmap at 2X.

Inline email is the worst offender IMO. I have yet to see an email show up on my iPad where someone designed it so that the iPad would request a 2X image and then scale it to 50%. Why would they? It's crazy. It's wasted on non-iPad devices, there is no way to segment, and it just makes everything take longer to load. Most mail clients don't support SVG AFAIK. I don't even know if the Mail app supports SVG.

I'm glad I got this thing, but because I work content side the iPad just made my life a whole lot more difficult. It's a whole new consideration, and given that older people with money are now using the iPad as their primary computing device (especially for purchasing), it's a pretty serious consideration. I'll go ahead and just say this now: If you are doing B2C e-commerce you better find 2X resolution images of EVERYTHING and redesign your mobile site so that all the UI elements are smaller. What you really need is 3X images, because you can make product images bigger and UI elements smaller, since the text will still be very legible. If you had a 200x200 product image before, you should 600x600 and restrain it to 50% while shrinking down other UI elements (other than the buy button) by like 10-25%.

What a freaking nightmare. I should have been more aware of this months ago, but TBH I didn't really think Apple was going to be able to pull off a 2048x1536 display. I didn't think it was even possible to get decent yields on densities like that in a 9.7" panel, and I really didn't think we have the mobile graphics technology to drive a display like this. Even modern mobile graphics cards can choke at this resolution. If I drive a 2560x1440 display with my MacBook Pro it doesn't take much to pin my fan at max RPM.

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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

There is no vector or dynamic format for bitmaps, as far as I know. Bitmaps will always have to be 2X, then restrained by 50%. You could link a bitmap within an SVG (and then you wouldn't have to restrain with CSS), but it would just add more overhead because the XML for the SVG is going to be more than the CSS. Either way you have to serve the original bitmap at 2X.

Inline email is the worst offender IMO. I have yet to see an email show up on my iPad where someone designed it so that the iPad would request a 2X image and then scale it to 50%. Why would they? It's crazy. It's wasted on non-iPad devices, there is no way to segment, and it just makes everything take longer to load. Most mail clients don't support SVG AFAIK. I don't even know if the Mail app supports SVG.

I'm glad I got this thing, but because I work content side the iPad just made my life a whole lot more difficult. It's a whole new consideration, and given that older people with money are now using the iPad as their primary computing device (especially for purchasing), it's a pretty serious consideration. I'll go ahead and just say this now: If you are doing B2C e-commerce you better find 2X resolution images of EVERYTHING and redesign your mobile site so that all the UI elements are smaller. What you really need is 3X images, because you can make product images bigger and UI elements smaller, since the text will still be very legible. If you had a 200x200 product image before, you should 600x600 and restrain it to 50% while shrinking down other UI elements (other than the buy button) by like 10-25%.

What a freaking nightmare. I should have been more aware of this months ago, but TBH I didn't really think Apple was going to be able to pull off a 2048x1536 display. I didn't think it was even possible to get decent yields on densities like that in a 9.7" panel, and I really didn't think we have the mobile graphics technology to drive a display like this. Even modern mobile graphics cards can choke at this resolution. If I drive a 2560x1440 display with my MacBook Pro it doesn't take much to pin my fan at max RPM.

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Do they really look that bad though? I thought the point of going quad res was so images could scale 1px->4px for compatibility reasons.

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Originally Posted by Timman_24

Do they really look that bad though? I thought the point of going quad res was so images could scale 1px->4px for compatibility reasons.

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Resolution doubling won't distort a graphic if that image is made of squares. Anything with anti-aliasing becomes incredibly soft and fuzzy. In order for that image to "look good" again it needs to be anti-aliased at the higher resolution, otherwise the image just ends up with anti-aliasing artifacts (I'm guessing there's a term for this, I don't know what it is). Non-photo based images (JPEG, GIF, and PNG) end up looking pretty terrible, with bitmap circles and triangular letters being the worst offenders.

Photos are okay by themselves, but the second you put them next to high resolution text or buttons they look horrible by comparison. If you pick one up or go to the Apple Store you'll see what I mean. Look at NYTimes.com and then look at the NYTimes app. Most of the photos in the app are pixel doubled, but none of the images on the .com are. The app looks a LOT better. But even in the app you notice these hideous, fuzzy leaderboard ads on the right, with high resolution images, UI elements and crisp text everywhere else.

It's like playing a game at 1024x768, but all the UI elements and the chat box are being rendered at 2048x1536. Take a screenshot of Minecraft and then wrap the UI from WoW around it at a super high resolution. That's what it's like.

It's going to force a lot of companies to think about how they architect webpages. The days of quick sprite maps are over. There's going to be a LOT of work out there in the next 2-3 years. I never really learned Photoshop. Good enough, but not great. I learned Freehand and Fireworks instead. That may end up being a bit better now, since a lot of my Fireworks files can be ported to Illustrator fairly easily. Fireworks has always been the ugly stepchild of image editing because it blends both bitmap and vector tools, but it's much easier to port a file from Fireworks to Illustrator because most shapes are vector. The only vector objects in Photoshop are those drawn with the pen tool.

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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

Resolution doubling won't distort a graphic if that image is made of squares. Anything with anti-aliasing becomes incredibly soft and fuzzy. In order for that image to "look good" again it needs to be anti-aliased at the higher resolution, otherwise the image just ends up with anti-aliasing artifacts (I'm guessing there's a term for this, I don't know what it is). Non-photo based images (JPEG, GIF, and PNG) end up looking pretty terrible, with bitmap circles and triangular letters being the worst offenders.

Photos are okay by themselves, but the second you put them next to high resolution text or buttons they look horrible by comparison. If you pick one up or go to the Apple Store you'll see what I mean. Look at NYTimes.com and then look at the NYTimes app. Most of the photos in the app are pixel doubled, but none of the images on the .com are. The app looks a LOT better. But even in the app you notice these hideous, fuzzy leaderboard ads on the right, with high resolution images, UI elements and crisp text everywhere else.

It's like playing a game at 1024x768, but all the UI elements and the chat box are being rendered at 2048x1536. Take a screenshot of Minecraft and then wrap the UI from WoW around it at a super high resolution. That's what it's like.

It's going to force a lot of companies to think about how they architect webpages. The days of quick sprite maps are over. There's going to be a LOT of work out there in the next 2-3 years. I never really learned Photoshop. Good enough, but not great. I learned Freehand and Fireworks instead. That may end up being a bit better now, since a lot of my Fireworks files can be ported to Illustrator fairly easily. Fireworks has always been the ugly stepchild of image editing because it blends both bitmap and vector tools, but it's much easier to port a file from Fireworks to Illustrator because most shapes are vector. The only vector objects in Photoshop are those drawn with the pen tool.

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Hmmm seems like a good way to go forward is have the device send the display DPI to the webserver instead of resolution. Then the webserver can serve the appropriate graphics rescaled from an archive of high resolution assets. DPI used to be roughly standard throughout computer displays at around 72-96, but now we see a huge difference.

The bad part about only querying resolution is that the server knows nothing about the physical size. At the moment the server doesn't know whether it is serving graphics to a 120" projector or a 9.7" iPad 3.

It will be very interesting to see how this is fixed, if it is. I doubt we will see a large scale adoption of very high DPI computer screens except for Apple in the next few years. Although, LCD makers most likely are looking for the next big thing to sell consumers. LCD margins are so low right now and 3D fell flat.

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Originally Posted by Timman_24

Hmmm seems like a good way to go forward is have the device send the display DPI to the webserver instead of resolution. Then the webserver can serve the appropriate graphics rescaled from an archive of high resolution assets. DPI used to be roughly standard throughout computer displays at around 72-96, but now we see a huge difference.

The bad part about only querying resolution is that the server knows nothing about the physical size. At the moment the server doesn't know whether it is serving graphics to a 120" projector or a 9.7" iPad 3.

It will be very interesting to see how this is fixed, if it is. I doubt we will see a large scale adoption of very high DPI computer screens except for Apple in the next few years. Although, LCD makers most likely are looking for the next big thing to sell consumers. LCD margins are so low right now and 3D fell flat.

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You know what? That is a very good solution, and I don't think it exists. It would need support from both webkit and the web server, but that would work out rather nicely.

It is unfortunate that people didn't look ahead. They took MS's standard of 96DPI/PPI and Apple's 72 and designed everything around that without thinking to the future. It will take a decade or more to sort it out smoothly. The only short term solution is for Apple to employ a very smart browser to sort things. They could hamfist it by loading the page twice, once at high res and once at low res. Take the CSS/text from the low res, supersample the high res graphics, and merge the two. They could ignore graphics on the low res pass and CSS/text on the high res pass to save bandwidth. It would be a true feat to see that work quickly in real time.