The Mandelbear's Musings

So we had a party. It wasn't publicized nearly as well as it should have been (my bad), but we got three new adults and two kids, from fliers passed out at Baycon. So that's a win. Jilara and Andrew turned up a few minutes to midnight and we didn't get to bed until after 1. That's a win, too.

The eQuill tablet I brought home was a hit -- everyone I showed it to (which was, like, everyone) liked it. I'm glad I brought the earlier prototype, though; it still has better pen tracking (because the display driver for the production hardware is still being optimized). Altogether a win, though I wish I'd thought to put a long document on one of them to show off the fast page flipping. Next time.

I made what everyone agreed was a good chili, and got in a little noodling. No singing; I didn't get any requests, and didn't want to interrupt the ongoing conversations. That's ok.

One fascinating link: Shock: Windows 8 optimized for desktop tablets - Computerworld via The Mad Filkentist - Microsoft jumps the shark "Interestingly, the Metro UI handles files like the iPad -- documents and data files are associated with the application, and will be managed only from within applications. But in the Windows 7 window, you'll still have old-fashioned file management, where your data file locations are not associated with specific applications and can be moved copied, deleted or modified without reference to specific applications."

Yup, the shark is well and truly jumped. I think that the thing that's going to bite them in the end is that they still think that the user interface is part of the operating system. In fact, for them, the UI is the operating system -- they still call it "Windows", for goodness sake! Now, they've even moved the file system out of the OS and into the applications. In the Unix/Linux world I get to choose my UI, and share files between applications. Which means that I can script complex processes involving multiple tools.

Fun times ahead.