Re: [PLUG] OT: Web development on an iPad

[Jack Hill <ejh56@drexel.edu>]

I thought that I would chime in with my feelings as someone who has never 
owned a tablet or phone. The most I've used a phone is to play with 
someone else's on-screen keyboard enough to decide that I didn't like it 
as much as my Model-M.

On Tue, 22 May 2012, Rich Freeman wrote:
> So that then brings us to the docking station concept (whether it
> involves actual plugs or just bluetooth.  Many suggest that this will
> be the convergence between tablets and PCs.  I'm not convinced - the
> UI model for something like a mouse is just fundamentally different
> from that of a tablet.  If I'm dealing with tons of text the last
> thing I want to be doing is trying to select and manipulate it with a
> big fat finger.

Even when I'm on a traditional computer, I attempt to use the mouse as 
little as possible. I have had pretty good sucess with this, and only use 
the mouse when I need to do something involving graphics. I recently got 
one of those laptop spin the screen around and use it as a tablet combos, 
and so far I quite like it, and enjoy using a stylus is place of a mouse. 
The disadvantage of this setup is that it is heavier than a tablet.

I don't see workstation-class computers going away (perhaps I mean, I hope 
that they don't go away). One of the killer features of them for me is 
interchangeable components. As an example of how great interchangeable 
components are I recently came into ownership of a Sun Ultra 60. I wanted 
to use this a file server, but needed a way to do backups. I have several 
large USB disks, but unfortutatly, the machine predated USB. Fortunatly it 
had free PCI slots, so all I needed to do was stick in a USB card and I 
was off and running. Of course laptops don't have this advantage and 
compined with their weight comparison to tablets, I can see tablets as a 
reasonable alternative to laptops, but hope that desktops stick around.

(The non-interchangeable components is also one reason why I don't see 
myself using those single-board embedded computers for my main home 
server).

Jack
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