Enough with the tablet promotion
Scoble is as nutty about the Tablet PC as I am about Smalltalk. Take this:
MacDailyNews starts the name calling already: "Microsoft's Windows 'Vista' promises similar features to Apple's already-shipping Mac OS X."
Oh, really?
I didn't realize there's a Tablet Mac already shipping (is there a Mac that you can carry around and use a pen with?). Ours is already shipping, don't need to wait for Vista.
So.... exactly what does Vista or OS X have to do with the Tablet PC then? He then goes through a laundry list of features (many of them interesting, and as far as the Media PC stuff goes, we'll see how that works out - my wife's new box is one of those things with more ports on it than you can count, almost).
Here's one feature of OS X that I liked immediately, and one that the PC does not have - simple remote access capability (don't talk to me about terminal services, etc - if I have to go out of my way to install it and the requisite clients, it doesn't count). The Mac locked up the other day, when my daughter tried to get on brettspielwelt.de - apparently, trying to use a JVM in a browser is asking too much of the OS. However - unlike Windows, where once you get to the point where the three fingered salute is ignored, you aren't hosed - I was able to ssh in from another machine and kill off the offending process.
It would be nice if MS, at any point, applied some of the Unix technology that's been lying around for decades now...
Comments
Force quit?
[ Troy Brumley] July 23, 2005 12:23:22.000
Couldn't you even get to the Finder? There's an item Force Quit in the Apple menu, and the keystroke equivalent is command-option-escape. The Mac also doesn't have any problems with JVMs that I know of. I just went to the site you mention in Safari. Are you having her use Firefox?
[Ziv Caspi] July 23, 2005 16:27:45.000
OTOH, if Windows came with TS enabled by default, you'd complain Microsoft doesn't get security...
[Byron] July 23, 2005 17:03:58.000
AFAIK Apple could make a Mac with a pen, they just don't. Either because Stevie J doesn't like 'em (entirely possible) or because they can't figure out a market (also entirely possible. since the only person who really likes Tablet PCs is Scoble and he's already got one...). Personally, I've only ever known one person who had one and he never used it as a Tablet, unless he was going out of his way to show off Tablet features. Its got a lot of gee-whiz but not a whole lot of wow-thats-useful. I certainly wouldn't switch out my Powerbook for one since it'll likely only make it bulkier due to the double hinge you need to switch modes. Now, a smart-slate (like the things VNC was originally created for) that was cheap and designed to talk to my computer-on-the-desk-over-there. Thats got some possibilities.
At any rate, Apple supports pen-based computing just fine. To wit:
Using Ink
derived AFAIK from the 3rd Gen Newton's handwriting recognizer---meaning both input and gestures are supported. Additionally, Tablet types events are also directly supported in Tiger
Tablet Events
Works fine in Safari 2.0
[Rowan Bunning] July 23, 2005 23:20:43.000
I've browsed around brettspielwelt.de for several minutes in Safari 2.0 on OS 10.4.2 and everything works fine. The Java Applet in the top frame loads fine and works nicely. You even get asked to accept a certificate from Zero G at one point which agin works fine. Safari is the browser to use on OS X and I'd be struggling to think of a site I've come across that doesn't work fine with it. If something really does crash though, you can always force a quit on it from the Apple menu when switched to another application. Not much need to resort to the terminal - unless you really prefer that interface.
Always?
[ James Robertson] July 23, 2005 23:41:14.855
Comment by James Robertson
Rowan,
The lockup I had prevented menu access and keyboard access. It was locked hard.
[Ayende Rahien] July 24, 2005 9:47:24.164
James, I've always found psexec a good way to log on into another system.
[Sriram Krishnan] July 24, 2005 10:00:00.490
James - you might want to look at Remote Desktop. Ships with every Windows XP machine. To let other people remote desktop to your machine, you have to check a checkbox - no installation nothing. To access someone else's PC, select Remote Desktop from the Start Menu. Again, no installation required
brettspielewelt.de
[d.w.] July 24, 2005 10:23:45.765
I wonder what happened there -- I'm on that site right now in another tab in Safari, and the applets load fine with no issues. Was there anything useful in your logs?
Must have been Firefox
[ James Robertson] July 24, 2005 11:00:28.479
Comment by James Robertson
I suspect that it was a Firefox related thing. Still, locking down the UI was pretty bad :)
XP Remote Access
[Eric Brown] July 24, 2005 19:04:39.580
Microsoft includes not one, but two forms of remote access. However, for security reasons, both are turned off by default.