LukasMathis

I think one of the reasons why we don't notice it on desktops is because there are so few vertical lines. Basically, it's the window edges where it might be noticeable, when dragging windows sideways.

On the iPad, on the other hand, there are tons of horizontal lines in a table view, for example.

Also, I thought about the 60 Hz thing, and I think high frame rate is a bit of a red herring. After all, the lines actually are slanted; the higher the frame rate, the fewer degrees they're slanted at the same scroll speed, but whether we notice the slanting is independent of the frame rate.

The Nexus One and the Galaxy Nexus are two different devices.

I think there will always be room for e-ink. This afternoon, I took an hour off to sit on the balcony and read a bit. It was so bright outside that I was barely able to read anything on the iPad. Switched to the Kindle, worked perfectly well.

I think it's a technology that fills a niche that LCDs or OLEDs won't fill for a very long time, if ever.

Right! Good point.

It's not tearing, it's just a slightly slanted picture, because the lines on the left (or right, depending on how you hold the iPad) redraw a tiny bit earlier than the ones on the other side of the screen.

A cheap Bresser. Though I wouldn't recommend buying a low-end microscope, like the one I use. You should be able to get much better images by investing just a bit more.

Mine isn't good, which is why I don't recommend it. But you should be able to find a reasonably good USB microscope at places like Think Geek, or similar gadget sites.

The pictures are less than 1mm wide. I've added a grey bar that approximates 1mm at the same scale at the top of the post to give a sense of the scale. Does that help?

No, that's how PenTile screens work. There are twice as many green pixels as red and blue ones (one "visual" pixel is made up of a green and red pixel, or a green and blue pixel, so there are two sub-pixels per pixel). Thus, the green pixels are smaller.

The OpenPandora shot doesn't look sharp because it has an anti-glare coating. Some of the others may be a bit too bright for the cheap microscope I'm using, so they're a bit blurry. But mostly, the pixels really do look that way; most of them aren't rectangular at all.

It would affect subpixel rendering of fonts, but I think the iPad doesn't do any subpixel rendering. Not 100% sure though.

It does create another strange effect, though. Since the screen effectively redraws sideways if you hold the iPad in portrait, scrolling vertically quickly makes stuff look a tiny bit distorted; horizontal lines look a bit slanted (like taking a picture out of a car using a cellphone camera, but much less so).

No conspiracy, I just don't have access to these devices. I'll add a Sony Tablet S when I get around to it, though.

(Update: I've added the Sony Tablet S image.)

It's just the camera rotation.

But it's kind of funny, anyway, since the home button is at the bottom of the screen, so the sub-pixels are arranged top-to-bottom when you hold the iPad with the home button where it should be.

The microscope only shows a sharp picture at a specific distance; as soon as you tilt something, most of the picture becomes so blurred that you can't see much anymore. And there's not enough space between the lens and the focus point to really tilt the device much, anyway. Sorry!

I use it for other things, too :-)

Good idea. I've added a picture from a Kindle Keyboard (third gen).

On second thought, I shouldn't have complained about Android in this way. I haven't used ICS, which might have solved the problems I've encountered, and I didn't explain what I don't like about Android's notification system. So I've removed that sentence from the article.

Weather and Stocks aren't notifications. I guess the idea there is that you can see the weather forecast and your stocks at a single glance, but I've turned them off. They're annoying, I agree.

As for everything else, apps that want to send notifications are forced to ask for permission the first time you open them. Presumably, you'd want to grant this permission to Words with Friends, since otherwise, you never know when you have to play :-)

But other than that, you just hit "no" every time, and that's that.

I own a bunch of Android phones (though none of them run ICS, so my experience with the notification system is based on Gingerbread), and I have the Sony tablet.

I'm not a huge fan of Android's UI. Since Duarte is working at Google, it's getting much better, but it still has a ways to go.

I think part of the problem comes down to application behavior. On my Android phone, tons of applications generate notifications that really shouldn't, so the notification widget constantly fills up with needless stuff.

That's a great point. Never occurred to me to look at it like that, but you're right. Open source projects often fail to reach mass acceptance because they're designed by and for the people who work on the project - programmers, that is. webOS has a huge head start in the design area, so it neatly circumvents open source's achilles heel.

I have no excuse. I just like gadgets.

Well, I'm not making a moral argument. I did imply that it was "a slightly shady business practice". Clearly, Google is using money from its search business to fund OS development, and to undercut competitors. I do have a bit of a problem with that.

But I don't think it's as problematic as using patents to go after your competition. Like I said, offering something for free makes it harder to compete with you, but not impossible. Lots of companies compete with free alternatives. Twitter clearly isn't the only example. Desktop operating systems, word processors, text editors, pick whichever example you prefer.

Owning the right patents, on the other hand, can make it impossible for others to compete with you (e.g. what's happening to HTC right now).

The "complex doesn't mean complicated" counterargument always feels like people are just playing the semantics game, rather than making a real counterargument. When somebody says "complexity is bad", he or she already uses "complex" to mean "intricate, complicated".

If you can hide complex functionality behind a simple user interface, it's not really a complex user interface, right?

Slowly revealing new buttons is probably not a good idea, since UIs that change on their own are confusing; things are never the way you expect them to be.

Similarly, searching doesn't work well for beginners, because they don't know what to search for. If you only know what you want the result to be, and not how to get there, or what features you need to achieve the desired result, it's easier if you can just click on things you see, and undo changes if they're going in the wrong direction.

Microsoft tried pretty much everything they could think of in Word, attempting to do exactly what you're suggesting: make an app that works for professionals, but is discoverable for beginners. This is where things like Clippy came from. It's really, really hard to get this right.

The web browser is a different case than something like the Gmail app, or the Kindle app.

"Back" is normally used to move "up" because most of the time, "back" and "up" are the same thing.

I agree that back should bring you back.

Not sure about Gmail. First of all, it doesn't behave the way you describe on my Nexus One. It always goes to the home screen when I switch to it, regardless of how I do it.

Second, is this really the best behavior? Or is the behavior you describe the best behavior? If you get a new message notification, and you tap on it, don't you usually want to see the new message?

And lastly, do you propose that applications should always implement "up" explicitly, or only when necessary? Because most of the time, they would just be duplicating functionality that already exists, thanks to the back button. But if you only show it when necessary, you're creating a situation where casual users won't really understand when and why they should use which UI element.

It's not that the behavior is unclear, it's that going back is not always what you want to happen.

Sometimes, you jump directly into an app, but then, you want to do other things inside that app; since the back button normally is used to move up inside an app, it's not always obvious how to do that (and it's sometimes not possible at all).

I might be in the minority, but none of these are things I do. I never need to check Twitter and Facebook at the same time, or play two games right after each other, or open several news apps. If I have a few minutes to waste, I open one of these apps. If I have a lot of time to waste, I open Instapaper or the Kindle app or a game I can play for a long time.

Even so, presumably, if these apps are important to you and you open them regularly, you have them on the first or second screen, so making the home button take you to the first screen doesn't seem like a huge additional burden.