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It looks like Canonical, as well as Microsoft, think that something in the form factor of a MS Surface is the way things are going. If you are going to have a desktop/tablet, you need a touch driven UI.

Five years ago, when Samsung Q1 UMPCs were exciting [1], I'd have agreed, but it turns out that tablets (with tiny their screens even when you plug in a keyboard), are crap for creation. People don't just want to be passive consumers.

Hence, this unified Tablet/PC idea is a bad one. I'm sure it'll fly eventually, just like mice over trackerballs, but that doesn't mean it's better. Dedicated devices that are good at creation and consumption respectively (PC, Laptop, TV, Tablet) are better. Unified Tablet/PCs yield interfaces that are bad for everything, and extra RSI from the touchscreen.

But it's the way of the future, so Linux had better be ready. Because soon it'll be hard to buy a laptop that isn't a tablet. And can you think of a better Desktop Environment for touch screen than Canonicals?

[1]http://www.mobiletechreview.com/notebooks/Samsung-Q1-UMPC.ht...




> but it turns out that tablets (with tiny their screens even when you plug in a keyboard), are crap for creation

Disagree massively. If you look at the iOS market, you'll see a ton of content creating apps making good money. For example, ipads are now better for making music on than laptops.


You may have a point there. I'm sure being able to draw on the screen is pretty good for art work too.


Yes the art app market is also very big. There's a really ignorant meme going round in tech circles that ipad is only good for passive consumption - people think it sounds smart but it couldn't be further from what is actually emerging in reality. (Have to say for some reason I can't ascertain, I hate to see people take pictures on an ipad - but go into a busy tourist spot in a big city now and observe.)


can you get Live, Cubase or Reason on a ipad yet? can you connect your pro fire-wire sound card to an ipad?

NO tablets are great for playback and controller use cases for composing/creation not so much.

Now Live on a Surface pro might be good for music creation.


Obviously you won't get a 1:1 correlation with legacy desktop apps. ReBirth is an example of an app arguably not worth porting to ipad. Unsurprisingly, the ipad does better in areas where it innovates and sometimes exceeds desktop capabilities - for example apps like Konkreet Performer, Traktor, Reactable, Samplr, Lemur, Impaktor, Electrify, all the Korg and Moog apps. There are a ton of DAWs to choose from but they are among the less interesting things out there.


Calling Live a 'legacy desktop app'?


I know obviously an amateur who hasn't had to work in the real world i doubt sound on sound would agree with him/her on this


You're not actually in the music industry are you. Nobody who was would cite SoS.


Isn't desktop legacy by definition? ;)


Well, touchscreens are trendy right now and they're moving a lot of hardware and software.. but for real hardcore musical creation?

They won't be a centerpiece like a desktop running Ableton Live until they get a hell of a lot more powerful.. and frankly, the first thing most people will do with their touchscreen musicbox is find a board covered in keys, knobs, faders, and buttons to attach to it.

I think people might underestimate just how tactile music is and how important it is with electronic/computer-powered music to see what you're doing at the same time as you're doing it or--conversely but no less importantly--to be able to do what you're doing without looking at it.

I mean, there's talk of tactile feedback touchscreens and everything else, but really--this is a solved problem, it's called a button.


You're obviously correct that tablets are CPU-bound compared to desktop which is why the more exciting stuff is native on the ipad rather than being a port. Traktor is a good example - the ipad version is very different and stripped down yet more powerful in a number of ways. When you talk about 'hardcore creation', remember that Brian Eno is a big fan of the ipad. Now you can get Reactable for ipad and even an emulation of the Tenori-on - you won't find anything remotely like those capabilities (or e.g. Samplr or Impaktor) on desktop.

And the controller market is much larger for desktop than tablet - the tablet is a very popular controller for the desktop (especially Ableton as it happens). Consider that for a long time Lemur has been a high end pro choice precisely due to it being a soft controller and they are now working with the ipad.


I'd like to see Eno do a show with naught but one ipad. I think Reactable is basically a toy and as for the Tenori-on.. I don't know if you've ever played one, but it was kind of terrible.. I think it probably would do better as an app than a discrete physical device though. It looked cool and novel, but the build quality was poor and the interface actually wasn't worthwhile, it was a toy. It's so much easier to address tone using a keyboard, and you don't need a crazy 16x16 grid to address time. A linear array of 16 buttons, any of which you can hold to address a specific point in time, and then manipulate that point in time by pressing keys on a keyboard or turning encoders to set parameters works very well.

Samplr looks cool, but I don't actually see the capability. Controllerists hack together things like this in PureData, Max/MSP, and Reaktor all the time. Just watching the video, the issue of the finger covering the display is huge. I see him changing parameters that are tightly clustered by pressing on them and then sliding his finger left and right. So.. the nearby parameters are inaccessible when doing this? What happens when my hands get sweaty?

I think touch screens have their uses but they simply don't replace tactile controls. Having an integrated computer and screen that can present a large amount of information is itself a huge advancement. The overly touch-centric UI is a regression, in this musician's opinion. I see a lot of novelty, but I've yet to see anything that I personally would even consider bringing onto the stage. Keys work, knobs work, faders work, decoupled controls and display work. In all the novelty I don't see any real tools for managing the complexity and demands of live performance, I see complexity added without practical affordances.

Tightly coupling control and display is just not such a great idea and I really don't think it takes much imagination once you remember all of the different sensors and hard input devices that exist to come up with another way of implementing any interface that works well on a touch screen.

I'm more interested in the possibility of apps w/ dedicated controllers, or multipurpose controllers, than I am in the standalone apps. Unfortunately, these devices don't really put configurability very high on their feature sets.

If you haven't done so recently, go play a modern hardware synth or sequencer. Then think about the explosion of possibility that 'desktop'(Which is really a misnomer with laptops and small headless computers on the table) solutions offer... then revisit a tablet app and you'll find yourself asking, as I found myself asking, why do I have to obscure the information with my finger and why is such a large part of my screen given over to taking input?


Some of us prefer the term mature.


Let me know when I can use XCode on iPad.


The goal Ubuntu appears to be aiming for is that you dock your phone/tablet to a workstation setup with a full-sized screen and keyboard, and all your apps and content seamlessly carries on in the new environment. That's a bit different from Surface's model of attaching a keyboard and using the same touchscreen.


> "something in the form factor of a MS Surface"

you mean something in the form factor of the iPad? I don't want to get into a debate about who made that shaped device first, but the iPad was the first that anyone normal had heard of.


The vision of the surface (unlike the ipad) is that it is both a tablet, and a PC.

You can mount it on a wall, put a bluetooth keyboard and mouse under it, and you are at a PC.

You can clip in the little clippy keyboard, and it's a laptop.

I don't have a problem with ipads. Ipads are a specialist device for consuming content, and apple make laptops for doing other stuff on. You're supposed to have both.

I have a problem with Tablet/PCs, like the surface, because they are trying to be both, and failing. It's like asking for a lorry that's also a sports car - you're gonna get something, and it's gonna be really really bad.


Personally I'd kinda like to have a bigger Surface-style device, like 15", and plug in my mechanical keyboard. That way the laptop's keyboard isn't getting in the way.

Only trouble is it wouldn't be good for use on my lap, but that could be solved with an arrangement similar to a Surface with keyboard attached, where the "keyboard" is just something to put my real keyboard on.

This could also be a nice arrangement for people who fly a lot, if you could hang the screen on the seat in front of you.


fair points all - in this way, Ubuntu is indeed more similar to Windows 8 on a tablet than iOS on an iPad is to either.




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