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Calm down, all large websites go through some instability every now and then. I know that very well from professional experience and I have worked in sites with similar page-loads as The Verge.

4 days ago on The Verge Live: Google I/O 2013 1 reply 3 recommends

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I hope this means the OM-D E-M5 will get focus peaking now…

(Yes, I know there is a work-around, but it’s simply not as good as having the functionality built-in)

10 days ago on Olympus announces PEN E-P5, a Micro Four Thirds camera with 1963 looks and 2013 specs

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I’ll third the Eneloop recommendation. Right now I switch between Eneloops and Apple’s batteries.

11 days ago on Rechargeable Batteries for Magic Mouse and BT Keyboard

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Looks nice, but lets not forget two things:

• Nokia has forged fake imagery of their smartphone’s cameras capabilities before
• We still don’t have comparison samples to show how the camera performs in decent light, that was one of the weak points of the Lumia 920 and there’s no hint of that being addressed thus far.

I’d rather wait until we see a comparison done by professional writers than to trust Nokia’s footage. There’s more than one way they could have distorted the recording of those videos and they’ve fooled me enough in the past not to trust them at first sight.

12 days ago on Lumia 928's PureView camera competes with Galaxy S III and iPhone 5 in Nokia video 1 reply 1 recommend

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Same here. I really dislike the height taken up by Chrome and Firefox. Safari displays so much more in less space.

12 days ago on Fastest and smoothest web browser on Mac OSX 2 recommends

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I carry very little music around with me nowadays, mostly because I have my laptop with me most of the time, but right now I have on my iPhone:

• Pure Reason Revolution’s albums,
• the XX’s albums,
• a couple of Massive Attack albums,
• a couple of Lamb’s albums,
• Nocturne’s Wild Nothing (recommended by one of Verge’s staff) and
• “Everything Last Winter” album from Fields.

12 days ago on What music do you listen to most on your devices?

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Safari is smooth and fast but I’ve seen more than one site “choke” its performance when it’s loading stuff. A simple example is Google’s image search. A more complex example is loading a theverge.com article with a lot of comments (over 500). After the page is fully loaded, it works like a charm, but there’s that brief period where it simply freezes.

12 days ago on Fastest and smoothest web browser on Mac OSX 2 recommends

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Looks like he saw the video.

20 days ago on Samsung Galaxy S4 launch party in India features terrible 'Gangnam Style' remake 1 reply 23 recommends

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If that will give their laptops even better battery life, what’s so wrong about that? I’m sure there will be some way to turn it off, or just being able to ignore it altogether.

And again, this is just a rumor, one that may very well prove itself to be true, but I don’t think we should make too much of it until the announcement.

20 days ago on OS X 10.9 will reportedly include tabbed browsing in Finder and iOS-style multitasking 2 recommends

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All welcomed features from where I’m standing.

20 days ago on OS X 10.9 will reportedly include tabbed browsing in Finder and iOS-style multitasking 2 replies 5 recommends

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First of all, UX/UI is a joke profession where 99% of people are doing something I could do, as a developer, if half the time with better results. Very few actually pull their weight.

Oh don’t worry, we’ve all seen how great you developers can design stuff, and I can’t wait to see the kind of trash that a developer-centric community will make when suddenly their main platform of development switches from a usability-centric design to a graphic-centric design. Oh wait, I have seen it, and it’s what’s available right now on the Windows Phone store. Although there are a few well developed and designed apps for the Windows Phone, most applications in that store are garbage.

You are right that there are a lot of people out there that claim to be UX/UI design gurus that can’t pull their own weight, I’ll give you that, but there are more people who are good at UX/UI and can pull their weight than there are Windows, or Windows Phone, developers that can make an app with good design.

26 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 4 recommends

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I don’t mind the fact that it does not bother you, but I do mind outright lies.

26 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 2 recommends

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@InstyleVII – Having a common feature that could easily be placed in the graphic user interface obscured from sight and most easily accessed with a keyboard shortcut is a bad thing.

There’s a considerable difference between saying that and saying that shortcuts are bad.

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 2 recommends

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Not it doesn’t. If I want to search for anything that isn’t an installed app on the Metro UI I have to press the Windows key, start typing and on the right-hand side click on the “Files” to get to what I want.

This is an extra hoop I have to jump and it’s a stupid one, because by default, if Microsoft can’t find any search results for apps then they should give me the result that most closely matches what I typed.

By comparison, when I type something to search on OSX, it gives me the “Top hit” which is what it considers to be the most relevant result, followed by Applications, most types of documents and last but not least, dictionary definition and the ability to jump to web search the term.

Not only does it require more steps, but it fails to give me results if I’m not looking for an app that was installed and registered on the system registry. On Windows 8 any application that wasn’t installed on the registry is simply a file and is mixed in with a bunch of jargon files that you probably don’t need.

Case in point, I searched for “minecraft” and the first result in the “Files” was MINECRAFT_CREEPER.DAT.BINDAT and Minecraft.exe was the fifth result.

It’s fast, I’ll give it that, but the way it presents the search results is anything but ideal.

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 1 reply 4 recommends

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Jee, I sure am glad that as a new user I was told that. /sarcasm

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 1 reply 4 recommends

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Couldn’t have said it better myself.

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 2 recommends

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I use Photoshop daily, but that is a very different scenario. It’s not crucial to how I operate my computer, it’s a professional program.

What you’re asking me now is the equivalent of: “You don’t fly a plane? It has tons of buttons, and it enables you to fly much safer so you should like buttons.”

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 1 reply 4 recommends

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I never said shortcuts are bad. But everything that is easily accessible with a shortcut should be just as easy, or nearly, as the visual interface counterpart.

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 3 replies 9 recommends

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What’s the point in having a GUI if I have to end up remembering commands and shortcuts again?

You understand what the point of Windows is, don’t you? Shortcuts like the ones you mentioned are there to make power user’s lives easier, not to be the basis of how the system is supposed to be used. If the system was mean to be used with commands and shortcuts, it wouldn’t be a GUI.

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 2 replies 11 recommends

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Oh here we go again, it’s the age-old Microsoft “It can do this, it can do that” argument. For over two decades Microsoft strongly believed that as long as it “could do” a certain feature, regardless of how well or how convoluted that feature was it couldn’t do any harm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

And they were proven wrong, and now more accessible and portable devices are eating into their market, and the only way they found to combat that was to harm it’s core market in favor of supporting the new mobile-driven one leaving users that prefer the legacy desktop with a worse experience.

Sure, the Legacy desktop can be shutdown easily, and access my settings easily provided I know a keyboard shortcut by heart, or go through a couple of extra steps in order to get to it, and sure I can access my main folders rapidly by either pinning them or making shortcuts to them just as in the previous versions. But those are all extra steps just in order for me to get stuff done. An operating system is not supposed to be in my way, it’s supposed to get out of my way and let me do what I want quickly.

Microsoft learned this the hard way with their phones and it seems that they have completely forgotten about it with their desktop OS.

Instead of acknowledging that these differences do exist and are a barrier, difficulty or hindrance to people you instead try to insult me and be dismissive, because it’s easiest thing to do.

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 7 recommends

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And you think that’s a normal thing? That such a prominent and commonly used feature has to be accessed in 3 steps, which aren’t very accessible for people with disabilities as I’ve witnessed.

Also, I haven’t found a way to see an “All Programs” list on Metro yet. Yes, Metro does show some apps, but not all of them.

Here’s another one for you:

If you don’t know that Paint, Notepad, Remote Desktop and other tools exist in Windows 8, how do you find them as a new user?

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 3 replies 12 recommends

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Not as obvious from a UI standpoint, and smaller links and unorganized items unless you pin each individual folder you access the most on the File Explorer itself. More of a minor annoyance than a loop, but still worse than the start menu.

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 3 replies 9 recommends

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I use the Start Menu primarily as a way to search, to shut down my computer, and quickly access the documents/pictures/user folder directly instead of jumping through a couple more steps on the file explorer.

Everything that Microsoft replaced the Start Menu with requires me to jump through an additional loop to get to what I want.

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 5 replies 14 recommends

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It is an admittance of failure because it is a failure.

It makes absolutely no sense from a user-interaction perspective. Using Metro to search for things on your legacy desktop is the equivalent of stepping into a boat to see how much gas your car has.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t enjoy using Metro, and I don’t have anything against Metro in general, but I do think that the removal of the Start menu was a huge failure, as is being admitted by Microsoft right now.

The Start Menu’s removal was Microsoft’s way of saying “we really want you to use the Metro UI” because that UI is restrictive and gatekept, and it would profit Microsoft greatly if it was used. But for some reason a lot of Microsoft fans rallied behind it because it was the first time in two decades that Microsoft was truly daring with it’s interface design and user interactions and gathered in its defence as if it was the greatest thing created since the GUI in Windows 95.

I can sympathise with people being passionate about the gadgets and software they use, and them wanting things to be better and innovative, but I can not sympathise with people that oblivious to corporate interests that stand in the way of usability for the sole sake of control and profit.

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 4 replies 26 recommends

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There’s a difference between having balls and shoving balls in one’s mouth.

If you’re ok with being forced to use Metro by default, you should completely ok with being given a choice.

27 days ago on Windows 8.1 set to bring back the Start button 7 replies 144 recommends

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If you want to be safe, you should wait until September. By then most of the upcoming cameras will be announced and you will be making a safer purchasing decision. But I wouldn’t worry about the RX100 becoming obsolete any time soon.

Cameras don’t tend to have huge leaps in terms of quality from one year to the next one. There are many people with older enthusiast P&S cameras that are still very much enjoying them today (The Fuji X100, the Canon S100/S90, etc). I honestly wouldn’t upgrade from the S100 to the Sony because they are not immensely different cameras and while the Sony may perform a bit better, it’s not enough of a deal breaker (for me at least). I would instead be looking at something like the Fuji X100, which would be a slight upgrade in terms of image quality, but also a much different shooting experience that could perhaps help you improve your skills and see photography from a different perspective.

27 days ago on Sony RX100, buy or wait? 1 reply