Via introduces APC Paper: A $99 Android PC

Re:Via introduces APC Paper: A $99 Android PC by zmmmmm on Thursday January 17, 2013 @06:09PM (#5075863)

> as long as Google optimizes it a little more to be more suited as a desktop OS

I think it's a bigger jump than just a little optimization. Consider:

  * no proper windowing

  * no OS support for copy and paste of anything except plain text - you can't
    even copy some bold text from one part of an email to another
    part of the same email!

  * the mouse support is really mouse-simulating-a-finger, with all its clumsiness
    (for example, you have to "long click" to get functions you'd normally "right
    click" for on a desktop), there's no "mouseover"

  * apps are killed randomly in the background and often don't restore their state
    upon returning eg: switch from your word processor to your browser and back
    again and there's a *chance* your word processor got killed. Depending on the
    quality of the code, it'll start up blank, perhaps with the same document, but
    almost never in exactly the state you left it.

I would love for Google to address these things but they haven't shown any sign of it. The fact that they went out of their way to kill multi-windowing in CyanogenMod is interesting ... and the fact that the CM team complied without a whimper suggests that something may happen on that front, but I might be hoping more than really optimistic.

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Re:Via introduces APC Paper: A $99 Android PC by NoPiece on Thursday January 17, 2013 @09:43PM (#5076742)

I'm only semi serious, but only supporting plaintext copy and paste is more of a feature than a limitation for me. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has kept notepad open to copy into to remove formatting. Not so much an issue anymore with "paste and match style" available.

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Re:Via introduces APC Paper: A $99 Android PC by shurane on Monday January 21, 2013 @01:21PM (#5092808)

About muli-windowing, are you talking about Onskreen's Cornerstone and perhaps these links by Steve Kondik [1] and CyanogenMod [2]?

[1]: https://plus.google.com/100275307499530023476/posts/ViCME1bb...

[2]: https://plus.google.com/+CyanogenMod/posts/jWb2VJi3KJT

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Re:Via introduces APC Paper: A $99 Android PC by zmmmmm on Monday January 21, 2013 @04:52PM (#5093947)

Yes, those exactly.

Hackborn starts with a stick ("I suspect we are going to need to start doing things to prevent you from impacting our app ecosystem") and then shows just a tiny glimmer of carrot ("Doing this correctly, without impacting our app developers... I also think it is something that needs to be done at the mainline platform level...")

So who knows what to make of that. My main reason for hope is that it's just so unusual for Google to speak out that way. All kinds of bizarre things get added to ROMs and they just ignore it. Then this comes and the Google engineers go bananas. It has to mean (or at least, I think it has to mean) that they have some plans around it, and they really don't want something incompatible coming out and becoming a defacto API ahead of that.

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Re:Via introduces APC Paper: A $99 Android PC by hayksaakian on Friday January 18, 2013 @04:42AM (#5077902)

The long/right click thing really gets to me.

One PCs you have right click and double click, which are both replaced with long click. Using PC design interfaces on mobile will usually work (2 becomes 1). But the reverse fails because 1 cannot become 2.

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