zlacker

>>iBelie+(OP)
My primary concern with this is that different applications are inherently optimized for the platform on which they were originally designed. There are some applications that have a very dense UI because there's simply alot of functionality that the program handles (think of a video editor, an IDE, etc). Trying to slim down those applications to make them reactive so that they will scale onto a phone or tablet just seems silly, and I fear that in the name of making "everything work everywhere", we're going to compromise a bunch of apps that worked beautifully on one platform in favor of making them work adequately on several platforms.

I mean, if someone said, "I've successfully ported Vim to Android!", my first thought would be, "Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?"*

* Ruling out, of course, someone plugging their phone into external KVM.

>>Admira+K7
Some folks, myself included, reel at the conventional wisdom that a small screen necessarily means reduced functionality.

While I agree that it can be difficult to design information-dense UIs for small displays or provide navigability to a large feature set, I strongly applaud efforts to unify computing and work through these challenges.

I very much want all of my computing devices to be unified. In fact, I want a model where I have one computing device and multiple views ("terminals" if you wish) [1]. But a consistent experience as Purism is pitching, and which Microsoft attempted with Windows 8 + Windows Phone 8, are viable first steps. There is learning to do here and it's great to see people taking on the challenge.

> I mean, if someone said, "I've successfully ported Vim to Android!", my first thought would be, "Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?"

Sure, but if they find it useful, fun, or just plain cool, I applaud it. I want more desktop-class computing capabilities on my phone-sized device and I routinely find myself deferring important actions until I can get in front of a "real computer." Many things are just too challenging or limited on today's mobile operating systems. Even with "convergence," as Purism calls it, there will still be cases where I simply want to use a larger screen, so I'll defer until I can dock the device and use some large form-factor I/O devices. But with the stance Purism is taking, I would no longer experience the frustration of software limiting me even when I am willing to endure the limitations of my hardware.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

>>bhauer+Om
A 10” screen has a twentieth the screen estate of my workstation screens, and is the difference of a narrow point of attention and spanning my view.

It’s bordering on absurdism to try and utilize the same UI between them, and simply doesn’t match the reality of human perception or tool use.

There are certainly uses where it makes sense — people who use just a phone and laptop for the internet and documents, for instance — and arguments to be made for consistency in styling or icons, but there’s also a lot of use cases where they’re different kinds of tools, even if both use computer chips, and it makes sense to have different UIs.

I appreciate Microsoft offering the other option in Windows 10: that I can use a tablet UI in tablet mode and a desktop UI in laptop mode.