4 ms·
Most computer users aren’t hardcore users. Of course not scientific, but I know a lot of users that are intimidated by strange FN keys and are glad the touchbar
by mstolpm 7y ago
Most computer users aren’t hardcore users. Of course not scientific, but I know a lot of users that are intimidated by strange FN keys and are glad the touchbar clearly labels the current function of the virtual keys. We as HN crowd and hardcore freaks need to accept that no major hardware company can survive by delevoping for us niche users.
- xiphias2 7y agoYou're right, but it's not just hardware. I was part of the spell correction team at Google, and we made sure that we aren't overly aggressive even though lots of people mistype their web query. Nowdays I find it much harder to research rare things on Google, and I have to undo the automatic correction that the spell corrector does all the time (which is OK as long as it's easy to undo).
- beerandt 7y agoI've always preferred the results page corrections for spelling. I'm more ok with the extra step, if it's my fault for misspelling. Less so if I have to take an extra step to correct Google's inaccurate "correction."
- sethammons 7y agoA question for you, given your expertise: why do most (all?) spell checking/correcting not take into account key locality (is, neighboring key accidentally pressed). A big one for me is hitting n or b instead of space. I think it has gotten better recently, but has a loooong way to go. Just curious on your thoughts. Cheers!
- ses1984 7y agoSwiftkey does.
- xiphias2 7y agoIt was there from the first iteration of spelling a long time ago (the first iteration was just looking at misspelling frequencies, second iteration 12 years ago moved to understanding multiple spelling mistakes/mistypes) If you see these kind of easy-to-correct mistakes, it probably means that the spell corrector wasn't given that big attention in the past 10 years.
- xiphias2 7y agoI just realized that you wrote space....that’s harder as the spell corrector works on words separately :( I was working on URL corrections part that didn’t need to use segmentation, so I don’t know the details though.
- thedaemon 7y agohttps://www.boxx.com/ https://www.boxx.com/ https://system76.com/ https://system76.com/ These companies are doing fine. There are more like them. Unless you are saying they are not major hardware companies?
- TomVDB 7y agoNot OP, but I had never heard of them before.
- beerandt 7y ago>Most computer users aren’t hardcore users. I know at this point it's mostly marketing, but we are talking about a "pro" model.
- aykutcan 7y agoPro as in Professional End User.
- cgriswald 7y agoWhile we are trading anecdotes, my extremely-non-technical girlfriend returned her Macbook in part because of the touch bar; the other part was the terrible keyboard. In any case, it is very non-obvious that removing the function keys used by power user and non-power user alike (often for work) is necessary for the survival of the company. It is also very non-obvious why the function keys had to be removed for a touchbar to be added to an already relatively expensive piece of hardware. The touch-bar/function keys are already non-reachable from the home row for most people; so what's another row? I think this was a design-oriented decision, not a regular-user-centric one.
- opencl 7y agoMost computer users are not hardcore users, but I would think most users of a computer which costs $2400-6100 are.