Nerdcore shit, sorry.
Looking at it, things that seem obvious but aren’t for OEMs and all actors of this microcosm.
- WEB
What do we do on the web, most of the time? We read. Displays and text rendering techniques are getting better but there’s one thing that stays out of the discussion: FONTS. We live with like, 9 different fonts and that’s it. Publishing and text should be able to use any type of font, how awesome it would be. We’re starting to have options but there’s no standard and it’s all about hacking. The HTML5 specs don’t contain ANYTHING about this.
Meanwhile they try so hard to run 3D in my browser. It’s useless native apps do that much better, which leads me to:
- 3D
We’re using small form factor devices these days and obviously 3D makes everything hot. So why don’t we already have external graphic cards for when we game? PCI Express allows that and both main graphic manufacturers have solutions ready for this since 2007/2008. It never took off because they suck. And it sucks for us because finding a laptop with enough GPU power without costing you $1000 or looking like a Transformer is a nightmare. Which leads me to:
- AMD
You see today chip manufacturers search for the Holy Grail: being able to make CPUs and GPUs. Intel as huge as they are suck at GPUs, years that they say they have something when they have nothing. Nvidia is starting to make CPUs -only ARM based though- but are really into GPUs. The only company that has experience in both is AMD. The sad part is that they didn’t deliver so well in the past and with Intel pressuring OEMs, machines with AMD tech are always super lame 17” ugly ass laptops. It’s terrible because their shit is really good: a quad-core and 384 shaders units embedded in a slim notebook with which you can play 3D games better -up to twice as much fps, that’s no little bump- than on much more expensive Intel “ultrabook” stuff. Best deal ever.
- APIs
Developers are trying to avoid to be dependent on one company making one OS, but they’re willing to be dependent on one company making an API, which is much more restrictive. Despite countless examples showing how it ruins the ability to build for long, developers don’t rush for open APIs or standards so much. Twitter is the best example. To get news in a stream form we have rss/opml or the new river of news, both totally open. Make apps using these. Don’t silo data, don’t make people sign up. Let the data flow and build/sell nice, simple and designed things around them. People will rush to them.