A New Toy
This is my new Acer Iconia W-500.
Acer Iconia W-500
It’s a tablet computer that runs Windows. When I get my network sorted, I’ll use it to demonstrate Daisy and also to browse on my travels to access my bank account, Zopa and GMail.
I think I might write some stroke-friendly software for the device. Of course, it will be in Visual Basic 6. You might ask why I don’t want an iPad.
The reason is simple. Real programmers don’t use Apple products and anyway, I’d need to learn a whole new set of progrmming tools. As it is virtually all of the software, I’ve written will run on this machine. I won’t need to buy anything else, except possibly a case to protect it. But it does fit my manbag.
Here’s an old joke.
Q: How do you make an Apple go faster?
A: Drop it from a higher building.
I have an iPad and love it, I find it ideal for the problems I have with my hands. But then I havent done any programming since I was 16! It does everything I need it to do without any problems. The other tablets I looked at were smaller, which meant the touch keyboard was smaller, and my poor aim needs the extra size iPad can give me.
Comment by liz | May 29, 2011 |
Isn’t the Windows 7 version of that tablet a bit slow and clunky? There’s an Android version that looks better to me.
I guess you’ve chosen it for Windows compatibility but your comments about Macs are presumably a wind-up as Macs can run Windows natively or in virtual machines (and it can run other OS like Linix). As a Unix-based platform the Mac OS is pretty decent and the machine/interface build and experience is superb.
Comment by Marc | May 29, 2011 |
The speed is enough for what I want. Macs can’t run Visual Basic 6 stuff at a reasonable seed. You may ask why I use somerthing as old as VB6 and not the laest versions? It’s because it so easy to do very difficult things with. There are also large numbers of big systems out there written in the language. I was once told by a senior Microsoft guy, that they still use VB6 to sort out serious problems. Especially, as the number of programmers they have who use it is quite a large number. After all we still use a similar claw hammer to what we did 150 years ago.
Comment by AnonW | May 30, 2011 |
[...] a serious side, I do carry an Iconia tablet when I travel. But I only use it for business, research and entertainment. 52.245212 [...]
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