Discussions

Wonder if they'll finally update the settings UI this time.

@Ray7: The magnifying glass is a great solution, yeah. They should've just cloned it really. I do have to say that the "can't see what's under your finger" problem isn't that bad for me because you can take hold of the marker a little bit under where it's shown, and as you move it around your finger will stay not quite on top of it.

(Does everyone know about the ability to precisely position the text editing cursor by pressing-and-holding in a textbox?)

I find it smooth enough and reasonably forgiving (and don't really see the difficulties with highlighting you mention) but agree that the iOS implementation is better. It's not quite true though that you can only copy editable text - you should be able to highlight anything in the Mail and IE apps for example, and in other places, like the People and Messaging apps, they've added a Copy item to the context menu (press and hold) of various un-highlightable items.

@felix9: this is really cool! they put some thought into what could make a language/env fit for mobile. though it seems a ways away from being actually useful, but will definitely be following this ...

@Setag_Yrneh: lol, of course they are doing this. there will probably be a beta announced at MIX next week.

if there's a circular reference such that A depends on B and B depends on A, isn't the standard fix to factor out a common "kernel" C with the common dependencies, so that the remaining parts of A and B only depend on C, not on each other?

@Sven Groot: that's interesting - I like the pinned sites exactly because they enable a 3-level organization of browsing into multiple "activities" each with multiple tabs. Whenever I start a new task, I pin the "hub" site for that task to the taskbar, then unpin it when I'm done. So having the multiple windows help me remember which tabs go with which task. In fact, I really hated IE's taskbar-preview-per-tab "feature" in IE8 because I almost always have at least several dozen tabs (often hundreds) open in various windows at any given time, but in conjunction with Pinned Sites it makes a lot more sense.

" The market momentum behind adoption of HTML5 as the path forward for broad cross-platform reach continues to gather momentum"

someone needs to parachute an emergency editor into Walid, Scott & Soma's compound! I dunno who Walid is, but I don't remember ScottGu's or even Soma's writing being that garbled most of the time.

6.2

 There's no such thing as "finished" or "ready". In fact, what you posted about Apple is 180 degrees wrong. They don't wait until they have every feature they'd like to have. They wait until they have a small subset of features they think are enough to have a compelling product, and polish just those. By contrast Microsoft in the past has been criticized for trying to cram too many features in too early (with e.g. WPF), but with WP7 they tried to take a more Apple-like approach by limiting the initial feature set (whether or not they were right in their judgement of what subset of features would make a compelling product).