Thread: This is serious competition.
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johnkzin is offline johnkzin
2009-02-10 , 02:50
Posts: 1,878 | Thanked: 646 times | Joined on Sep 2007 @ San Jose, CA
#30
Originally Posted by YoDude View Post
It is hard to make something usable with out usefulness. If it isn't useful it's soon becomes useless.


...however, there was this useful community that grew up with the tablets so I stayed involved. The syntax problem was resolved through a very useful bug tracking program and the Opera web browser gave way to MicroB so that useful web apps like flash and CSS could be used. These and other things made the tablet more "usable".

Those two comments kind of lead me to believe that you don't know what usable means...

Usable is the formal/clinical term for the colloquial "user friendly". It's a Human Factors Engineering/Ergonomics term. Things can easily be usable, but not very useful. Several of the cheap $10-$20 PDAs that don't sync with anything, don't have the ability to load apps, etc., are actually quite usable (well designed, straight forward, easy to use/figure out interfaces), but have rather limited usefulness.

The opposite can also be true... things can be quite useful, even amazingly useful (lots of utility, lots of features, powerful hardware for delivering those features, etc.) and abysmal when it comes to being usable.

Useful and usable have almost nothing to do with each other, other than building on the same root word.

The things you said in the 2nd paragraph I quited, in fact, do nothing to make the tablet more "usable". More useful, yes. More usable, no.

It is true that something which isn't useful becomes useless. That says NOTHING about whether or not it is usable.
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