Posted by Brian Cui on March 24, 2012 at 7:15 pm
Hardware manufacturers have been churning out netbook competitors by the dozens: specifically, smartphones and tablets. The netbook market has fallen drastically, and with no new killer netbooks coming out, they rarely make the news these days as they slowly become replaced by its competition. With all these alternatives available, who would actually buy a netbook, when their disadvantages in performance and portability seem to no longer make them viable contenders as must-want devices? Picking out the differences, and getting a little specific, it becomes clear that netbooks are still alive because they fill a fairly specific niche.
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Posted by Brian Cui on July 31, 2011 at 5:10 pm
Digital distribution services for gaming have slowly been taking over the PC gaming market. Steam is currently the largest digital distributor, with services like Impulse and Origin creeping up from other providers. Quite frankly, digital distribution lies in the future of gaming, seeing as I no longer take trips to the nearest electronics store to pick up a game. It’s more convenient – but there’s always a catch, and in this case, it’s DRM. More digital versions of games means more piracy, and DRM is supposedly the solution to stop that.
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Posted by Brian Cui on July 2, 2011 at 8:28 pm
Browsers have always been simplifying their layouts over the decade, starting with big, blocky buttons to small, compact interfaces meant for saving screen space and hence increasing room for browsing. While extra space to view webpages is nice, smaller buttons get harder and harder to aim for. Have you noticed Chrome’s close tab button? It’s pretty small, and if you want to close an individual tab quickly, you better have some serious cursor-aiming skills. Mouse gestures bring a new form of navigation to the table, and frankly, I feel that it’s quite important to learn them.
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