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The dirty word: 'Android' wasn't said a single time during the Google Pixel 3 event
Android is the world's most ubiquitous OS and one of the most important parts of Google's business. But it's becoming clearer that the company no longer wants the word associated with its phones. The latest evidence is in the transcript for its event this week in New York City.
"Android" wasn't said a single time during the Made by Google 2018 keynote. It marks the first time ever that Google has held a public-facing hardware event like this — since the introduction of the operating system in 2008 — without at least mentioning it by name.
[...] While Android went unsaid, Google had no shame talking Chrome OS, which powers the new Pixel Slate tablet. Google told an entire story around Chrome OS, where it's come from, why it makes sense on the tablet, and touted it as a great desktop alternative to Windows and macOS. To me it seemed Chrome OS was clearly marketed as a standout feature of the Pixel Slate. To add insult to injury for Android, the "universe" of Android apps that can now run on Chrome were referred to as simply "apps" or "apps from the Google Play Store" during the keynote.
[...] It's understandable that, given the Android brand's association with "lower quality" non-premium phones that Google doesn't want to associate the name of that OS with its phones — at least not in terms of the public-facing marketing message. Android phones are made by dozens of scattered manufacturers, all with varying approaches to their products, their design, their features, etc. — which has lead to an arguably good thing: immense diversity of phones running Android today. But that means "Android" doesn't really have much meaning other than just being not-iPhone. [...] And it doesn't want the baggage of the Android connotation mucking up the image of a phone that competes with the iPhone and costs upwards of $1,000.
Also at BGR.
Related: Now Is the Time to Start Planning for the Post-Android World
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday October 12 2018, @11:09PM (2 children)
OK now this is awesome. It's something I've often wanted to hack together on other OSes but never quite found the time. I figured you could maybe fake it if you read the second mouse's state with a custom driver and then either very rapidly alternate the pointer between the two locations or just draw the second pointer with some graphics code and spoof all the extra mouse events. I got stuck thinking what would happen if an application tries to read the pointer location at a given moment and gets the "wrong" pointer. Maybe you could get around it by ensuring that each window was associated with the closest pointer to it but it would be a challenge to code up.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Saturday October 13 2018, @03:33AM
Well if you consider multi-point touch effectively multiple 'mice' as each touch point behaves very well like that .. then it's been around for a long time. Several USB HID drivers for multi-touch screens could be used as a basis for this ... and hacking the HID input to what you want via xinput isn't very difficult .. although building and testing X is a bit of pain.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Saturday October 13 2018, @10:19AM
> OK now this is awesome. It's something I've often wanted to hack together on other OSes but never quite found the time.
Linux X-server has supported multiple pointers for years. I remember using it with two mouse pointers on the same screen in the 00's. First time was actually by accident, I plugged a mouse in at the front panel without knowing there was one tucked in behind the PC, and got very confused when there were two pointers on the screen, but I could move only one of them. Thought it was a graphics corruption at first..
After that I used it with a mouse pointer and a tablet (which pretended to be a mouse for compatibility) for graphics work just fine.
There is even an entry about it here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Multi-pointer_X [archlinux.org]
The link says it came about in version 1.7, which was in 2009. So multi-pointer support has existed on one of the 3 main OSes (without needing to hack anything together) for almost 10 years now.