vb6 created application running on $99 Tablet

[axisdj]

Hello Everyone,

I know some of you may know this but let me just say it.

We recently bought some HP Stream 7 Windows Tablets. To my amazement my vb6 created application runs FAST and looks amazing. Even with my 3d Visualizer open and directShow Video Mixing everything with USB hardware connected this thing rocks.

To me this is an indications of what vb6 apps can do in the Tablet Realm. I think this is a very positive move that allows for very quick tablet apps created by vb6

All my sales people got one, and are using the tablets to show software. We are also planning to create a product around this.

I really think the development by Intel to make low power fast processors is just amazing!

[Navion]

Great news. I already posted my views on the topic where you reported this first

[esposito]

Hello Everyone,

I know some of you may know this but let me just say it.

We recently bought some HP Stream 7 Windows Tablets. To my amazement my vb6 created application runs FAST and looks amazing. Even with my 3d Visualizer open and directShow Video Mixing everything with USB hardware connected this thing rocks.

To me this is an indications of what vb6 apps can do in the Tablet Realm. I think this is a very positive move that allows for very quick tablet apps created by vb6

All my sales people got one, and are using the tablets to show software. We are also planning to create a product around this.

I really think the development by Intel to make low power fast processors is just amazing!

Do you know the maximum screen resolution supported by HP Stream 7 Windows Tablets?

TIA

[Shaggy Hiker]

Tablets have static RAM rather than hard drives. I've found that programs that run well on a laptop run GREAT on tablets. I'm using a Surface II Pro, and the performance of pretty much everything is better than on any other computer I have...except for the performance of my fingers...those are worse on the small keyboard.

I'm surprised that you have a tablet running Win7, though. Win8.1 is a better tablet OS, and will still run your VB6 apps.

We have the issue that we need to get hardened, or at least waterproof, tablets, which rules out all the cheap ones. There's some neat hardware out there, we just can't use most of it.

[passel]

Do you know the maximum screen resolution supported by HP Stream 7 Windows Tablets?

TIA

Probably just quicker to read a review or look up the specs from one of the sites selling them.

Display
7" diagonal HD WVA IPS multitouch-enabled (1280 x 800)

[Shaggy Hiker]

It looks nice, but the memory is a bit deficient.

[passel]

To get it down to $99 they had to cut a few things. It would be nice if they had the option to pay a bit more to get more memory.
To get a decent docking station so you can hook up keyboard, mouse, external monitor and charge the tablet at the same time is going to cost you almost as much, like $89, but I would want that option as well. I don't think I would want the restriction of either using the mouse and keyboard, or being able to provide external power to the device. Not being able to do both at the same time would be a detriment for me.

[Shaggy Hiker]

It isn't viable for me, anyways. I'm interested in more portable ways to run VS, Word (or actually LibreOffice), and SQL Server Express + Management Studio, all at the same time. That system is kind of strapped for memory, but if it had sufficient memory...I still can't imagine using a monitor that small for anything productive. The Surface monitor is fairly marginal in size, but at least it can be docked to something else and has great specs. The drawback to the Surface is that the cost is pretty high. It has recently dropped, though only by a few percent. If there was a $200 large-size tablet that ran the software I wanted, I'd consider it. Until then, the Surface is the way to go, for me.

[passel]

At $200, then it seems that the closest to fit your bill would be a step up to the HP Stream 11. At $199 it is designed to compete with Google's chrome book, but is Win8.1 so can be used offline, compared to Google Chrome. But, it also isn't a tablet any longer, just a Celeron based light laptop, and the memory is only doubled, to 2GB, over the Stream 7.
One review can be read here. http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/hp-stream-11
Probably going to be hard to find something that meets all your requirements at $200 at this point.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Yeah, that's how it appears. I'll wait.

[esposito]

Probably just quicker to read a review or look up the specs from one of the sites selling them.

1280 x 800 looks good enough to me.

Question: if you have a form full of textboxes occupying most of the screen area of your Windows tablet, how can you fill in the boxes using the touch-screen mode? I mean, doesn't the virtual keyboard that pops up cover almost half of the screen, making it impossible to see what you are typing?

[dilettante]

Tablets have static RAM rather than hard drives.

Static RAM pretty much died with the 1970s for most purposes.

What tablets do use is generally either eMMC connected directly to the system bus or SSD connected via a disk controller chip. Both are flash-based, not static RAM at all.

[techgnome]

1280 x 800 looks good enough to me.

Question: if you have a form full of textboxes occupying most of the screen area of your Windows tablet, how can you fill in the boxes using the touch-screen mode? I mean, doesn't the virtual keyboard that pops up cover almost half of the screen, making it impossible to see what you are typing?

My experience with this situation is that the form then scrolls. I use the Tab or Next button a lot in those cases.

I wish there was a way to have a smaller OSK, but yet at the same time, something big enough to handle my fingers with accuracy.

Depending on the situation, something like this might help:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PLLXGJ0?psc=1

Would do for in-field where you don't have a desk or flat surface to work from.

-tg

[Shaggy Hiker]

Static RAM pretty much died with the 1970s for most purposes.

What tablets do use is generally either eMMC connected directly to the system bus or SSD connected via a disk controller chip. Both are flash-based, not static RAM at all.

I wasn't using some marketing name, I was talking about the result. Dynamic RAM was dynamic because you had to keep it powered up or it would lose what was stored. Static RAM is just memory that retains information without an electricity source. There was a thing called "Static RAM", which could well be different from whatever the word for todays memory is, but I was just using the adjective as it originally was used before it became adhered to a specific architecture. There's a long and illustrious history of this practice in the English language, and probably all others, as well.

[passel]

I wasn't using some marketing name, I was talking about the result. Dynamic RAM was dynamic because you had to keep it powered up or it would lose what was stored. Static RAM is just memory that retains information without an electricity source. ...

Unfortunately I believe you're confusing the term static memory with non-volatile memory.
I don't believe the term static and non-volatile was ever synonymous. Static just meant it didn't require refresh cycles to hold its memory, versus dynamic which did require refresh cycles.

Both dynamic memory (DRAM) and static memory (SRAM) are volatile memory.
They both require electrical power to maintain their contents.
The difference is that dynamic memory has to have its contents refreshed at regular intervals or it will lose it.
Static memory will hold its contents as long as it has power, so doesn't need to take time to periodically refresh its contents.
In the 70's static memory was easier to build with (because no refresh cycles had to be built in to the memory cycle) and was faster. Static memory was transistor-transistor based, and maintained the value of a bit by switching the on/off state of the transistor. But the transistors had to consume power continuously to hold this state.
Dynamic memory was a transistor-capacitor combination, and the value of a bit was maintained by the charge of the capacitor. The capacitor had to be really small for quick switching (charging/discharging) and storage density, and capacitors naturally loose charge at some rate, and with small capacitors as used in memory, the time they can hold a charge is measured in microseconds, so they have to be refreshed at regular intervals.
So, while static memory was simpler and faster originally, the constant power requirement of holding the transistor in a switch on state was a big power drain. The DRAM memory only needed short bursts of power to charge the capacitors during refresh, but used little power between those periods so overall required much less power.
As the size of memory grew, the power advantage of dynamic over static pretty much ended the use of static memory except for small caches within the processors themselves.
Also technological advances in DRAM sped up their access speeds so increased their pros vs the Static memories cons.

So, I just took it that your use of the term static really meant to say non-volatile, which for NVRAM (non-volatile RAM, aka Flash Memory) is the most common for high speed, non-volatile storage.

[esposito]

My experience with this situation is that the form then scrolls.
-tg

But how can the form scroll if there is no space left? I mean, since all of the screen is occupied by the form (which has no scrollbars), how would it be possible to scroll it?

Thanks.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Unfortunately I believe you're confusing the term static memory with non-volatile memory.
I don't believe the term static and non-volatile was ever synonymous. Static just meant it didn't require refresh cycles to hold its memory, versus dynamic which did require refresh cycles.

Both dynamic memory (DRAM) and static memory (SRAM) are non-volatile memory.
They both require electrical power to maintain their contents.
The difference is that dynamic memory has to have its contents refreshed at regular intervals or it will lose it.
Static memory will hold its contents as long as it has power, so doesn't need to take time to periodically refresh its contents.
In the 70's static memory was easier to build with (because no refresh cycles had to be built in to the memory cycle) and was faster. Static memory was transistor-transistor based, and maintained the value of a bit by switching the on/off state of the transistor. But the transistors had to consume power continuously to hold this state.
Dynamic memory was a transistor-capacitor combination, and the value of a bit was maintained by the charge of the capacitor. The capacitor had to be really small for quick switching (charging/discharging) and storage density, and capacitors naturally loose charge at some rate, and with small capacitors as used in memory, the time they can hold a charge is measured in microseconds, so they have to be refreshed at regular intervals.
So, while static memory was simpler and faster originally, the constant power requirement of holding the transistor in a switch on state was a big power drain. The DRAM memory only needed short bursts of power to charge the capacitors during refresh, but used little power between those periods so overall required much less power.
As the size of memory grew, the power advantage of dynamic over static pretty much ended the use of static memory except for small caches within the processors themselves.
Also technological advances in DRAM sped up their access speeds so increased their pros vs the Static memories cons.

So, I just took it that your use of the term static really meant to say non-volatile, which for NVRAM (non-volatile RAM, aka Flash Memory) is the most common for high speed, non-volatile storage.

You're right. I didn't realize that static memory required electrical power to maintain its contents, so I thought static was used simply to mean un-changing, which is clearly a definition of static. I can't say I ever paid all that much attention to it. Names have come and gone with memory, over the years. That name just stuck with me. Must have been static cling.

[Shaggy Hiker]

But how can the form scroll if there is no space left? I mean, since all of the screen is occupied by the form (which has no scrollbars), how would it be possible to scroll it?

Thanks.

I seem to remember seeing some that could be scrolled by swiping even without scrollbars being visible.

[passel]

Well, one thing I apparently remembered incorrectly was that static SRAM was more power hungry than DRAM. I guess once latched, the SRAM didn't consume that much power, so its power usage was based on how often it was accessed, not on how much power it drew parasitically. DRAM because of the constant need to refresh draws more power in most cases. DRAM dominates for main memory because of manufacturing price (its relatively cheap) and density (lots of memory in small area), not for its power consumption.

[Shaggy Hiker]

At one point, SRAM was also considerably slower than DRAM for access times. Of course, by considerably slower I am talking about nanoseconds. They are both really fast compared to HD access, SRAM was just supposed to be slower...and more expensive. That may have been due to other factors, though, and it hardly matters anymore since we are now talking about flash in the brain pan memory.

[passel]

I think you're confusing SRAM with something else again. As far as I know, SRAM has always been much faster then DRAM because there is no need to take cycles to refresh (i.e. charge the capacitor) and no complicated addressing scheme needed to support that refreshing which slows down DRAM addressing.
About the only places you'll find SRAM in use today is in the implementation of high speed caches, where the speed of the memory outweighs the extra cost and lower density of SRAM. My first computer, an Ohio Scientic Challenger 1P (1978), had 8K of static memory in it, because of the simplicity of SRAM at that point in time.

[dilettante]

Somebody should stick to cleaning fish.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Well, we are just talking about memory. I haven't dealt with that stuff since the 90s, which is getting to be a few days back. I could easily be misremembering pretty much everything from that decade.

Fish don't need cleaning, they live in water.

[dilettante]

Looks relevant:

Windows 10 for small tablets won’t support desktop apps (mostly)

For instance if you run Windows 10 on a tablet with an 8 inch or larger screen you’ll be able to run both touch-friendly, tablet-style apps and also classic desktop Windows apps. But on smaller tablets or smartphones there will be no desktop mode.

There are some exceptions: if you’ve already purchased a 7 inch Windows tablet like the HP Stream 7 or Toshiba Encore Mini, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore says you’ll be able to upgrade to Windows 10 while retaining the ability to run desktop apps.

But if you buy a new device that ships with Windows 10 and you want access to the desktop, you’ll want to opt for a model with an 8 inch or larger screen.

Anything to try to keep the broadly detested Metro/Modern/Store fiasco alive I guess.


Hmm, it looks like this is really an x86/x64 vs. ARM issue. The "missing desktop" thing comes along because they are trying to avoid using the term Windows RT for... Windows RT. Hoping to sucker in more fools I guess.

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'd say that's an unfortunate choice, but it may be driven by an expectation that standard desktop apps might look horrible on a 7" screen regardless of pixel count. They might either not fit (low pixel count), or be shrunk below useable size (high pixel count). For example, I run VS on a Surface (I'm typing on it now), and the screen real estate is an issue. It would be even more of an issue on a smaller screen.

[dilettante]

Fair point. Basically at 7" or under you have a bulky phone so you'd have to have huge buttons and such anyway to deal with finger-resolution no matter how high the pixel density is.

But I think the point of this thread was that the Intel-based small devices running Windows will let you continue writing applications without resorting to WinRT/Metro development. Then you have a usability issue so you'd run full-screen most of the time with giant controls and text.

[Shaggy Hiker]

That's true, and the thread has got us thinking about some simpler solutions to mobile problems we are running into at work. I share your view that WinRT/Metro was a mistake for the most part. I think the idea of a tile based interface is great for tablets and phones, and I do see that there are scenarios where the store-based app distribution model makes sense, but it has to be more seamlessly integrated with standard desktop applications rather than being a "whole new thing".

One thing that the mini-tablets are doing is bringing my segment of the market back to where we were in the late 90s, when PDAs were looking like useful field data entry tools for us. The mini-tablets are simply a whole lot better than PDAs ever were.

[dilettante]

I'm not sure why WinRT is an obstacle for .Net programmers. Microsoft has pretty much given away everything required to do that, so it just becomes yet another of the several ways you "hold your mouth right" while designing your programs - one more way of doing things just like the console, WinForms, WPF, WinPhone, etc. personalities of .Net programs.

Yet amazingly for all that went into that giant Welfare program, adoption rates are miniscule. Just look at the phone and Metro forums here. Not enough copy/paste examples I suppose, though the walled-garden deployment model is probably a significant factor.

The main difference between PDAs of a decade ago and small tablets today is that hardware has come a long way. Well, that and the ability to use the older .Net and even VB programming models to develop as long as you avoid Windows RT devices (whether they drop the name in Win10 or not).

[Shaggy Hiker]

Actually, I would say that the biggest difference may be simply screen size. PDAs were fixed size screens, which made UIs very simple. You really couldn't do all that much, and you had strict limits on how you did it. Once you add a lot of flexibility, you have much greater opportunity and much greater difficulty. The PDA was kind of like a starter set for all that came afterwards.

WinRT isn't an obstacle for programmers, it just doesn't have a clear applicability for LOB applications. MS did try to improve on this, but their solutions worked best for large organizations with sizeable IT infrastructure, or for people creating apps for sale. I don't think that, even combined, those two categories form a majority of apps written today.The programming itself was no big deal, it was the vision for how the app that was used that doesn't appeal to me. I'm fine with the tile-launched application (why not, we've actually had that for years), and I'm fine with most of the restrictions. I simply can't have a store-distributed application because I work where we won't have a local store and can't use a public store.

[dilettante]

So the deployment model is one of the bigger showstoppers. Pretty much as people expected from day one.

Surprising they haven't found a way to leverage their ClickOnce technology for this.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Yeah, people saw the logical hole in the store model right away. If you get rid of the problems that the store appears to impose, then ClickOnce would be a reasonably viable alternative, except that I don't see that there would be any point in it.

[dilettante]

I suppose. After the deployment issues the sandbox probably becomes the big obstacle.

Pretty soon it all looks like one hurdle after another

[Shaggy Hiker]

I'd say the biggest obstacle, for me, is the lack of any perceived benefit. If there was some clear gain, then I could evaluate the cost/benefit of changing strategies. Without any well identified benefit derived from Win RT, in my situation, there is NO cost low enough to justify the action. I may very well be misunderstanding the situation, and there may well be some significant benefit that I would receive for switching over. If that's the case, then I haven't been made aware of the benefit, in which case it is a failure to communicate.

[dilettante]

Makes you wonder where this will end up then:

Building universal Windows apps for all Windows devices

Where "all" means those devices that run WinRT or Phone 8. At least this makes it clear that there is nothing "universal" about these apps: you actually have to create two or even three separate apps to cover x86/x64 Windows, ARM Windows RT, and Phone 8. All that gets shared is some back-end code.

So if Store apps are a poor fit aside from mass-maket fart apps "universal apps" sounds like a non-starter.

[Shaggy Hiker]

Yeah, we'll see. The promise that is being made there has been made over and over and over for the last 20+ years. It has never worked out, but the allure is so strong that you can never count it dead.