The tablet I wound up with...

In case anyone remembers my question about what tablet to get for occasional keyboard use, and was curious about the answer:

Shortly before Origins (about which I will post shortly), I wandered over to MicroCenter and checked out their stock. Looking it over (and checking reviews online), I decided that the Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro looked like a good option. The specs are sweet -- fast processor, the current version of Android, a lovely screen, and it scarcely weighs a thing. As it turned out, MicroCenter only had the display model in-stock, but that was okay: with the floor model discount and a little haggling, I paid about $140 below list, at which point it no longer qualified as "pricey". (Which the retail price certainly is.)

Most of that discount wound up going into picking up a fancy case from Kensington. It's not technically designed for this tablet model, but turned out to fit perfectly fine, and suits my requirements nicely. The keyboard not only isn't built into the tablet, it's not actually built into the case -- it attaches to the case with a fairly strong magnet, so it is easy to bring with or not as I see fit. (Which is important, because it adds quite a bit to the weight.)

Having used this setup for a week or so now, both with the case/keyboard and not, I'm pretty happy with it. The keyboard is cramped, but no worse than my ASUS netbook's, it is nicely solid and easy to type on, it has nearly infinite battery life, and connecting it to the tablet is very easy. (And once they were paired, I basically don't have to even think about it any more: I turn on the keyboard, and *poof* it works.) The case itself fits the tablet snugly, with gaps in all the right places to access necessary ports and such; the only issue is that it doesn't have its own handle, which would have been useful. (I am pondering ways to maybe graft one on.)

The tablet works extremely well -- it feels incredibly zippy after my poor decrepit Xoom -- and the battery life is downright remarkable: I got through the entire week of Origins on less than half a charge. My only complaint is, as usual for Android, with the ways in which Samsung decided to deviate from the stock Android design, adding a bunch of largely unnecessary (but ignorable) extra "news" pages to the homescreen and gratuitously swapping the Back and Running Apps buttons.

But that is survivable, and otherwise it works *quite* nicely for my purposes. Thanks to all the commenters: while I didn't wind up going with any of the specific suggestions y'all made, the conversation did much to help me clarify my use cases, and figure out what I really needed.

How best to display a "choice"?

A quick pointer for folks interested in UX/UI who aren't already following the Querki Development Journal: I just posted a question looking for opinions, on what is the best default UI for choosing between unpredictable collections of "choices". If you have an opinion, please come chime in...

What mainstream social network features *should* LiveJournal pick up?

Having just shared an EW article on Facebook, it crystallized for me a point about LJ's recent "+1 button" flap.

The thing that bothered me about the whole +1 feature, I am now realizing, is that it was a solution in search of a problem. That is, my sense was that LJ was mostly doing it to keep up with the Joneses, with no thought to what the actual effects on the community would be. It was notable that they never said, "Here is a problem we're trying to address, and this is the way we're planning to deal with it" -- they just said, "Here's a new feature", with no rationale presented at any point aside from the fact that Everybody Else Does it.

And the thing is, I don't actually *like* this feature on FB or G+, because it is too ambiguous. I certainly use it, but I am always bothered by it. FB's "Like" is connotationally wrong in many circumstances: what I usually want to say is, "I agree with this post" -- but there are a lot of posts on horrible subjects, where pressing the "Like" button is just plain squicky. And Google's "+1" is (deliberately, I suspect), semantics-free -- it is never quite clear *what* somebody means when they press it. Sometimes it indicates agreement, sometimes it's a cheap-and-quick way to share the link, sometimes it is simply a way to store this link for future reference.

(Of course, the truth is that both buttons mostly exist for the purposes of giving more information to Facebook and Google, so that they can more accurately profile you, to sell you as an advertising target.)

When I ponder it, I find that I wouldn't actually mind buttons with clearer semantics. A simple "I agree" button would have some downsides (in that it would reduce the impetus to actually comment meaningfully), but at least I would understand its purpose. Frankly, an "I read this" would fulfill the social-back-scratching that many people mean when they say "Like". A configurable mechanism, that let you design your *own* buttons on your blog, and choose from a palette of canned options, might be downright spiffy and interesting. (If more challenging to implement.)

This is leading me to wonder which features from the big social networks I actually *want* in LJ. The one that jumps out to me is "Share". I've wound up doing most of my link-sharing via FB these days, simply because it is so damned *easy*: click the button, type my meta-comments, and it's done. I'd love to have something similar for LJ, but of course LJ can't make sites pick them up, and nowadays they're sufficiently minor that most sites won't. I suspect the right answer would be for someone to implement this as a browser plugin that detects the presence of a Facebook "Like" button and injects the LJ version. (Or possibly just adds a right-click that lets you Share any page via LJ.) Does this already exist?

Anyone have other ideas? LJ's comment system is vastly better than FB or G+'s, and it had the concept of distinct flists long before they picked the idea up. Are there any other features of the other social networks, or variations thereof, that you think would be positive additions to LJ? And for that matter, what features *have* you always wanted to see on LJ?