

Touchscreens have no hand - yarone
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003qM&topic_id=1

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frankPants
I am at odds to argue with Tufte but I will. The issue with touch screens is
not that they lack the same surface texture as the objects they're imitating.
It's that they're imitating real world objects in the first place. I think
most people would agree with sculpture and painting, that the high point of
those media was reached during the point of pure abstraction. When paint was
allowed to simply be paint. Painting stopped being a way to represent the real
world on a canvas and was allowed to be itself, the real advantages of paint
came out.

Well, let's stop pretending that the tablet is a representation of the real
world, and let pixels be pixels. Why pretend they're anything more than that?
"Ceci n'est pas une pipe" as Magritte so eloquently put it in '28-29.

Pixels, while not having the 3 dimensional qualities of the real world, surely
have many of their own unique qualities; that while we attempt to copy the
real world, remain unexplored.

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cageface
I think the fundamental problem isn't one of emulation, it's the lack of any
kind of tactile feedback. I write music software and there's a world of
difference between a real knob on a synthesizer or a real piano key and _any_
representation you put on a screen. Touchscreens have unique strengths and
weaknesses.

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dolle
I'm totally with you. After I've aquired a smartphone (HTC Desire), I've come
to the conclusion that the only thing that touchscreens are good for is
scrolling. I hate writing on it, I hate pushing buttons and links, I hate that
the virtual objects that I interact with gets occluded by my fingers, I hate
that I have to hold my phone in awkward ways so I don't accidentally "push"
virtual "buttons". Many of these irritations stem from the fact that the
interface has no tactile feedback, and does not respond to different levels of
pressure (like ordinary buttons).

Touchscreens are a regression in user interfaces, and I hope that the future
will bring a comeback of more tactile input devices, like keyboards.

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cageface
I think touchscreens are going to become the cheap, ubiquitous, lowest-common-
denominator interface for general tasks. But I agree that they're really not
that interesting for anything more than browsing. You'll notice that most apps
don't go far beyond basic tap, pan, swipe and pinch gestures because anything
more complex is too awkward and error-prone. That leaves a lot of the
expressive potential of the human hand untapped.

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Tsagadai
This is just a part of the world of impersonal mass production. Make
everything the same. I sometimes wonder if electronics would benefit more from
the world of welding and construction where the maker often leaves their
personal mark somewhere on the finished product. Many hands went into the
construction of a tablet but each is almost identical and has almost no hints
as to its origin or the mood of the assembly line worker on that particular
day or whether the sun was shining while it was on the delivery plane as it
was landing. Companies often talk about 'brand identification' and
'personalization' but is it any closer to reality than the coat of fingerprint
remover?

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karol
I think you touched on the underlying principle of why pictures behind glass
interfaces are so popular. The only way to satisfy the mass demand and follow
market rules is to master cloning of physical objects. Not everyone can afford
a piano but everyone can have a piano app, because of perfect copies of
software and near perfect copies of hardware.

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gbog
The problem for me is about how we input something in the machine. iPad,
Kindle, etc. are wonderful for consuming content, and this can probably be
done efficiently enough with touchscreen interfaces. But producing content is
one important part of the deal (specially for guys like Tufte), and in this
activity the physical grain of the interface become prominent.

In my dream, I would have a phone-like thing, small enough to fit in my
pocket. I would be able to put it on a flat surface and two laser rays would
draw a rectangle were I would be able to draw or write. What I draw would be
projected on the surface by the laser in real-time, so I'd have the feedback
that is missing on electronic draw-pads. With this we would go back to hand-
writing for most of us, and it would be possible to have a keyboard drawn on
the surface and use fingers. The haptic feedback is the hard part, but I think
laser can't "touch" you so I don't see how to do it.

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hessenwolf
Can you just add in a laser keyboard there? Handwriting is slow and my hand
gets sore.

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hopeless
I think he's limited himself by the idea of a physical screen but I
nonetheless agree with the sentiment that we should use our computers to give
us more time in the physical world, not replace it.

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icebraining
Why do I get the feeling he's telling me to get off his lawn? I found Bret
Victor's article informative and inspiring. This just feels like a grumpy
rant, and it adds nothing.

On the matter of digital surfaces, I found the description of an object which
changed surfaces in Arthur C. Clarke's _Imperial Earth_ fascinating. It
essentially "worked" by transmitting electric pulses through the skin that
simulated the feelings - the actual object didn't change. I wonder if there's
research in that area.

