

Touch Laptops - stalled
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/11/touch-laptops.html

======
jerrya
Jeff Atwood writes, _The screen bounces when you touch it_ and for me this
just brings up all the reasons I don't want a touchscreen except on a tablet.
There is gorilla arms, screen bounces, and screen smudges. Jeez, I hate when
people touch my screens.

But I am wondering if a reasonable or even better solution is an appropriate
touchpad or even Android or iPad touchpad app.

Right now there are two (maybe three) touchpads quasi made for Windows 8 that
I would like to try.

* The Logitech Wireless Rechargeable Touchpad T650 -- a huge touchpad with Windows 8 gesture support

* Splashtop Win8 Metro Testbed for Android and iPad

* Unified Remote for Android and Windows Phones

I haven't used Windows 8 more than three minutes, and I haven't used these
alternatives to a touchscreen monitor, but I like the idea of having a 4" to
7" phone or tablet screen that mirrors the Windows 8 screen but lets me keep
my finger flat on the table, pointing to a smaller screen now in remote
touchscreen mode and able to get feedback to where my finger is either by
seeing a "mouse pointer" move on the screen, or just by looking at the phone
or tablet my finger is on and seeing the screen there.

~~~
mkl
_There is gorilla arms, screen bounces, and screen smudges._

These things keep being repeated as if they're showstoppers, and it seems
usually by people without any experience in the matter. I have been using a
laptop purely by touch screen for 1-8+ hours a day for two years, and here's
my experience:

\- Gorilla arm simply doesn't exist. I use the laptop in a variety of setups
and haven't had any problems. Yes, if your desktop PC suddenly accepted touch
you'd probably want the screen much closer, likewise some laptop users with
good eyesight (which I don't have - relevant since it makes me close already).

\- Screen bounces do exist, but I haven't noticed them since a week or two in.
I usually use the laptop with the screen up and facing backward (I don't use
the keyboard), so I definitely get them. The Surface form factor does seem
better for touch in a laptop, but I haven't tried it yet.

\- Smudges do exist, especially if you use an on-screen keyboard so they
accumulate, but in most indoor lighting they are not a problem at all. Then
again, they don't bother me on my desktop screen either - if I'm looking at
the screen content I don't see them.

I'm excited to see what possibilities Leap Motion provides, but at this point
I think it's unlikely I'll buy a non-touch screen again. In the meantime, I'd
quite like something like your last idea, and have thought about making a
program to do it.

~~~
flyinRyan
>\- Gorilla arm simply doesn't exist.

That's a pretty strong statement for an anecdote of precisely one person.

~~~
mkl
As I said, this is purely _my_ direct experience. Based on it, I hypothesise
that the idea of gorilla arm arose from people using touch screens as if they
were regular screens, i.e. inappropriately. I have certainly never heard of
gorilla arm from iPads/Android tablets.

------
antoko
Ok I know this is nitpicking but...

 _I'm not sure I would want a 13.3" tablet on my lap or in my hands. There
must be a reason the standard letter page size is 8½ × 11", right?_

The diagonal on the standard letter is 13.9". The evidence Jeff cites
completely undermines his point.

I'll just assume it must have been a really long time since he actually held a
piece of paper.

~~~
ceejayoz
Plus "letter-size" paper wasn't the standard until the 1980s, and most of the
world uses an _actual_ standard, A4.

> The American Forest and Paper Association argues that the dimension
> originates from the days of manual paper making, and that the 11-inch length
> of the page is about a quarter of "the average maximum stretch of an
> experienced vatman's arms".
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_(paper_size)>

------
WalterBright
I bought a new Asus laptop with Win8 specifically because it has a
touchscreen. The touchscreen solves my long standing problem with using
laptops - I find touchpads nearly unusable. It's soo much easier to scroll
with the touchscreen, especially with the small laptop screens.

All non-touchscreen laptops are, to my mind, instantly and sadly obsolete.

Note that for a desktop, I see no advantage to a touchscreen, as the mouse is
just fine.

~~~
davidlumley
> The touchscreen solves my long standing problem with using laptops - I find
> touchpads nearly unusable.

Have you used a macbook running OS X before? I find the touchpad handling much
better in OS X than I do in Windows so would be interesting to know what sort
of touchpad you're comparing to.

~~~
WalterBright
I've played with a mac laptop in the Apple store.

The problem with the touchpad is suppose I want to scroll. I have to carefully
position the mouse over the scroll bar. Then click, or click and drag,
whatever, which is just freaking awkward with a touchpad. (It's no issue with
a mouse.) Yeah, I know that the right side of some touch pads acts as a scroll
bar. But that depends on the right window being the "top" and I often get that
behavior mixed up with the other regions of the touchpad. I also have problems
with accidentally brushing my palm over the touch pad and "what the hell just
happened".

With a touch screen, this all becomes natural and trivial.

I know, I see people using touchpads all the time like it was an extension of
their hand, and they have no issues with it.

But I do. I like that touchscreen for my laptop. It is _transformative_. No
other word for it.

As for a desktop with a big display, I don't need a touchscreen except for one
case - where you are working with someone and are both hovering over the
screen. The touchscreen is real handy for that rather than passing the mouse
back and forth.

~~~
davidlumley
>But that depends on the right window being the "top"

Not on OS X

>I also have problems with accidentally brushing my palm over the touch pad
and "what the hell just happened".

Palm brushes don't register on OS X

That's why I wanted more clarification on what you're comparing it to. The
only positive I can see of a touch screen compared to a __good__ touchpad is
that you can see the content below your fingers as you interact with it - I
wager it's the difference between the Intuos and the Cintiq.

I don't know if that's a big enough difference for most people to have to deal
with all the negatives that using a touchscreen on a computer monitor comes
with. For me it's not.

------
octotoad
This got me thinking about the whole Windows ARM port and x86 compatibility.
I'm sure it's been mentioned before, but, why the hell didn't Microsoft make
use of .NET for cross-platform compatibility?

Have developers write applications in C# or any other language supported by
the CLR and let .NET work out the x86/ARM differences.

I'm sure there are valid technical and possibly political reasons this didn't
happen, but I still find it very strange that Microsoft went to the trouble of
developing this entire platform/framework/ecosystem just to ignore it when the
opportunity arises to actually make good use of it.

~~~
kevingadd
Judging by Microsoft's recent choices to kill .NET-based products like XNA and
Silverlight it seems to be the case that management aren't fans of it anymore.
Dropping support for XNA is particularly mysterious given Microsoft's
struggles to get game developers to support Windows 8 - they literally had a
dedicated community of game developers that could have put titles on the
Windows 8 store on day 1 if Microsoft had provided any support. Instead, even
game developers with titles being published by MS are stuck using MonoGame for
Windows 8 support. It's insane.

~~~
xradionut
Yes, plenty of C# developers were shafted over the changes to the
infrastructure. I'm ignoring the "Metro" Apps for now, most of what I do is
either server, web or a "real desktop" application. (Not to mention lots of
CRUD corporate projects.)

------
meaty
Why does everyone still have to use imperial/US measurements. Metric please or
I have to break out the calculator.

~~~
jiggy2011
Try being British, you basically have to understand both intuitively.

~~~
meaty
I am British! I haven't used imperial for at least 15 years apart from for
speed limits, which I ignore anyway.

~~~
smiler
Except you subconsciously have. All display sizes are sold in inches. The trip
computer on your car will tell you miles per gallon. Even if you ignore speed
limits, your speedometer gives you your speed in MPH :). If you've ever flown
on a plane, altitude has been given as feet and distance in miles. So you do
use both.

~~~
nfg
> If you've ever flown on a plane, altitude has been given as feet and
> distance in miles.

I've been on plenty of flights where displays and cockpit announcements were
in metres (altitude) and kilometres (distance + velocity) - as well as Celsius
for outside temperature.

------
stcredzero
_> And Intel's long neglected Atom line, thanks to years of institutional
crippling to avoid cannibalizing Pentium sales, is poorly positioned to
compete with ARM today._

Apple was ready to have new products that cannibalized the old ones. If Intel
had the same courage, they'd be in a far better position today.

~~~
chroma
Bless you, Captain Hindsight! I assume you shorted or put INTC to profit from
your insight.

Seriously, this post-season quarterbacking helps nothing but your own karma.
The people in charge of Intel are intelligent, incentivized, and they've given
the problem a lot more thought than you have. I realize our economies are
ludicrously inefficient, but a single comment on HN is not going to outsmart
an Intel board member.

~~~
flyinRyan
That's quite a brutal response to the pretty common sentiment. Also fairly
nonsensical.

>I assume you shorted or put INTC to profit from your insight.

Just because you realize a company has made a big mistake doesn't mean you're
in a position to short it. I realized MS had a vision problem after hearing
Ballmer speak in person years ago, yet shorting MS at that point would have
hurt me, not them. It's taken years for his lack of vision to begin to be a
problem and even now no one sees it as critical as I do.

>The people in charge of Intel are intelligent, incentivized, and they've
given the problem a lot more thought than you have.

You have no idea if any of that is true, you just assume it is. The people in
charge of Intel could well be blinded by something they need to be true that
isn't. If people at the head of companies are so infallible why does any
company ever fail?

>I realize our economies are ludicrously inefficient, but a single comment on
HN is not going to outsmart an Intel board member.

Now apply that logic to human nature and tell us what you intended with your
hateful comment?

------
lukifer
I'm surprised he likes photo passwords. What's the point of a password if you
give it away to everyone around you every time you unlock? (Maybe Jeff has
never had co-workers who like to play pranks...)

~~~
stcredzero
With that sort of password, screen smudges become a problem, more so than
conventional ones. Shoulder surfing also seems a bigger problem.

------
jcfrei
I can only imagine borderline use cases where touch screen interfaces might be
faster than a lenovo track point. those use cases might be more common for an
average user, but when I'm spending most of my time inside office products, R
studio and ssh terminals (and of course the browser) it seems unlikely that it
would be more convenient - and I'm wondering, what is jeff atwood actually
using this touch laptop for?

------
rikf
I find it annoying when I have to move my hands from the keyboard to the
mouse. I imagine it would be infinitely more irritating and far less
comfortable moving my hands from the keyboard to touch a vertical screen in
front of me.

~~~
bryanlarsen
A large part of the reason why that's so annoying is that when you do that you
have to also figure out where the mouse pointer is, and then start the mouse
moving in the right direction. Once the mouse is moving the interaction is
very natural and you can do it by auto-pilot. But until it is, you actually
have to use a little piece of your brain which you'd rather focus on the
problem at hand.

Touch should completely negate that. Just touch what you're looking at; you
should be able to do that without requiring any higher brain activity.

~~~
hollerith
>you have to also figure out where the mouse pointer is, and then start the
mouse moving in the right direction

Although it can be tricky to know what is actually going on during a "non-
deliberative" task, I am fairly sure I start moving the mouse, then my brain's
motion-detection circuitry very naturally tells me where the cursor is.

One of the reasons I believe that is that I remember a few times choosing (or
noticing that I prefer) to make a vaguely semicircular arc rather than
abruptly reversing direction. (If I did what you describe, I would probably
not have reversed direction often enough to have such memories. In contrast,
if I'm right, then I would've reversed direction half of the times that I had
no idea initially where the cursor was relative to the target.)

------
saturdaysaint
Kudos to this guy for trying out a lot of new gear, but these things are a lot
more puzzling through the eyes of an average consumer. I was at Best Buy this
weekend and the shiny new "Windows 8" section, complete with a handful of
touch laptops, was a ghost town. Even spending a few minutes reading this
article doesn't really sell me on why I should want to touch a laptop - if
it's not immediately obvious to consumers, they're just going to walk by to
the tablet tables.

Touch is great because it enables extremely mobile computing devices -
anything built without that in mind might as well not have touch. The Yoga is
within eyeshot of dozens of comparatively razor-thin tablets at Best Buy, so
even attempting to pitch it as a "PC plus a tablet!" seems like a stretch when
you've just palmed an iPad mini. This stuff is kind of cool, but I don't think
it's going to make anyone I know upgrade their PC any quicker, which is the
measure of MS's success.

~~~
untog
I don't think that a touch laptop is puzzling in the eyes of the average
consumer- in fact, they're a pretty simple concept. I was in Best Buy over the
weekend and saw a good number of people playing around with the display Lenovo
Yoga. The only downside was that the hinge on it was broken- not the best
advertisement, but I don't judge it too much (display devices take a _hell_ of
a beating)- if anything it just shows that a good number of people were using
it.

------
aluhut
With win8 I thought for the first time about using a touchscreen for work or
at home and my conclusion was:

Don't want to do it.

Maybe I'm to old or something but It just don't feel right fingering around on
my monitor. Even if it would be flat and part of my desk (which would also be
horrible because I eat, drink and smoke at my desk at home). I want to have my
head up, look straight and don't have the screen right before my nose.

There are tabs and smartphones. I have those. Touching their screens feels
right. It's the small thing you do on the road, in the plane, do small things
or have fun. But I just don't feel like I could work with that at work or at
home.

~~~
stan_rogers
It makes sense when you're working directly on a screen. I've had the
opportunity to use the Wacom Cintiq in its various models over the years (and
would love to actually afford one of my own), and for graphics and photo
retouching, it's the most natural way to work. It's a lot like working at a
drawing board or an easel (depending on the tilt angle you use). Not so much
if what you're doing is keyboard-centric, though.

------
AndrewDucker
Can't see it working with a 15" laptop, which is my preferred size.

But if it gets to the point where all laptops have touch screens then I won't
complain - it might work well with some UIs (like XBMC). I'm just not willing
to pay extra for it.

~~~
untog
These trends are causing me to reconsider my computing setup. Right now I have
a 13" Macbook Air with an external screen, which to my mind is the best of
both worlds- portability when I need it, a large monitor when I'm sat down to
do some serious work.

But I'm wondering if my minimal processing requirements (I'm doing web
development) mean that I could buy an Asus Transformer tablet (complete with
keyboard) and install Ubuntu on it. It would make the portable even more
portable, but retain a good workstation setup when I'm sat at my desk.

------
cturner
If he's right that touch is here to stay, we're going to see a major split
between workstations and consumer devices. This is novel. Until recently, the
workstation has been the anchor-point by how close they come to being as
effective as the workstation. The workstation isn't going to go away, but
neither is it going to support touch - multiple screens and comfortable
posture are features for that setting.

------
hayksaakian
Sorry, but that just reads like a sales pitch / marketing copy for windows 8.

~~~
SEMW
Atwood is an admitted fan of Microsoft products, so yeah, this is written from
that perspective. Blogs aren't encyclopedias - they don't have to be NPOV to
be worth reading.

If you don't want to read opinion posts written by people who are partial
towards one platform or another, you're going to cut yourself off from an
awful lot of potentially interesting writing. (E.g. Jeff Atwood & Ed Bott,
John Gruber & MG Siegler, Jon Corbet & Bruce Byfield, to pick two fans each
respectively of Microsoft, Apple, and Linux).

(Of course, the worst thing is to only read blogs from people whose biases you
share, under the delusion that they're the only objective ones...)

~~~
hayksaakian
I understand its a blog, but his post had not a one bad thing to say about
windows 8. It was also exclusively about windows laptops. He might have
written better articles, and I'll give this a shot. As a sponsored post
though, this one is less than subtle.

------
Breakthrough
And this is exactly why I wonder who decided 16:9 was better than 16:10 for
laptops/tablets/etc... Even just that little bit of extra vertical space makes
it so much more comfortable in portrait mode (when I rotate my computer
monitor, which is an old TN LCD panel since low response 16:10 monitors are
pretty much non-existent now).

------
nicolethenerd
I use Air Display (app that lets you use an iPad as an external monitor, and
to control that monitor w/ touch or the mouse) on a regular basis, mostly just
as a chat window next to my MacBook so Adium isn't taking up valuable screen
real estate, and I often find myself touching the iPad to move windows around,
close pop-up notifications, etc... and then I find myself trying to touch my
MacBook screen without thinking to do the same thing, and disappointed when it
doesn't work. So I can totally see usecases for a touch laptop - it feels like
the natural next step, plus you could do things like draw directly (with a
stylus) in Photoshop instead of using a graphics tablet.

------
kakuri
It's extremely disappointing that the majority of (or is it all?) Android
tablets do not have screens with a 4:3 aspect ratio. 16:10 is awkward and
silly; 16:9 is something I won't even bother trying.

------
rhplus
The Lenovo Yoga 13 is an unsung hero of the Windows 8 wave. I tried it at a
Best Buy as was very impressed with the build quality, specs and price. The
story that's not being told though is that it's sold out everywhere and the
order time on Lenovo.com is _4 weeks_!

[http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/ideapad/yoga/yoga-1...](http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/ideapad/yoga/yoga-13/)

------
ccoggins
I don't really get his point #2 "A giant touchpad makes the keyboard area too
large"

Isn't the distance the screen is away pretty much dependent on the height of
the screen? I know I don't see many laptops that the base is larger than the
screen. Occasionally the back sticks out a bit for a larger battery but I've
never seen a laptop where the keyboard/trackpad were not completely covered by
the screen when closed.

------
josteink
His complaints about widescreen tablets not being very natural in portrait
mode speaks volumes about his lack of experience with Android tablets, which
all comes in this form.

It may feel a bit weird at first, but really, it's sorta like reading webpages
of a normal A4 sheet of paper. And we should be pretty used to that. The iPad
haven't been around for so long.

~~~
tomflack
A4 has an aspect ratio of 2:3, not 9:16. The iPad is 3:4 which is
significantly closer to A4 than a weirdly tall portrait widescreen tablet
(3:5.33333)

~~~
isani
Actually, A4 has an aspect ratio of one to the square root of two. Your point
still stands, as this is even closer to the iPad screen than 2:3.

------
pgsandstrom
Am I the only one that prefers my widescreen monitors flipped to portrait
mode? I have it both in the office and at home, I only flip them when watching
a movie.

~~~
socialist_coder
No. Based on my experience on ~130 person dev teams it's the preferred mode
for programmers.

