“I don’t want to be reaching around on a vertical surface all day – my hands will get tired. It’d be so awkward!”
Why on earth do people assume that touch interfaces to desktops, laptops or whatever, will remain vertical and not be adjustable to an angle that’s comfortable to work at? My 6 year old laptop screen already does this and it doesn’t even have a touch screen. The iMac in front of me can lean back a bit already. I’ve read so many complaints like the one above, often from apparently very knowledgeable people on sometimes very specialist forums, it beggars belief. Every one seems to forget that your real desktop that you reach about on and touch is still horizontal, just like it was 30 years ago before computers became so typical. Obviously, one reason for this choice of inclination is to stop things falling off, but, for instance, draughtsman working on large paper designs used to work at an angle, because it was easier for them – touch screens will be adjustable to the angle you want to work at. I could quite easily imagine multiple surfaces at different angles depending on their function – think about the Nintendo DS or imagine a music studio with mixer channels at a shallow angle with sound information etc. displayed on a more conventional screen. Would these all be touch enabled? Perhaps not initially, perhaps not ever. Perhaps not until the technology became so ubiquitous that not having it would be considered unusual. After all, reaching out and touching a vertical surface might be the most intuitive thing to do occasionally, even if it is a little awkward for constant use.
The other huge assumption is that as soon as touch screens become available then we’ll suddenly have to throw away all our mice and keyboards and be entirely restricted to working/playing with the touch screen. Doesn’t anybody remember when computer mice became popular? We had all these complaints then – it never seemed to occur to people that 25 years on we’d still see “QWERTY” every time we sat at a machine. On the whole, computer interfaces are additions to each other that may overlap in use, but entire replacements are rare. This will be exactly the same. Perhaps the reason people are getting so upset is because of the way mobile devices are developing, but in a stationary environment, space and weight concerns are not so severe and so input choice can be much more varied.
Tags: Geeky, Rants by Infidel
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