Mac iPad

[SinbadEV]

I don't see why a special-rubber-or-something stylus couldn't be designed to work on a touchscreen...

[==Troy==]

a single point on an x/y plane isn't as efficient as multiple points. with a mouse, you have more bandwidth into a concentrated area. with 10gui's huge multitouch surface, you have more bandwidth to the whole screen. absolute positioning also provides more input bandwidth than a mouse's relative positioning.

repeating what video said is good for those who hasnt watched it.


Your EYES will not be able to let you to use all of your 10 fingers separately. There is no 10 pointers, maximum 2, not more. Have you tried to write with both of your hands? Follow 2 different points at the same time?

No. The point here is that 5 fingers effectively act as a single mouse pointer with 5 buttons. You will never _ever_ be able to control and follow 10 distinct points on the screen. Brain will not allow you.


Edit : in short : the bottleneck is now at the brain, not at the mouse. Max 2 mice to control, not more.

[JohannesH]

How would I go microing with 10 fingers like that? You give up keyboard and 3-key mouse for 10 pointers that are very hard to move independently.

What you would get is kinda like an improved line draw, but I dont think that would be worth the cost of moving your hands down there almost ever.

Would you give up keyboard for a second mouse? Even if you could move it as accurately as the first youd still be missing on issuing commands with keys, grouping, and other shortcuts.

Replacing mouse with a 5 cursor approach might be decent though, but not without its cons too.

[Jazcash]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQnT0zp8Ya4

[Panda]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQnT0zp8Ya4

Lol.

[SinbadEV]

this was a video response to the last one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnHG79fW ... onse_watch

[aegis]

Have you tried to write with both of your hands?

it's something I figured out how to do in 4th grade when I was training myself to do mostly everything with my left hand as well as my right.

I'd much rather use two full hands on my typing surface to control my cursors instead of two hands on dedicated pointing devices separate from my cursor...

Gestures are *much* more efficient than just adding more buttons. A button provides only a single on/off toggle, while extra fingers provide intuitive extra input. I'd much rather grab an object with two fingers and rotate my fingers *exactly* the amount I want to rotate the object than press two buttons on my mouse and move it sideways until the object is in the right orientation. The efficiency bonus also applies to absolute movements - I can grab an object with each hand and easily move both objects to a close proximity on the screen, simply by moving them to a close proximity on the surface.

I don't see why a special-rubber-or-something stylus couldn't be designed to work on a touchscreen...

I'd like to see you hold and use more than two styli at the same time

[knorke]

I'd much rather grab an object with two fingers and rotate my fingers *exactly* the amount I want to rotate the object than press two buttons on my mouse and move it sideways until the object is in the right orientation. The efficiency bonus also applies to absolute movements - I can grab an object with each hand and easily move both objects to a close proximity on the screen, simply by moving them to a close proximity on the surface.

Wat?
Dont think such a system lets you position objects as precise as with a mouse, with mouse you can have stuff like press crtl for rotating in 45┬░ steps or press shift for slower & more precise movement. How would this work on a touchscreen?
Also mouse has 2 (or more) buttons to click, a finger is like a one button mouse.

If I read wikipedia correctly, the iPad does not have USB? Only via adapter.
wtf!
How is one supposed to use it anyway, holding like this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... Pad-01.jpg
and touch stuff with the thumbs?
I imagine it would be too big to hold in one hand and use the other to press stuff?

[aegis]

rotating with a single point of input isn't as intuitive and quick. with a mouse, you must specify you want to rotate, then mentally translate lateral motion into degrees of rotation, then specify you wish to stop rotating.
with multitouch, rotating can just happen without any extra thought - you just naturally grab two points and rotate them.

[==Troy==]

rotating with a single point of input isn't as intuitive and quick. with a mouse, you must specify you want to rotate, then mentally translate lateral motion into degrees of rotation, then specify you wish to stop rotating.
with multitouch, rotating can just happen without any extra thought - you just naturally grab two points and rotate them.

This debate can easily be applied to keyboard + mouse vs gamecontroller for xbox or whatever.

[Caydr]

Alternative to multi-touch? Double-tap and hold down on the last tap, then move whatever it is around. Can be context-sensitive so that whatever part of the screen you do it on has a different effect, for example rotation, dragging, stretching, etc. Oh damn, I was beaten to the punch by every laptop made in the last 10 years.

Multitouch is neat but it's just another excuse to add some extra smear to your screen. It is not a universal panacea to all input problems, nor is it Apple's invention, despite what ignorant douchebags who wear turtlenecks in summer and want to save the whales from deforestation like to think.

It's "fast"? Compared to what giant 4:3 pane of glass with a battery attached would that be? Oh, you mean compared to a phone that fits in the palm of your hand? It's fast compared to something in a completely different size and battery life category? I have a car. It's fast. Compared to my nephew on a bike. Besides, virtually anything will seem ultra-fast if you run only one thing on it at a time.

As for the "price too low" point, I think maybe Apple has decided to go with the usual 5-20% profit margin this time around - on its lowest-end model that they will do everything in their power to ensure nobody buys. $130 for a radio transmitter? You can buy a complete, brand-new, unsubsidized 3G phone for less than that - not a very good one, but on the other hand you won't be locked into using it with AT&T either thanks to the nigh-proprietary SIM card that's required on the "unlocked" iPad. I don't recall what exactly they're charging for each flash memory size stepping, but I remember that the price gets as high as $900 or something. Apple tards routinely pay that much just to get a logo stamped on something, the mass of true believers will probably not get the cheapest model.

The economically-effective manufacturable OLED size is increasing rapidly. These are significantly thinner, better looking, and require less battery power than any TFT panel. To get an idea what that means in a practical sense, IIRC a typical middle-to-high-end MP3 player you buy today gets around 10-25 hours of battery life playing music and 4-5 playing video. My Cowon S9 with an OLED panel is no bigger than these, but it gets 50+ hours of music or 12+ hours of video playback to a charge. There's more free internal space for the battery. Notice that the video playback time is roughly tripled because OLED panels are so much more efficient in producing light (instead of selectively blocking it as TFT panels do). A bare OLED screen is a fraction of a millimeter thick, kind of like 35mm film, while a TFT panel is 2-3 mm. That's as much as a third of the internal space for some devices!

I have been following and advocating OLED technology for years and with the steady progress I've seen lately, in a year's time, I think there will probably be OLED tablets. They will cost roughly the same or less compared to the iPad, but won't be locked down in typical Apple style, will allow multiple simultaneous processes, will benefit from seeing how and where the iPad succeeds and fails, and won't be such a general clusterfail. I'm guessing they'll also play Flash, not to mention most likely having plugs on them for things like... USB? SD? HD video output? An industry-standard SIM card? Geez... what a hellmess.

Don't worry, there will also be a new version of the iPad out by that time, incorporating revolutionary new anti-glare technology or something.

[aegis]

I was talking about multitouch on a panel on my DESK, not multitouch on a tablet device, but I suppose not really reading the thread allows you to make more assumptions in your wall of text.

[Gertkane]

rotating with a single point of input isn't as intuitive and quick. with a mouse, you must specify you want to rotate, then mentally translate lateral motion into degrees of rotation, then specify you wish to stop rotating.
with multitouch, rotating can just happen without any extra thought - you just naturally grab two points and rotate them.

So you would prefer a multitouch system vs mouse + keyboard as it is supposed to be more practical?

Hold one mouse button to rotate + rotate mouse = Pretty intuitive and you still have leftover buttons on your mouse. And how intuitive or comfortable would it be to do almost 360 degree turns with two fingers tapped (i.e. volume min to max)?

Physical keyboard vs virtual keyboard.. lets not get into the intuitivity argument here because there are no PROs for a virtual one.

And one thing i haven't seen anyone mention: physical obstruction.

You want to have a virtual keyboard on your screen? Lets say it takes up a part of your touchscreen. Now your two hands typing take up more space from your screen, add a few application running on the screen to the mix and you now have a clusterfuck going on. Ofcourse this obstacle is easily overcome by getting a huge touchscreen but we are not there yet.

At this point, multitouch is a novelty and from a practical point a very, VERY niche product (i.e. graphics).

As soon as multitouch screens become available (and affordable) in the size of an architects table this can change. As long as they are just book sized plates their overall practicality can't really compete with a mouse+keyboard setup.

[PicassoCT]

next in the productline i-wipe, the paper to get your fingerprints from the screen.

[aegis]

Hold one mouse button to rotate + rotate mouse = Pretty intuitive and you still have leftover buttons on your mouse.
...
Now your two hands typing take up more space from your screen

1. eww, using your two index fingers would be way more intuitive of a rotate and allow you to rotate much further than that...

2. is nobody getting the part where I want the multitouch panel to be on my *desk* while still having monitors? resistive+capacitive touch means I can see my fingers on the screen without pressing, but pressing (which could be pressure-sensitive) would allow me to interact.

and having this multitouch panel would in no way prevent me from *also* having a keyboard (or mouse) if I wanted.

[PicassoCT]

this whole concept of con10inum is pretty awesome, but it could be made awesomer if you add a camera that tracked your eyes movement, just so the machine can read your mind on what you might want to do as next step.

[aegis]

camera to track head/eye movement could serve to focus on a different monitor :)

[Caydr]

I was talking about multitouch on a panel on my DESK, not multitouch on a tablet device, but I suppose not really reading the thread allows you to make more assumptions in your wall of text.

Reading = for fags. Cool cats like me just type.

[AF]

You do know holding one finger on what your rotating and using the other finger to rotate isnt just more intuitive, its more efficient, because now you also have a means of moving the object, and scaling it, so thats 3 transformations at the same time!

People here are also demonstrating a massive ignorance of touchscreen technology, by taking their knowledge of crappy resistive touchscreens, and applying it to capacitive touchscreen technology.

Anybody who mentions using a rubber stylus has never touched or used an iphone or ipod touch. They dont work! Capacitive sensors dont measure touch or pressure, they measure capacitance! I can put a piece of paper over my iphone and still do gestures, I cant use a pen or piece of paper, I don't even have to touch the screen, hovering 1 mm over it should suffice!

I'd also say those people who cite lock in as an excuse for not buying iphones or iPods, are also ignorant. Has nobody heard of jailbreak? Backgrounder? The task switching apps? I have one on my iphone that looks like a copy of the palm pre switcher...

Right now on my iphone I have about 3 applications running in the background as well as the usual Apple background processes. I can run python and lua files on it, I can build my own C apps, there's even a small java VM, command terminals, etc etc

[Satirik]

rotating with a single point of input isn't as intuitive and quick. with a mouse, you must specify you want to rotate, then mentally translate lateral motion into degrees of rotation, then specify you wish to stop rotating.
with multitouch, rotating can just happen without any extra thought - you just naturally grab two points and rotate them.

with mouse and keyboard you hold shift, you click somewhere and you rotate by moving your mouse cursor, it's way more accurate, and you can enter a value for the angle you want and using a scrollwheel you can also zoom, you can hold ctrl to display something else etc ... you can also handle scale with the distance to the first clicked point ... and it is as intuitive as your touch crap

the main interest of touch screen is for drawing and writing or when you don't have enough space for both controls and screen, like for phones with limited size

people who think touch crap should replace mouse and keyboard are retarded