The trend towards a touchscreen interface seems like a nod to startrek and the LCARS OS.
Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
251–260 of 770 posts
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offense intended, but the sector as a whole has been doing all sorts of dumb sh*t recently when it comes on-board electronics (787 batteries, 737max MCAS, A380 wiring, F35 ... everything). This doesn't exactly refute OP's point, is all I'm saying. Maybe airspace firms shouldn't be taking their design cues from Cupertino.
OP was making an appeal to authority, that avionics manufacturers know what they're doing and decided against touchscreens. So IMO it does strongly refute OP's argument. (That's not to say that OP is wrong, of course, just that their argument isn't really a valid one. My belief is that touch screens would suck for flying a plane, but I'm not a pilot.)
What I was trying to say was more that avionics are by nature risk averse, so if they're doing something it's probably worth understanding why. So it's not so much "it's safe because it's in an airplane", I was more going for "consider why this very safety-focused environment looks different". So sure, I might be in the wrong if what I said was interpreted as a simple appeal to authority, but I was trying to get a point across that people spent a lot of time trying to make and keep these systems secure, so let's try to learn from that instead of invalidate it as being simply old or outdated (which Boeing themselves ironically seem to be guilty of).
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Touchscreens are a cost saving measure, not a feature." That's why there are so many high-end phones with lots of buttons.
"If your metric is safety, control, and effectiveness, there is not an argument" not really the metrics for high-end phones
You left out the last part: "Touchscreens are a cost saving measure, not a feature."
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#254Any monitor manufacturers want to follow suit? What I'd give for hardware input source buttons. This is a ridiculous UX: 1. Touch button to open menu 2. Select "Input Source" 3. Click up/down (possibly multiple times) to find your source 4. Click OK ...when your monitor has TWO sources. Just give me 2 buttons: HDMI and DisplayPort. I don't care that this would be marginally more expensive. I'd pay it. Touch screen co…
I dunno, when it comes to configuring monitor settings, I'd trade a touch screen menu for any of the physical button configuration schemes on any monitor or TV i've ever owned.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#255My Mazda 3 sGT (and current year model) already does this and it's a joy to use, no touchscreen climate control!
Pics: http://www.2wired2tired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Mazda...
https://blogmedia.dealerfire.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/45...
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#256Another fad that should go away is blue light dashboards. They give horrible afterimages in dark conditions. BMW's red-orange lights are so relaxing to look at in comparison.
Ugh! Blue light should never be used at night.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#257Look at the cockpit of any modern airliner and you will see screens, but they are never interactive. There are hardware buttons, dials and lights all over the place. A tactile interface is both more obvious, sturdy and more stable, and therefore safer. The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to repl…
This comment is off-topic: the article is about physical buttons for non-safety-critical systems. E.g. the article explicitly mentions climate control.
You can still die if the driver spends too long messing with air conditioner settings instead of focusing on the road.
CarPlay and Android Auto make this problem worse, IMO. Now you have app publishers writing arbitrarily complex UIs for cars. Spotify is a bitch to use while driving and because of Apple's reluctance to enable Siri support for third party apps, it's not very controllable by voice.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#258Funny coming from Honda. My parents own a 2017 (I think) Civic and the only way to adjust volume is by tapping +/- on the touchscreen. It's the most unusable volume adjustment I've ever experienced. It was completely unusable with a glove in the winter. So while most other companies only implemented touchscreen controls for secondary features Honda did it for the most widely used one. Now they are backtracking 100%,…
I just got a 2020 Civic. There are touch screen control, but volume, music, climate control (up and down, not which vents), tuner, cruise control, and a number of other things are all physical buttons and knobs. I mostly have Android Auto up with music and map going on the touch screen while actually driving anyway, so more physical interfaces are a-ok by me.
I'm in the same boat with my 2019 ridgeline. To me, this is the best of both worlds. Most days, I don't even have to look at the touchscreen much less interact with it.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too late! Boeing 777-X will have touch screen interfaces for pilots. Personally, I think information display can and should use touch interface, but actions should be tied to physical switches or buttons.
That sounds like a horrible idea. If you're trying to say, lower the landing gear, and the button malfunctions, you can probably smack the button a few times until it works, failing that, rip the switch out and short the wires inside the switch and get the plane landed. With a touch screen? What if the glass breaks and the capacitive layer fails? Or the software running the screen crashes? Or a bug prevents you from…
There are three redundant methods to lower the landing gear on my aircraft, depending on whether you still have hydraulic ability available or not. It is not unique. One is a big, fat lever that will not go away with a hypothetical touchscreen option, since we pilots tend to like physical backups for flight-critical systems like that (though I’m curious what pc86 is flying upthread, since even the G1000 aircraft I’ve flown have usually had airspeed dials).
It is even totally possible to gravity drop landing gear on nearly all commercial airliners, I would expect, though I can only speak on the types I’ve rated on. I don’t see you asking “what happens if the landing gear lever fails?” which is actually a totally reasonable question, and one manufacturers have thought of. Touchscreens aren’t magic devices, they’re just another type of input to build redundancy behind.
It sounds like a horrible idea because you probably haven’t flown an aircraft and don’t know this. That isn’t an indictment of you, just a request to not judge so soon. I like the idea of screens that adjust to phase of flight so what I need is where I need it, because pilot workload is a real problem that automation has addressed for decades.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too late! Boeing 777-X will have touch screen interfaces for pilots. Personally, I think information display can and should use touch interface, but actions should be tied to physical switches or buttons.
That sounds like a horrible idea. If you're trying to say, lower the landing gear, and the button malfunctions, you can probably smack the button a few times until it works, failing that, rip the switch out and short the wires inside the switch and get the plane landed. With a touch screen? What if the glass breaks and the capacitive layer fails? Or the software running the screen crashes? Or a bug prevents you from…
> If you're trying to say, lower the landing gear, and the button malfunctions
If you're trying to lower the landing gear, and the button malfunctions, you use the gravity gear extension handle, which is a completely independent system. You can also land without the landing gear in the worst case.
> What if the glass breaks and the capacitive layer fails? Or the software running the screen crashes? [...]
You use the other screen, which is controlled by the other computer. There are also knobs to switch which computer controls each screen. In the worst case, there are the standby instruments.
Airplanes have a lot of redundancy.