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Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

autocar.co.uk

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Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#611

Post by nickik »

aembleton wrote: post #153
koheripbal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Touch screens are cheap and very easy to develop for. They also de-couple the software development from the device development. It also allows updates and changes after the car is in production.

I'd like to see everything controllable through the touch screen, but then have plenty of physical buttons and knobs that can be programmed to map to elements on the touch screen. That way, if there is a software update; and there is a new feature it can be mapped to a button by the user in the way that they want.

That seems like the kind of nerd wish that 99.99% of buyers would never use and would make it impossible to drive somebody elses car.

Its like people who insist on working with dvorak in a company but much worse.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#612

Post by perl4ever »

saagarjha wrote: post #526
perl4ever wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, well, people are selective in their concerns. How much does it affect reaction time to have passengers in the car who you may talk to, or may be doing all sorts of things that distract you?

Aren't passengers much better to have in your car, because they can "copilot" for you?

If you don't stop that right now, so help me, I'm going to turn this car around...

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#613

Post by thedance »

wtallis wrote: post #606
thedance wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I need my camera to have GPS? In what situation would I be equipped with a camera and not my phone, which certainly has a GPS? This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it.

> This seems like the same instinct that makes OEMs put mobile modems in laptops, as if I would ever have my laptop but not my phone to which to tether it. A cellular radio in a laptop gets access to better antennas and a vastly larger battery than what's found in a smartphone.

The combination of the batteries in my phone and my laptop is clearly more capacious than the battery in the laptop alone.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#614

Post by _trampeltier »

My mom she has a Honda Jazz and the UI is one oft the most terrible from all cars I have seen so far. A few things at least like Audio volume, some radio channels and temperature should have hardware knobs or buttons, so I easy can change it without looking on the screen. Then also should be a place under the screen where i can rest my hand (like has something, at least in a new car I drove recently), so I can touch the screen with a single finger multiple times on the same spot without looking on the screen.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#615

Post by DonHopkins »

The first and best microwave I ever had simply had a dial, a cook button, and an open button: that's it. The more you turned the dial, the longer your food would cook, and the hotter it would get. That's all you needed to know or do. And you could even turn it back or forth while it is microwaving, to change the time after you start, or finish cooking immediately. But it's almost impossible to find one with a dial, now.

Microwaves with digital keypads are terrible, even with those "convenient" +10 sec / +1 min / hot dog / peep buttons, you still have to hit a little target you can't feel, instead to twisting a big knob you can.

Entering time by touching digital buttons isn't a rapid, reversible, and incremental action with continuous feedback -- i.e. "direct manipulation", like turning a dial is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_manipulation_interface

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#616

Post by sigspec »

daotoad wrote: post #257
jasondclinton wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Siri, play the Eagles on spotify"

Been available for a little bit now.

https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-use-siri-to-control-...

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#617

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

twomoretime wrote: post #552
mattmanser wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no good point for "redundant" microservices. They are, by very definition, an additional point of failure as you're always adding an additional interface. They're good for scaling, not for redundancy, and even that's wishful thinking for most applications. EDIT: You could argue that microservices might free up the UI thread from locking mistakes, but if your team is going to make locking mistakes, you're als…

It's not about minimizing points of failure, it's about removing singular points of failure. Perhaps "redundant" was the wrong word but the point is instead of having a single UI component (touchscreen/UI thread) which can cause the whole system to fail, if you group buttons/knobs into individual microservices they are unlikely to all go down simultaneously.

So… You're suggesting reducing the impact of potential error… By increasing the surface area of potential error…?!

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#619

Post by tmaly »

I have a 2019 civic. even with the non touch screen option, a weird glitch in bluetooth freezes the entire media center. I have to pull over and park the car and turn the engine off to reset.

Hitting the power button does not solve this. So in some sense having hardware buttons does not solve everything.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#620

Post by fludlight »

travisgriggs wrote: post #540
im3w1l wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In many of the newer systems, all those physical dials and switches are just inputs to the computer system which ultimately decides to do what the user is requesting. Even so, a program for processing a switch or dial can be really short and simple. You can print it out on a sheet and check and double check every line of code for to make sure it's correct and all possibilities are accounted for. A program handling…

You've done a lot of programming for hardware switches and such then? I do some. And the last device we built, we still fight with a simple rotary switch. You have to do things like debounce inputs that seem like obvious binary switches. Getting the debounce windowing right can be just as "guessy". And guess what the highest point of failure on said device is. That selector switch. Had similar experience with buttons…

If anyone else is wondering what debouncing is:

https://my.eng.utah.edu/~cs5780/debouncing.pdf

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