Never liked the touchscreen on my car. Tactile buttons are easier to control when your eyes are on the road.
Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
651–660 of 770 posts
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#652What I really hate about touchscreen, and love with analog input, is the "speed control" of rotary dials.
For example, if you want to change the air speed of your ventilation system down to zero from max, a quick rotation of your vent speed knob will bring it back to zero and you can rotate it back to put it to one, without looking.
With touchscreen, it's hard to do the same without looking.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#653Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not like trying to flip just the right toggle. You’ve flipped it thousands of times and memorized its exact location through haptic memory. You gently feel the surroundings to ensure your hand is in the right location and then you make the decisive motion with your fingers. You don’t need to look while doing this. This is how hands work. This is how you type. I wish people would stop pretending they don’t unders…
> flipped it thousands of times This raises a question: how many times do an average pilot actually flip a switch over their carrier?
Many switches are flipped once or twice on takeoff, then again before or after landing. Depending on the plane (small GA aircraft or airliner or anything inbetween) there could be 4 or 5 switches to flip in total before takeoff, or 30-40. One of the most ubiquitously used controls in aircraft are concentric rotary encoders though, with a button integrated in them if you press the top of the encoder. Those are used to do menu navigation in the GPS units used in many planes, or for altitude/heading selectors in autopilot units.
Worth mentioning that these days GPS units seem to be getting touchscreens but usually still aren't losing the physical buttons.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#654Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work for an avionics manufacturer and I can assure you most of our upcoming comercial systems (and even a healthy portion of government ones) feature touch screen inputs.
The sad but real reason a ton of this is happening is one very big word that is typically not present in things like car / airplane design: flexibility... flexibility to change the user controls, flexibility to fix problems, flexibility to let the SW team work up until the last minute to get stuff working, and the second part that goes with this is cost. Touchscreens mean increased flexibility for the design and bett…
There already are redundant systems like the ones you want. Multiple displays. Most planes that are heavily reliant on screens for instruments/navigation, touchscreens or not, have two of them at least. If one fails, there is a button you press which condenses the information previously shown distributed over both screens on each individual screen (so, the remaining one if one has failed).
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#655Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't get how we can explain it in a simpler way? If you add a microservice, you're adding another point of failure. You add another interaction, you add more code. Add more code, you add more bugs. It's pretty much the only empirical thing we have in software engineering, more code = more bugs. Lots of little microservices means lots of extra code means lots of extra bugs. Plus you've got to manage how they all in…
Do you object to redundancy under all circumstances, or only when it’s preceded by “microservice”?
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#656Look 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…
I'm afraid I have some bad news for you:
https://youtu.be/wfOD2y_AD_w?t=190
https://www.dynonavionics.com/SkyView-HDX/
Just a few examples.
Aviation very much uses touch screens quite extensively. The difference usually is that more thought is put into when and how to use them; you're not just replacing all the buttons with a touchscreen and letting some underpaid intern design the interface for it.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#657Dear Honda,
my next car is now much more likely to be a Honda. I am literally at less risk of dying with controls I don't need to look at.
Thank you.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#658Earlier 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…
Are you debouncing on tactile or is the hardware doing it for you?
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#659Touch controls in the car should not be used for anything that is supposed to be used while driving. 1) They give no haptic feedback and require to look at them to do anything. 2) They are very finicky if the hands are wet/dirty/sweaty/cold. Knobs can be rotated and buttons pressed without looking. Physical objects can be manipulated as long as you can move your fingers.
One more reason to consider Honda when the time comes to buy a new car. Another reason is their outstanding reliability ratings.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#660I'm baffled by the insane number of upvotes this post has. "Honda is putting knobs in their cars" is the least interesting thing posted in HN history