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US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

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Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#391

Post by that_jojo »

DonHopkins wrote: post #360
starsinspace wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, it worked on Star Trek. IIRC the official explanation from the makers of Star Trek is that the displays look like simple touch screens, but they are actually overlaid with structured force fields, so for the users it feels like a physical button press.

I saw a touch screen for controlling AV equipment at Sun decades ago that had a single solenoid underneath the glass that could thunk to provide tactile feedback as you pressed buttons and dragged sliders.

My god. Sun invented the Taptic Engine.

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#392

Post by ethbro »

gugagore wrote: post #309
ethbro wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an interesting thought. You'd want to use a full bandwidth data channel (e.g. Bluetooth) for anything complicated. But for simple things, if possible without affecting the other parts of the screen, it'd be amazing to have a broadly supported, low bandwidth standard.

I can't really make sense of the bandwidth (information rate) of a tactile interface. A measure in units of length would make more sense to me.

Any digital control signal effectively has a minimum bandwidth.

This might be as simple as "Here's my encoded position * frequency of sampling", but for a general interface you'd want something adaptable.

What if there were two dials on the control? Two dials and three buttons? One dial, four buttons, and a joystick?

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#393

Post by PunchTornado »

mxscho wrote: post #335
PunchTornado wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm, I like the coffee machine at the office to have touch screen. They have literally 30 types of coffees there, I prefer quick searching and selecting my stuff. + with touchscreen you can bookmark your specific drink with the right amount of sugar and milk and then get it every time at the touch of a button.

We also have these big coffee machines at work and they're very cool because when you're walking to a different one it's kind of random which mix of products you'll get offered just because there are so many drinks and each one is programmed differently. And I agree that it makes sense for these types of machines. But my personal one has literally two options to choose from. However, the touch screen is old technolog…

yes, I agree. I think the UX should always start with physical buttons and if they find that the buttons are too many to fit on the device in an intuitive way, then adopt the touchscreen.

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#394

Post by DonHopkins »

that_jojo wrote: post #391
DonHopkins wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a touch screen for controlling AV equipment at Sun decades ago that had a single solenoid underneath the glass that could thunk to provide tactile feedback as you pressed buttons and dragged sliders.

My god. Sun invented the Taptic Engine.

I don't think they actually designed it, they just used it in one of their conference rooms.

By the way, are you "Le Jojo" of "Jojo on UI", or a different "that_jojo"? ;)

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/jojo-o...

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#395

Post by zeveb »

bigiain wrote: post #324
gugagore wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know that this has happened specifically around touchscreens, or is this a more general observation?

Just generalised Monday morning cynicism... It happens with _everything_ else in this stupid industry, what're the chances of it not happening just the same when the tech industry targets the military industrial complex???

Principle of charity: don't attribute mistakes to malevolence.

Unlike in business, military purchasing is, I think, generally run by people who were once users of the systems they were purchasing, and are not unlikely to rely on them again. Far more likely than, 'I don't care if the ensign standing watch on my next ship can do his job, this Mai Tai tastes great!' is 'wow, I see all these touch screens on TV shows, in movies and in the Tesla cars the print media tells me are the wave of the future; we need to get the New Hotness™ for our future combat systems too!' and 'hey everybody, look at this awesome futuristic 21st century cockpit my team designed!' They were, I think, completely well-intentioned and genuinely believed that they were doing a good job — and the few folks who opposed them probably sounded like cranky old guys ('why, in my day you had to get three stout sailors to man the rudder, and we liked it that way!').

Our entire culture is neophilic; military purchasers live in our culture; is it any surprise that they might be neophilic too?

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#396

Post by ubermonkey »

Justsignedup wrote: post #198

Wait. Let me get this straight. Touchscreens, which are ideal for representing multiple user unterfaces in an intuitive way, but requiring constant visual contact are being replaced by a physical user interface that can be used by both touch, and memory? Why was touchscreen ever even a consideration for controls you're not looking at? Touchscreen is great for phones. It is awful for keyboards (see macbook pro). And i…

>It is awful for keyboards (see macbook pro)

I've never seen a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen keyboard. Can you point me at one?

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#397

Post by SteveMoody73 »

StillBored wrote: post #357
devnulloverflow wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever since mouses and GUIs were invented it was common knowledge that "ordinary" users don't bother to learn keyboard shortcuts. That common knowledge is wrong, but it comes from an important truth: brand new users who are not yet committed to your product will get frustrated if the thing they need to do is hidden away as a key-binding or command-line command. So successful products optimise for the UX of a user who…

This is something that has irritated me since windows/mac's started hiding the UI/shortcut hinting in favor of a "cleaner" interface. UI discoverability was a huge part of human/computer interaction research in the late 70's/80's. If you look at the menu's in win3.1 for example you will see that nearly every menu item has both the alt-menu, keystroke, shortcut as well as the global keyboard shortcut to the right of t…

The ALT-f-s option still works in a lot of windows software now. Microsoft Office will even overlay the letter of the keypress on top of the menu item.

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#398

Post by coldpie »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #369
Justsignedup wrote: post #198

Wait. Let me get this straight. Touchscreens, which are ideal for representing multiple user unterfaces in an intuitive way, but requiring constant visual contact are being replaced by a physical user interface that can be used by both touch, and memory? Why was touchscreen ever even a consideration for controls you're not looking at? Touchscreen is great for phones. It is awful for keyboards (see macbook pro). And i…

There’s something even worse than touchscreens IMHO - those capacitive buttons on non-screen surfaces, like the capacitive power touch points on some monitor bezels. As a visually impaired person, these are absolutely maddening. I don’t know if anyone else gets this, but it’s almost like my brain doesn’t know how to press them. Touchscreens are fine for me, but for some reason I get major tension in my hands when try…

I loved how my XBox would turn on and do its 60 second boot sequence every time I dusted it. What a nice feature.

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#399

Post by leetcrew »

baroffoos wrote: post #262
leetcrew wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's really not that complicated, you just have to understand why condensation is happening in the first place. it's always because the glass is colder than the moist air it is touching. there are two strategies to deal with this: either blow air with very low relative humidity over the glass, or fix the temperature differential itself. if you're using the "blow dry air" strategy, you always want to turn on AC and at…

>it's really not that complicated After reading this I am still not sure which one to use. They seem to both work.

tl;dr of my post: turn on AC and blast hot air at the windshield. if that doesn't work in the winter, open your windows. if it doesn't work in the summer, it's because the fog is on the outside of the windshield; use your wipers.

Re: US Navy will replace touchscreen with mechanical controls on its destroyers

#400

Post by amiga-workbench »

animal531 wrote: post #390
amiga-workbench wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bridge modules can be fairly easily swapped out in drydock, but I don't believe that can be done while underway. The Galaxy class was the first class of ship with a saucer separation system that could be re-attached while in flight. I believe the Constitution class did have the ability to separate its saucer, but that was accomplished with explosive bolts and it couldn't re-attach without being in drydock.

Right, before they mainly used it as an escape vehicle in case of warp nacelle or containment issues.

Yeah, the warp core ejection systems always seem to conveniently fail. You would want to dump the entire engineering section and haul ass if you were sitting on an antimatter bomb.
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