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Touch Laptops

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Re: Touch Laptops

#61

Post by stephengillie »

jerrya wrote: post #11

Jeff Atwood writes, The screen bounces when you touch it and for me this just brings up all the reasons I don't want a touchscreen except on a tablet. There is gorilla arms, screen bounces, and screen smudges. Jeez, I hate when people touch my screens. But I am wondering if a reasonable or even better solution is an appropriate touchpad or even Android or iPad touchpad app. Right now there are two (maybe three) touch…

One option might be connecting the tablet to an external display and mirroring the screen on both, like a presentation mode. You could control the tablet directly while looking at the external monitor.

Re: Touch Laptops

#62

Post by rikf »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #58
rikf wrote: post #7

I find it annoying when I have to move my hands from the keyboard to the mouse. I imagine it would be infinitely more irritating and far less comfortable moving my hands from the keyboard to touch a vertical screen in front of me.

A large part of the reason why that's so annoying is that when you do that you have to also figure out where the mouse pointer is, and then start the mouse moving in the right direction. Once the mouse is moving the interaction is very natural and you can do it by auto-pilot. But until it is, you actually have to use a little piece of your brain which you'd rather focus on the problem at hand. Touch should completely…

I dont think its really the cognitive effort that I find annoying but rather the time it actually takes to move my hands from the keyboard to the mouse.

I am firmly in the know thy shortcuts camp and find anything that forces me to move hands away from the keyboard has a negative effect in terms of my productivity. With a mouse and keyboard at least your hands are moving in the same plane.

Re: Touch Laptops

#63

Post by antoko »

Ok I know this is nitpicking but...

I'm not sure I would want a 13.3" tablet on my lap or in my hands. There must be a reason the standard letter page size is 8½ × 11", right?

The diagonal on the standard letter is 13.9". The evidence Jeff cites completely undermines his point.

I'll just assume it must have been a really long time since he actually held a piece of paper.

Re: Touch Laptops

#64

Post by hokua »

hayksaakian wrote: post #55

Sorry, but that just reads like a sales pitch / marketing copy for windows 8.

I do get the feeling that Atwood has become a MS marketing tool. I wonder how much free stuff he is getting for these posts.

Re: Touch Laptops

#65

Post by cturner »

If he's right that touch is here to stay, we're going to see a major split between workstations and consumer devices. This is novel. Until recently, the workstation has been the anchor-point by how close they come to being as effective as the workstation. The workstation isn't going to go away, but neither is it going to support touch - multiple screens and comfortable posture are features for that setting.

Re: Touch Laptops

#66

Post by saturdaysaint »

Kudos to this guy for trying out a lot of new gear, but these things are a lot more puzzling through the eyes of an average consumer. I was at Best Buy this weekend and the shiny new "Windows 8" section, complete with a handful of touch laptops, was a ghost town. Even spending a few minutes reading this article doesn't really sell me on why I should want to touch a laptop - if it's not immediately obvious to consumers, they're just going to walk by to the tablet tables.

Touch is great because it enables extremely mobile computing devices - anything built without that in mind might as well not have touch. The Yoga is within eyeshot of dozens of comparatively razor-thin tablets at Best Buy, so even attempting to pitch it as a "PC plus a tablet!" seems like a stretch when you've just palmed an iPad mini. This stuff is kind of cool, but I don't think it's going to make anyone I know upgrade their PC any quicker, which is the measure of MS's success.

Re: Touch Laptops

#67

Post by hollerith »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #58
rikf wrote: post #7

I find it annoying when I have to move my hands from the keyboard to the mouse. I imagine it would be infinitely more irritating and far less comfortable moving my hands from the keyboard to touch a vertical screen in front of me.

A large part of the reason why that's so annoying is that when you do that you have to also figure out where the mouse pointer is, and then start the mouse moving in the right direction. Once the mouse is moving the interaction is very natural and you can do it by auto-pilot. But until it is, you actually have to use a little piece of your brain which you'd rather focus on the problem at hand. Touch should completely…

>you have to also figure out where the mouse pointer is, and then start the mouse moving in the right direction

Although it can be tricky to know what is actually going on during a "non-deliberative" task, I am fairly sure I start moving the mouse, then my brain's motion-detection circuitry very naturally tells me where the cursor is.

One of the reasons I believe that is that I remember a few times choosing (or noticing that I prefer) to make a vaguely semicircular arc rather than abruptly reversing direction. (If I did what you describe, I would probably not have reversed direction often enough to have such memories. In contrast, if I'm right, then I would've reversed direction half of the times that I had no idea initially where the cursor was relative to the target.)

Re: Touch Laptops

#68

Post by panzagl »

pretoriusB wrote: post #60
HCIdivision17 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This principle is likely the reason imperial units stick: they're fantastic for fast fractional math. For the same reason, it's easier to work with 360 degrees in a circle than 2*pi radians.

> This principle is likely the reason imperial units stick: they're fantastic for fast fractional math. As opposed to multiples of ten, in the metric system? Huh?

Draw a line that's a third of a meter.

Re: Touch Laptops

#69

Post by ygra »

panzagl wrote: post #68
pretoriusB wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This principle is likely the reason imperial units stick: they're fantastic for fast fractional math. As opposed to multiples of ten, in the metric system? Huh?

Draw a line that's a third of a meter.

Do it with a fifth of a yard ;-)

Re: Touch Laptops

#70

Post by untog »

saturdaysaint wrote: post #66

Kudos to this guy for trying out a lot of new gear, but these things are a lot more puzzling through the eyes of an average consumer. I was at Best Buy this weekend and the shiny new "Windows 8" section, complete with a handful of touch laptops, was a ghost town. Even spending a few minutes reading this article doesn't really sell me on why I should want to touch a laptop - if it's not immediately obvious to consumer…

I don't think that a touch laptop is puzzling in the eyes of the average consumer- in fact, they're a pretty simple concept. I was in Best Buy over the weekend and saw a good number of people playing around with the display Lenovo Yoga. The only downside was that the hinge on it was broken- not the best advertisement, but I don't judge it too much (display devices take a hell of a beating)- if anything it just shows that a good number of people were using it.
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