Why Everyone Wants to Kill the Mouse and Keyboard
Why Everyone Wants to Kill the Mouse and Keyboard http://gizmo.do/boYucko <http://pocket.co/sDAQD> Sent from Pocket.
A stylus and really good hand writing recognition software is about the only thing I would give up a keyboard and mouse for. Bill On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 5:35 PM, Thomas Milne <thomas.bruce.milne@gmail.com> wrote:
Why Everyone Wants to Kill the Mouse and Keyboard
http://gizmo.do/boYucko <http://pocket.co/sDAQD>
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On 10/31/2014 09:37 AM, Bill Thanis wrote:
A stylus and really good hand writing recognition software is about the only thing I would give up a keyboard and mouse for.
Bill
It used to be that you would learn the keyboard shortcuts. But as menus became bigger, unless your work with a particular application all day, you mostly go by mouse. Folks don't spend enough time on application design to make them keyboard friendly, and the number of applications available has exploded. In narrower fields I do some power users learning their keyboard short-cut, digital artists for example. But even they only learn the shortcuts to a varying degree. What I'm seeing more of is context popup menus. You'll start typing, and based on where your mouse is, it will search the applications functions, and you can select from a shrinking list. Handwriting recognition doesn't help improve that case. If anything, unless your ambidextrous you've now committed two channels of input to a single hand. Namely pointing and character input. -- Scott Sullivan
| From: Scott Sullivan <scott@ss.org> | It used to be that you would learn the keyboard shortcuts. But as menus became | bigger, unless your work with a particular application all day, you mostly go | by mouse. (Of course I don't see this, I only see what I do, and I still use decades-old tools like X, xterm, jove, C, ...) One change I imagine is that a lot of the consumption applications have moved to totally different systems: phones and tablets. Desktops get used for real work and things that do require keyboarding. Perhaps that is actually a narrow set of applications. So I would expect keyboarding would actually become more important on desktops. The "app" world of the phone and tablet and the website world of browsers allow for a diversity of applications that the Windows and OSX world likely hasn't. In the desktop world there was some kind of tidal force that caused much functionality to end up in MS Office and a few other big hit applications. So the world with keyboards has less diversity than the touch world. The quantity of apps and websites is probably unsustainable. People cannot deal with that amount of choice, so we'll probably end up with an even more hit-driven marketplace. A counterexample: there still a heck of a lot of distinct books half a millenium after printing was invented (you can get a bunch cheap <http://stmikes.utoronto.ca/booksale/> today and tomorrow).
On 31 October 2014 15:59, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 09:37:48AM -0400, Bill Thanis wrote:
A stylus and really good hand writing recognition software is about the only thing I would give up a keyboard and mouse for.
But typing is way faster than hand writing.
Absolutely. The arguments in favour of "hand waving" tend to fail on this. Keyboards give quick and accurate access to a sizable number of choices of signals. If I'm trying to control something where "graphical" considerations are important, then 104 switches may be tough to choose from. But when I am trying to write an email, having 26 letters near to hand, along with punctuation and numerical symbols not terribly far away, in positions that my fingers get to remember, vastly beats waving my hands in the air. There are enough common situations that are similar to that to make keyboards continue to be a common meaningful solution to needs to control computers. -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 09:37:48AM -0400, Bill Thanis wrote:
A stylus and really good hand writing recognition software is about the only thing I would give up a keyboard and mouse for.
But typing is way faster than hand writing.
-- Especially using the Dvorak keyboard. (Ducks and runs. ;)
[I'm booting up a new Acer laptop which comes with Win8.1 I'll put dual boot on it, but I was interested to see that US Dvorak is one of the keyboard options from the get-go.] -- Peter Hiscocks Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto http://www.syscompdesign.com USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator 647-839-0325
On Oct 31, 2014 3:59 PM, "Lennart Sorensen" <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
But typing is way faster than hand writing.
I dunno about that. Give me some good paper and a decent fountain pen and I'd probably be quicker. It would also have the advantage of being completely illegible to anyone but me. Sometimes illegible to me, even. (I can't touch-type and likely will never learn. My absurdly expensive and old-fashioned Scottish public school wouldn't let boys take typing, as "you'll have secretaries for that" ...) Touch screens and me just don't work. Either they think I'm dead and they don't register for me (must be a problem for the modern undead-about-town) or I leave a layer of grease on the screen which needs to be squeegeed off regularly. Either way, it's brutal. Stewart
On 10/31/2014 05:51 PM, Stewart Russell wrote:
I dunno about that. Give me some good paper and a decent fountain pen and I'd probably be quicker. It would also have the advantage of being completely illegible to anyone but me. Sometimes illegible to me, even.
Well, at least you don't have to worry about encryption. ;-) BTW, many years ago, I used to overhaul Teletype machines. Back then, I could type at 100 WPM, provided what you wanted typed was "NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL...". (back then, they were upper case only)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 31/10/14 05:51 PM, Stewart Russell wrote:
Touch screens and me just don't work. Either they think I'm dead and they don't register for me (must be a problem for the modern undead-about-town)
I appear to be invisible to modern electronics as well. The faucets at work are all motion-activated. Or not, in my case. I have to hold my hands and wiggle them *just so* in order to get water, but as soon as I start making washing motions with my hands the water stops. The paper towel dispensers have also been electronicated, so it's equally difficult to dry my hands as it is to wash them. - --Bob. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.15 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Ensure confidentiality, authenticity, non-repudiability iEYEARECAAYFAlRWdXoACgkQuRKJsNLM5epnEwCg2ROml2qdruCEHNghtvOnxdtW XTcAoLZNTcbP4YV+US6FoA3aL4QMPJqF =BAd5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
| From: Thomas Milne <thomas.bruce.milne@gmail.com> | http://gizmo.do/boYucko <http://pocket.co/sDAQD> I don't know what that page did, but it seemed to kill my brwoser. There was a bunch of animation as if it were flash, but I don't have flash. I don't want that kind of animation, especially if it crashes my Firefox. I'm not annoyed at Thomas, I'm annoyed at the state of the art in web crap. (I don't have time to debug what went wrong. Perhaps it wasn't that noisy web page, perhaps is was a delayed effect of the solar eclipse. Complexity is driving us to a new age of superstition.)
participants (10)
-
Bill Thanis -
Bob Jonkman -
Christopher Browne -
D. Hugh Redelmeier -
James Knott -
Lennart Sorensen -
phiscock＠ee.ryerson.ca -
Scott Sullivan -
Stewart Russell -
Thomas Milne