I'd love a touchscreen - but I know that holding out my arms for long periods will cause them to fall off, and looking down the entire time would probably be bad for my neck. Some sort of angled screen might do it.
I use a mini-tablet a lot; think of it as a clipboard if you're using it while carrying it around, or a hardcover novel/journal if you're using it while sitting. Mine weighs under the kilogram mark, so it's really no great burden anyway, but if you need to you can hold it so that your forearm takes most of the weight and then perch your elbow against your side to make it super stable.
When I'm using it with a keyboard I do set it up like a conventional laptop.
-- Steve'd love to get a multi-touch screen for whatever portable eventually replaces my current one. Pity they don't make the Origami standard anymore. *sigh*
PS: my survey answer above on UI includes pen-based and touch-based input... and a bit of voice, though I don't tend to use it much even though my little gadget supports it already.
Addendum; Hewlitt Packard is whipping up a line of "Touchsmart" desktop computers with built-in touch screens. I've only handled one once in a store for a few minutes, but it looks to be more of a fun computer than a studio-workhorse computer. Nice media functions, though.
-- Steve is looking forward to getting Windows7, actually, with its integral touch and pen support.
Oh, probably. It'll have to be, as the interface we currently have hasn't been surpassed yet. Whatever it is will have to appear from nowhere and be better enough to pull people over.
Clicky needed to have non-exclusive options. There will at least be relatively robust toy mind control gadgets for computer control within the next ten years and probably more ubiquitous ones within the next fifteen, but I imagine training them to do more than one thing with your mind (rather than the many things you can achieve with 10 digits and two simultaneous input devices) will be at least Mind Control 3.0 and a good couple of decades away. Learning to use such a device will also be less easy than learning to use a mouse and keyboard or at least as tricky and we already now how to use those, slowing uptake.
I imagine there will be some amount of ubiquitous touchscreen take up in the same direction we already have it: for small devices and devices where a keyboard would double the size of the item. I think desktops will slowly move over to a point where you have a touch screen and mouse and keyboard. It's hard to type on a horizontal monitor but it may be useful and cheap enough that we'll have it on every monitor anyway and it will become an accessory to other inputs.
3D GUIs are a massive pain in the arse and I've never seen how one would work well, but I can imagine having 2.5D GUIs / 2D GUIs with different spaces you jump between for focus and context of what you're interacting with. The photos you're looking at being in the foreground and the Excel app sitting in the background ready to be bought forward again, visible but out of the way. Having those items in the background in a far away but available sense fits in with the human mind without cluttering the GUI real estate unnecessarily. Something like the Unix app from Jurrassic Park could have taken off 10 years ago. That it hasn't yet tells us a lot.
I imagine computer in pocket = iPhone which everyone will have one in 5 years. Desktops will keep with their current demographic of those who use them for games or major apps at home (geeks) and computers in your skulls in some ubiquitous way will be 30 years away at least. Though probably start coming in for those not paralysed 15-20 years from now.
Maybe they'll have full mono-controllers within 10 years then :)
I still think translating your intent to highlight a group of orcs and tell them to move to a position whilst attacking will be a level of complexity beyond that and another fair few years of development.
Or maybe granularity will quickly develop to a point where those three actions will occur one after another in your head fast enough that they'll seem like a cohesive action.
I find that I often use the multi-touch trackpad on my MacBook Pro rather than the mouse (although this could be because the scroll wheel on my mouse is busted). The ability to use two fingers to scroll up or down is damn useful; possibly because it involves moving my hand far less away from the keyboard.
I gave up the mouse last year (after an experimental coupla months as a leftie). I use a wireless keyboard with track pad [yes even for work]. 1 I like it, and 2 it is less ick on my shoulders/back.
interface of the future? more touchy-feely and I hope they can get somethign better than a keyboard going on - I am STILL the world's worst typist...
Personally, I'll still be typing as long as I can - I find text the most efficient means of communicating what I want, far more than GUIs, and the process of putting my thoughts into symbols makes them infinitely clearer than the fuzz in my brain. It's whether I'll be *able* to get along in an increasingly GUI-centric world that bothers me. (That said - brain/computer interfaces sound fun, especially if they offer the prospect of avoiding senility or other forms of cognitive degeneration, or even the old cliche of downloading your mind into a computer).
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andrewducker) wrote2009-06-30 04:23 pm
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The UI hasn't changed fundamentally between Windows 95 and Windows Vista -- that's two products launched nearly fifteen years apart.
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When I'm using it with a keyboard I do set it up like a conventional laptop.
-- Steve'd love to get a multi-touch screen for whatever portable eventually replaces my current one. Pity they don't make the Origami standard anymore. *sigh*
PS: my survey answer above on UI includes pen-based and touch-based input... and a bit of voice, though I don't tend to use it much even though my little gadget supports it already.
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-- Steve is looking forward to getting Windows7, actually, with its integral touch and pen support.
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Those Windows and buttons and textboxes and things you use to interact with your computer.
As opposed to a CLI: Command Line Interface (the text based way of using a computer - like DOS was, back in the 80s).
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CLI: Type a line of gibberish, exactly correct.
GUI: Double click on the bunny.
(I think it was
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(Something Else Wierd No-one's Yet Thought Of)
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I imagine there will be some amount of ubiquitous touchscreen take up in the same direction we already have it: for small devices and devices where a keyboard would double the size of the item. I think desktops will slowly move over to a point where you have a touch screen and mouse and keyboard. It's hard to type on a horizontal monitor but it may be useful and cheap enough that we'll have it on every monitor anyway and it will become an accessory to other inputs.
3D GUIs are a massive pain in the arse and I've never seen how one would work well, but I can imagine having 2.5D GUIs / 2D GUIs with different spaces you jump between for focus and context of what you're interacting with. The photos you're looking at being in the foreground and the Excel app sitting in the background ready to be bought forward again, visible but out of the way. Having those items in the background in a far away but available sense fits in with the human mind without cluttering the GUI real estate unnecessarily. Something like the Unix app from Jurrassic Park could have taken off 10 years ago. That it hasn't yet tells us a lot.
I imagine computer in pocket = iPhone which everyone will have one in 5 years. Desktops will keep with their current demographic of those who use them for games or major apps at home (geeks) and computers in your skulls in some ubiquitous way will be 30 years away at least. Though probably start coming in for those not paralysed 15-20 years from now.
AND LO HAVE I PREDICTED!
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You mean "now", I assume:
http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2009/01/12/mattel-mindflex-mind-control-toy-launches/
They exist for wheelchair users - apparently 3 hours training a day for a week will give you 95% accuracy.
I agree with you on the iPhone - the N85 I carry around at the moment is waaaay more powerful than the first PC I owned.
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I still think translating your intent to highlight a group of orcs and tell them to move to a position whilst attacking will be a level of complexity beyond that and another fair few years of development.
Or maybe granularity will quickly develop to a point where those three actions will occur one after another in your head fast enough that they'll seem like a cohesive action.
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interface of the future? more touchy-feely and I hope they can get somethign better than a keyboard going on - I am STILL the world's worst typist...
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(That said - brain/computer interfaces sound fun, especially if they offer the prospect of avoiding senility or other forms of cognitive degeneration, or even the old cliche of downloading your mind into a computer).