Touch Laptops

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/11/touch-laptops.html

by stalled • 14 years ago

99 98 14 years ago

meaty9• 14 years ago

Why does everyone still have to use imperial/US measurements. Metric please or I have to break out the calculator.

loeg• 14 years ago

Atwood's an American. Writers will write what they know… they're hardly obligated to use an unfamiliar measurement system for your convenience.

mooism2• 14 years ago

Well, it depends. If Atwood's aiming at an international audience, then he should use both measurement systems. If he's happy with an American audience then there's no reason for him to bother.

I note that the date of his blog post is the international-friendly “November 19, 2012” rather than the American numeric “11/19/2012”. But internationalising dates like this is easier than providing measurements in dual units.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

Try being British, you basically have to understand both intuitively.

meaty9• 14 years ago

I am British! I haven't used imperial for at least 15 years apart from for speed limits, which I ignore anyway.

gadders• 14 years ago

It's weird, because it is Imperial for some things,and Metric for others.

Temperature: Either

Building Materials: Metric

TV Sizes: Imperial

Beer: Imperial

Soft Drinks: Metric

cmelbye• 14 years ago

People from the US use US measurements, surprisingly.

meaty9• 14 years ago

Yes and look where that got you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

yread• 14 years ago

The real pain starts when you use derived units. How many pascals are there in a pound per square inch? And what is the ratio between DPI and pixel per mm^2

lukifer• 14 years ago

I'm surprised he likes photo passwords. What's the point of a password if you give it away to everyone around you every time you unlock? (Maybe Jeff has never had co-workers who like to play pranks...)

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

With that sort of password, screen smudges become a problem, more so than conventional ones. Shoulder surfing also seems a bigger problem.

aluhut• 14 years ago

With win8 I thought for the first time about using a touchscreen for work or at home and my conclusion was:

Don't want to do it.

Maybe I'm to old or something but It just don't feel right fingering around on my monitor. Even if it would be flat and part of my desk (which would also be horrible because I eat, drink and smoke at my desk at home). I want to have my head up, look straight and don't have the screen right before my nose.

There are tabs and smartphones. I have those. Touching their screens feels right. It's the small thing you do on the road, in the plane, do small things or have fun. But I just don't feel like I could work with that at work or at home.

stan_rogers• 14 years ago

It makes sense when you're working directly on a screen. I've had the opportunity to use the Wacom Cintiq in its various models over the years (and would love to actually afford one of my own), and for graphics and photo retouching, it's the most natural way to work. It's a lot like working at a drawing board or an easel (depending on the tilt angle you use). Not so much if what you're doing is keyboard-centric, though.

AndrewDucker• 14 years ago

Can't see it working with a 15" laptop, which is my preferred size.

But if it gets to the point where all laptops have touch screens then I won't complain - it might work well with some UIs (like XBMC). I'm just not willing to pay extra for it.

untog2• 14 years ago

These trends are causing me to reconsider my computing setup. Right now I have a 13" Macbook Air with an external screen, which to my mind is the best of both worlds- portability when I need it, a large monitor when I'm sat down to do some serious work.

But I'm wondering if my minimal processing requirements (I'm doing web development) mean that I could buy an Asus Transformer tablet (complete with keyboard) and install Ubuntu on it. It would make the portable even more portable, but retain a good workstation setup when I'm sat at my desk.

rikf2• 14 years ago

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.

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

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 negate that. Just touch what you're looking at; you should be able to do that without requiring any higher brain activity.

rikf2• 14 years ago

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.

hollerith• 14 years ago

>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.)

WalterBright2• 14 years ago

I bought a new Asus laptop with Win8 specifically because it has a touchscreen. The touchscreen solves my long standing problem with using laptops - I find touchpads nearly unusable. It's soo much easier to scroll with the touchscreen, especially with the small laptop screens.

All non-touchscreen laptops are, to my mind, instantly and sadly obsolete.

Note that for a desktop, I see no advantage to a touchscreen, as the mouse is just fine.

davidlumley2• 14 years ago

> The touchscreen solves my long standing problem with using laptops - I find touchpads nearly unusable.

Have you used a macbook running OS X before? I find the touchpad handling much better in OS X than I do in Windows so would be interesting to know what sort of touchpad you're comparing to.

statictype• 14 years ago

Yes, the MacBook's touch pad is significantly, significantly better than most other PC laptop touchpads. I don't need a mouse when using a MacBook. I can't use a PC laptop without a mouse.

I suspect its a combination of better hardware and better software (I bet Microsoft doesn't write the touchpad interpretation code, its done by the individual hardware makers and so will be total crap).

WalterBright2• 14 years ago

I've played with a mac laptop in the Apple store.

The problem with the touchpad is suppose I want to scroll. I have to carefully position the mouse over the scroll bar. Then click, or click and drag, whatever, which is just freaking awkward with a touchpad. (It's no issue with a mouse.) Yeah, I know that the right side of some touch pads acts as a scroll bar. But that depends on the right window being the "top" and I often get that behavior mixed up with the other regions of the touchpad. I also have problems with accidentally brushing my palm over the touch pad and "what the hell just happened".

With a touch screen, this all becomes natural and trivial.

I know, I see people using touchpads all the time like it was an extension of their hand, and they have no issues with it.

But I do. I like that touchscreen for my laptop. It is transformative. No other word for it.

As for a desktop with a big display, I don't need a touchscreen except for one case - where you are working with someone and are both hovering over the screen. The touchscreen is real handy for that rather than passing the mouse back and forth.

jerrya2• 14 years ago

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) touchpads quasi made for Windows 8 that I would like to try.

* The Logitech Wireless Rechargeable Touchpad T650 -- a huge touchpad with Windows 8 gesture support

* Splashtop Win8 Metro Testbed for Android and iPad

* Unified Remote for Android and Windows Phones

I haven't used Windows 8 more than three minutes, and I haven't used these alternatives to a touchscreen monitor, but I like the idea of having a 4" to 7" phone or tablet screen that mirrors the Windows 8 screen but lets me keep my finger flat on the table, pointing to a smaller screen now in remote touchscreen mode and able to get feedback to where my finger is either by seeing a "mouse pointer" move on the screen, or just by looking at the phone or tablet my finger is on and seeing the screen there.

mkl2• 14 years ago

There is gorilla arms, screen bounces, and screen smudges.

These things keep being repeated as if they're showstoppers, and it seems usually by people without any experience in the matter. I have been using a laptop purely by touch screen for 1-8+ hours a day for two years, and here's my experience:

- Gorilla arm simply doesn't exist. I use the laptop in a variety of setups and haven't had any problems. Yes, if your desktop PC suddenly accepted touch you'd probably want the screen much closer, likewise some laptop users with good eyesight (which I don't have - relevant since it makes me close already).

- Screen bounces do exist, but I haven't noticed them since a week or two in. I usually use the laptop with the screen up and facing backward (I don't use the keyboard), so I definitely get them. The Surface form factor does seem better for touch in a laptop, but I haven't tried it yet.

- Smudges do exist, especially if you use an on-screen keyboard so they accumulate, but in most indoor lighting they are not a problem at all. Then again, they don't bother me on my desktop screen either - if I'm looking at the screen content I don't see them.

I'm excited to see what possibilities Leap Motion provides, but at this point I think it's unlikely I'll buy a non-touch screen again. In the meantime, I'd quite like something like your last idea, and have thought about making a program to do it.

flyinRyan4• 14 years ago

>- Gorilla arm simply doesn't exist.

That's a pretty strong statement for an anecdote of precisely one person.

stephengillie• 14 years ago

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.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Interesting take on it. One of the setups I use has a Mimo touch monitor [1] which is attached via USB. Putting the tool bar for my CAD program on that monitor sized up, gives me a screen with all of the tools available, and I can use the entire space on my 'main' screen for drawing. My version isn't multi-touch which would be useful for doing view projections.

I realized that sort of the 'ideal' setup here is a keyboard, and then behind the keyboard a really wide and not too tall multi-touch display, and then vertically in front of me 1, 2, or 3 IPS high density displays. That would move the richer expression of touch gestures to a place that was halfway between my keyboard and my screens.

Like Jeff that opened me up to the notion of a 'hybrid' interaction model. Prior to that experience with the 'all-in-one' style machines was just frustrating. The conflict between wanting the large monitor set back, and then having to reach out and touch it was a challenge.

Amazingly far from 25 x 80 characters on a green (or amber) screen :-)

[1] http://www.mimomonitors.com/

jerrya2• 14 years ago

Yes, if I understand what you are saying and what mimo is selling, that would seem to be what I want.

The mimo site is a bit too timecube for me to quickly parse -- it is a very expensive touchpad at $329.99 but perhaps there is something similar for less. :)

But yes, I really don't want people touching my expensive, clean screens, I don't want my finger to obscure the detail of what I am drawing, and I don't want to swing my arms through six feet of three 24" monitors.

josteink• 14 years ago

His complaints about widescreen tablets not being very natural in portrait mode speaks volumes about his lack of experience with Android tablets, which all comes in this form.

It may feel a bit weird at first, but really, it's sorta like reading webpages of a normal A4 sheet of paper. And we should be pretty used to that. The iPad haven't been around for so long.

tomflack• 14 years ago

A4 has an aspect ratio of 2:3, not 9:16. The iPad is 3:4 which is significantly closer to A4 than a weirdly tall portrait widescreen tablet (3:5.33333)

isani• 14 years ago

Actually, A4 has an aspect ratio of one to the square root of two. Your point still stands, as this is even closer to the iPad screen than 2:3.

gabemart• 14 years ago

I was baffled by his example of the wikipedia article in both orientations. For me, the portrait mode he spent so long criticizing seemed the clear winner in terms of readability.

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

> And Intel's long neglected Atom line, thanks to years of institutional crippling to avoid cannibalizing Pentium sales, is poorly positioned to compete with ARM today.

Apple was ready to have new products that cannibalized the old ones. If Intel had the same courage, they'd be in a far better position today.

chroma• 14 years ago

Bless you, Captain Hindsight! I assume you shorted or put INTC to profit from your insight.

Seriously, this post-season quarterbacking helps nothing but your own karma. The people in charge of Intel are intelligent, incentivized, and they've given the problem a lot more thought than you have. I realize our economies are ludicrously inefficient, but a single comment on HN is not going to outsmart an Intel board member.

flyinRyan4• 14 years ago

That's quite a brutal response to the pretty common sentiment. Also fairly nonsensical.

>I assume you shorted or put INTC to profit from your insight.

Just because you realize a company has made a big mistake doesn't mean you're in a position to short it. I realized MS had a vision problem after hearing Ballmer speak in person years ago, yet shorting MS at that point would have hurt me, not them. It's taken years for his lack of vision to begin to be a problem and even now no one sees it as critical as I do.

>The people in charge of Intel are intelligent, incentivized, and they've given the problem a lot more thought than you have.

You have no idea if any of that is true, you just assume it is. The people in charge of Intel could well be blinded by something they need to be true that isn't. If people at the head of companies are so infallible why does any company ever fail?

>I realize our economies are ludicrously inefficient, but a single comment on HN is not going to outsmart an Intel board member.

Now apply that logic to human nature and tell us what you intended with your hateful comment?

sliverstorm2• 14 years ago

Apple cannibalized old products because the successor was mostly the same, but better. The argument around Intel is that success in the Atom line would hasten a repositioning of the microprocessor market that would inherently weaken Intel's position, so they are attempting to stall that repositioning as long as possible.

stcredzero3• 14 years ago

That is my point, except Apple's new products are also a repositioning in some important cases: iOS vs OS X being the most significant.

jcfrei• 14 years ago

I can only imagine borderline use cases where touch screen interfaces might be faster than a lenovo track point. those use cases might be more common for an average user, but when I'm spending most of my time inside office products, R studio and ssh terminals (and of course the browser) it seems unlikely that it would be more convenient - and I'm wondering, what is jeff atwood actually using this touch laptop for?

octotoad• 14 years ago

This got me thinking about the whole Windows ARM port and x86 compatibility. I'm sure it's been mentioned before, but, why the hell didn't Microsoft make use of .NET for cross-platform compatibility?

Have developers write applications in C# or any other language supported by the CLR and let .NET work out the x86/ARM differences.

I'm sure there are valid technical and possibly political reasons this didn't happen, but I still find it very strange that Microsoft went to the trouble of developing this entire platform/framework/ecosystem just to ignore it when the opportunity arises to actually make good use of it.

kevingadd• 14 years ago

Judging by Microsoft's recent choices to kill .NET-based products like XNA and Silverlight it seems to be the case that management aren't fans of it anymore. Dropping support for XNA is particularly mysterious given Microsoft's struggles to get game developers to support Windows 8 - they literally had a dedicated community of game developers that could have put titles on the Windows 8 store on day 1 if Microsoft had provided any support. Instead, even game developers with titles being published by MS are stuck using MonoGame for Windows 8 support. It's insane.

xradionut• 14 years ago

Yes, plenty of C# developers were shafted over the changes to the infrastructure. I'm ignoring the "Metro" Apps for now, most of what I do is either server, web or a "real desktop" application. (Not to mention lots of CRUD corporate projects.)

tonyedgecombe• 14 years ago

I just fired up VS2012, created a C# Store (Metro) app and looked in properties. One of the platforms available is ARM.

potatolicious• 14 years ago

> "but, why the hell didn't Microsoft make use of .NET for cross-platform compatibility?"

But they did. .NET is the platform of choice when it comes to Win8/ARM development. Any standards-compliant .NET code (more on this later) will with very little work build on ARM.

> "Have developers write applications in C# or any other language supported by the CLR and let .NET work out the x86/ARM differences."

This is exactly what's happening, though with a few caveats.

Note that all of this is from about a week of playing with the Win8/Windows Store SDK, so it may not be entirely accurate or complete.

The main problem with developing for the Windows Store (and, consequently, Windows RT) is that it badly fragments .NET. Very basic classes (like System.Collections.Hashtable) are not available for inexplicable reasons, even though they are in full-fledged .NET.

So sure, theoretically if you wrote your app in C# it will still build - unless you were calling parts of the API that are for some unknown reason unavailable in WinRT. Lots of the API has disappeared, and many, many parts of the System namespace have been replaced with equivalent-but-not-quite classes in the Windows namespace. All of this is very confusing and creates a huge fragmentation problem that will make even the most hardcore Android developer blush.

So yeah, conceptually MS is right there with you, but execution-wise that remains to be seen.

codeulike• 14 years ago

I think Windows 8 Metro apps can be written in either a .NET subset or using HTML5/javascript, right?

pgsandstrom• 14 years ago

Am I the only one that prefers my widescreen monitors flipped to portrait mode? I have it both in the office and at home, I only flip them when watching a movie.

socialist_coder• 14 years ago

No. Based on my experience on ~130 person dev teams it's the preferred mode for programmers.

Breakthrough• 14 years ago

And this is exactly why I wonder who decided 16:9 was better than 16:10 for laptops/tablets/etc... Even just that little bit of extra vertical space makes it so much more comfortable in portrait mode (when I rotate my computer monitor, which is an old TN LCD panel since low response 16:10 monitors are pretty much non-existent now).

hayksaakian2• 14 years ago

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

hokua• 14 years ago

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.

SEMW• 14 years ago

Atwood is an admitted fan of Microsoft products, so yeah, this is written from that perspective. Blogs aren't encyclopedias - they don't have to be NPOV to be worth reading.

If you don't want to read opinion posts written by people who are partial towards one platform or another, you're going to cut yourself off from an awful lot of potentially interesting writing. (E.g. Jeff Atwood & Ed Bott, John Gruber & MG Siegler, Jon Corbet & Bruce Byfield, to pick two fans each respectively of Microsoft, Apple, and Linux).

(Of course, the worst thing is to only read blogs from people whose biases you share, under the delusion that they're the only objective ones...)

hayksaakian2• 14 years ago

I understand its a blog, but his post had not a one bad thing to say about windows 8. It was also exclusively about windows laptops. He might have written better articles, and I'll give this a shot. As a sponsored post though, this one is less than subtle.

antoko• 14 years ago

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.

ceejayoz• 14 years ago

Plus "letter-size" paper wasn't the standard until the 1980s, and most of the world uses an actual standard, A4.

> The American Forest and Paper Association argues that the dimension originates from the days of manual paper making, and that the 11-inch length of the page is about a quarter of "the average maximum stretch of an experienced vatman's arms". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_(paper_size)

eru• 14 years ago

Also paper has different standard sizes in the rest of the world.

cturner• 14 years ago

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.

saturdaysaint• 14 years ago

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.

untog2• 14 years ago

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.

rhplus• 14 years ago

The Lenovo Yoga 13 is an unsung hero of the Windows 8 wave. I tried it at a Best Buy as was very impressed with the build quality, specs and price. The story that's not being told though is that it's sold out everywhere and the order time on Lenovo.com is 4 weeks!

http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/ideapad/yoga/yoga-1...

nicolethenerd• 14 years ago

I use Air Display (app that lets you use an iPad as an external monitor, and to control that monitor w/ touch or the mouse) on a regular basis, mostly just as a chat window next to my MacBook so Adium isn't taking up valuable screen real estate, and I often find myself touching the iPad to move windows around, close pop-up notifications, etc... and then I find myself trying to touch my MacBook screen without thinking to do the same thing, and disappointed when it doesn't work. So I can totally see usecases for a touch laptop - it feels like the natural next step, plus you could do things like draw directly (with a stylus) in Photoshop instead of using a graphics tablet.

kakuri• 14 years ago

It's extremely disappointing that the majority of (or is it all?) Android tablets do not have screens with a 4:3 aspect ratio. 16:10 is awkward and silly; 16:9 is something I won't even bother trying.

ccoggins• 14 years ago

I don't really get his point #2 "A giant touchpad makes the keyboard area too large"

Isn't the distance the screen is away pretty much dependent on the height of the screen? I know I don't see many laptops that the base is larger than the screen. Occasionally the back sticks out a bit for a larger battery but I've never seen a laptop where the keyboard/trackpad were not completely covered by the screen when closed.

Touch Laptops

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