My view of touchscreen laptops:
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Thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention it slows you down. It's bad enough if you have to use the mouse for something, but doubly-worse if you have to put fingerprints all over your damn screen to get something done.
Re:Thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't always found this to be the case. There's one particular webapp we use at work that involves a lot of clicking on things, often alternating sides of the screen. With a mouse I have to mouse back and forth across the screen, with a touchscreen I can just touch the links. It's one of the few cases were I've actually preferred having a touchscreen. And I voted leaning against.
One could argue it's a workaround for a poorly designed website though.
So, replace every computer in your office... or fix the broken app.
Re:Touch my ass (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can't use the keyboard to do everything faster then the UI is broken.
Really? Draw a picture of a wedge of swiss cheese.
Re:Thought... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is this even an issue? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand why people are against touchscreen laptops - nobody is forcing you to use the touch screen. You can still use the trackpad or a mouse or whatever. If you don't like it, just don't use it!
Re:Thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
So instead of moving your hand and mouse around, you have to move your whole arm around. Doesn't really seem like that's any easier.
Re:Thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
A tablet is not a laptop. This is a fundamental misunderstanding, and once you realise the truth, you'll finally understand why the iPad sells so well.
It's not a computer. It's a TV.
That is to say, people don't buy it to use as a computer. (Those who do, wind up frustrated and disappointed.) But those who buy it to use as an entertainment device are delighted, because that's what it is - and correctly understood in that context, it's an outstanding piece of kit.
Re:Thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. Remember the gorilla arm.
Not to mention that you obscure parts of the display while doing so, including (but not limited to) whatever you touch. You have to move your hand away again to see the result.
A navigation system that depends on obscuring visual focus isn't a good one, in my humble opinion.
Oh, and there's no tactical feedback either. Which makes it even worse than the same action on a cell phone (which you at least can have vibrate when it detects your taps).
This is, incidentally, why we don't have glass keyboards like in of Star Trek. Tactical feedback is rather important for both speed and accuracy.
Re:Touch my ass (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: Thought... (Score:2, Insightful)
Greasemonkey script to fix the layout.. o.o why go to such lengths for simple things
The moral of the story is... (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 1980's touch interfaces (and pen interfaces) were thoroughly discredited as a good input method for a desktop computer and nothing will ever change that. Nowadays, tablets have become a good implementation of a touch interface and fit a significant niche in terms of usability and function. But like everything else, once something becomes cheap, it gets foisted on us whether we want it or not, or whether it makes sense or not. Just like 20 years ago when everything got a clock put in it whether it made sense or not, and 10 years ago everything got a camera put in it whether it made sense or not, now everything has a touchscreen, whether it makes sense or not.
UI standards were a big thing in the early 1980s and I thought Microsoft was doing a really good job by adopting CUA and making a serious effort to adhere to UI standards. Even Windows 95, which introduced a lot of bad ideas along with the good ones still had a pretty consistent and well-thought-out UI. These UIs weren't fancy or very slick, but they made sense and people were able to use them well.
Then came cheap, high-res, high-color video cards, and suddenly by the late 90s, everyone went hog wild on the skeumorphic bandwagon. UI standards (and common sense) went out the door every time an interface designer broke the shrink-wrap on a new copy of Photoshop. Microsoft, of all people, eventually become the front-runner in pointlessly flashy (and usually much uglier) UI that broke all the standards but didn't supply a commensurate level of added usability or functionality. Remember how for about 5 versions, Windows Media Player kept devoting more and more screen real-estate to the border and pointless chrome and less to the actual, you know, media playing but, until it became a joke? I'm not trying to pick on Microsoft, but they are ubiquitous. Honestly, they were a little late to the game of pointless graphics and crappy UI, to their credit, but once they took the plunge, they went at it with gusto. The last good-looking UI they ever made, IMO, was Windows 2000.
Well, now that it costs almost nothing to put touch into every screen, we're going to get touch screens whether we want them or not. And Microsoft, again showing they've forgotten all the hard lessons they learned over the last 35 years when it comes to making software that is easy to use and consistent, will force us to adopt to the touchscreen paradigm whether we want it or not (i.e., Windows 8), and we'll have to suffer with it because they are still a monopoly. Now I am trying to pick on them, especially because I finally got a chance to use Windows 8 in the last week and I think it is easily the ugliest version of Windows since version 2. And Windows 2 was ugly because the technology limitations pretty much made it impossible for it not to be.
Yes, Apple will always have its niche of people who think they are more clever than the rest of us (or are just less stingy), and a few brave souls will wander the vast and wonderful frontier of Linux and friends (but to be honest, after seeing Unity and Gnome 3, it seems the bad UI disease isn't limited to the dinosaurs). But we are still in a place where the tail is wagging the dog and we have touch-screens not because they are the best solution, but just because they are cheap and make for a good checkmark on some marketroid's list.
Re:Thought... (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no idea how Apple did it
Really? They blanketed the media with commercials showing hands zooming and flipping through pictures, and I'm sure every Apply "Genius" showed every customer this cool feature of why you would want a touch interface on your phone. They basically sat down with every single person who bought an iPhone and showed them how to do it.