[haiku] Re: Interesting user interface.
- From: Izomiac <haikulist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:44:28 -0400
Very interesting. I whole-heartedly agree with the first half of the video
where they discuss the limitations of the traditional approach. But I don't
really care for their solution all that much, it gives too much emphasis to
one application IMHO. Just picture working on a lab report where you're
typing in a word processor, referring to numbers in an e-mail, and using a
scientific calculator to calculate formulas. In a traditional windowed
approach all three can be easily visible at the same time, but in their
approach a lot of vertical space is wasted and each of those windows would
be quite narrow.
Personally, I think the computing world would do well to break two
conventions. The first is a constant pointer position. If I'm watching a
movie I don't want the pointer to be anywhere. If working with widgets on
opposite sides of the screen then I have no desire to transverse the space
between them. No clue what a great solution would be, but one idea I had is
to use absolute positioning for the initial touchpad tap after a few seconds
of inactivity, so tapping the left side teleports the cursor to that rough
position (use traditional, relative movement after that initial tap for
finer movement).
The other is that there can be only one cursor and one active application.
In the physical world I have two hands that I can use independently. If I
bring up two applications at once, side-by-side, then it's arbitrary which
of them is currently focused (which gets keyboard input notwithstanding).
Likewise, I'd like the ability to use two cursors simultaneously. A decent
example of an activity that would benefit would be 2D window resizing and
moving. Another would be selecting drawing tools in an image editor. Also,
how often do you commit to dragging something, but discover you need to move
a window out of the way or something?
Maybe in R2 some of these paradigms can be addressed. Multi-touch is a
reality now, and touchscreens don't lend themselves to cursors. One API
issue that might need resolving is be with a touchscreen is that you can
interact with an inner BView without calling MouseMoved() on the surrounding
BViews; and would MouseMoved() even need to be called if it's just a tap? I
can't imagine that being much of a problem, but I suppose at some point the
developer suggestions should mention whether or not such things are safe
assumptions to make.
On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Bruno Albuquerque <bga@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> I was impressed by this. Maybe one day this will be the default in Haiku.
> ;) Watch the video.
>
>
> http://flowingdata.com/2009/10/14/is-10gui-the-future-replacement-of-the-mouse-and-keyboard/
>
> -Bruno
>
>
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