Who deleted the thread?
Did anything I typed caused offense?
What I was trying to say is that touch is not a virtue. It is a necessity to solve a particular evil, ie very small displays that were a compromise to achieve mobility on cellphones. When screens are very small, to see the content you want to
see, there has to be continuous zooming in/out and panning. Touch is the best option for this right now. If you have used the joystick on the old Nokia E-71 you will understand me perfectly.
Microsoft shouldn't be blindly chasing touch just because Steve jobs looked cool demonstrating it on stage.
Touch, as I had illustrated earlier, is a drawback in most other situations, even on the cellphone.
PCs (I mean mainly laptops as that appears to be the most popular PC form factor now) do not have the limitation of cellphone screens. Hence touch is very out of place. When Windows 8 is optimized for touch, it causes headaches for PC users.
Eg touch requires an icon to be huge enough so that the chubby finger doesn't touch the wrong one, so in addition to size they must be spaced out, but with a mouse (touchpad on a notebook), the hotspot is exactly 1 pixel in size. It is two vastly different
worlds. The design for touch does not just increase the size of a button. It affects the whole PC. So instead of a Start menu, you have a Start screen. On a 1920x1080 display, the Start screen is ten times slower than the Start menu
simply because it has to render and move ten times as many pixels, most of which are useless to a mouse hotspot of 1x1pixel.
View the full article
Did anything I typed caused offense?
What I was trying to say is that touch is not a virtue. It is a necessity to solve a particular evil, ie very small displays that were a compromise to achieve mobility on cellphones. When screens are very small, to see the content you want to
see, there has to be continuous zooming in/out and panning. Touch is the best option for this right now. If you have used the joystick on the old Nokia E-71 you will understand me perfectly.
Microsoft shouldn't be blindly chasing touch just because Steve jobs looked cool demonstrating it on stage.
Touch, as I had illustrated earlier, is a drawback in most other situations, even on the cellphone.
PCs (I mean mainly laptops as that appears to be the most popular PC form factor now) do not have the limitation of cellphone screens. Hence touch is very out of place. When Windows 8 is optimized for touch, it causes headaches for PC users.
Eg touch requires an icon to be huge enough so that the chubby finger doesn't touch the wrong one, so in addition to size they must be spaced out, but with a mouse (touchpad on a notebook), the hotspot is exactly 1 pixel in size. It is two vastly different
worlds. The design for touch does not just increase the size of a button. It affects the whole PC. So instead of a Start menu, you have a Start screen. On a 1920x1080 display, the Start screen is ten times slower than the Start menu
simply because it has to render and move ten times as many pixels, most of which are useless to a mouse hotspot of 1x1pixel.
View the full article