Would you improve your productivity
by switching to a touchscreen?
Microsoft has made it clear that it sees
future Windows users interacting primarily through touch-sensitive displays, or
touchscreens, although you can still use Windows 8 with a regular display,
keyboard and mouse/trackpad. By contrast, it’s Apple that has already sold far
more touchscreen devices than those that currently run Windows 8, leaving
Microsoft to face a very long and steep road to compete with the success of the
iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. Macs, however, remain driven primarily by mouse or
trackpad, and there are no signs of OS X going gooey over touchscreen.
Would
you improve your productivity by switching to a touchscreen?
Touchscreens are much more recent than the
mouse or graphics tablet, starting to appear in the early 1980s, when they
mainly used resistive technology. In these, the outer layers, of the display
incorporate two thin resistive sheets that, when they’re pressed together, allow
the x and y coordinates of the pressure point to be determined. Now, they’re
most commonly used in hostile environments where the display will become wet or
contaminated 0 you probably signed your name on one to acknowledge receipt of a
parcel, for instance. As they require significant pressure and don’t need warm,
bare flesh to operate, they’re often used with a stylus rather than a finger.
In their present form, such resistive displays are unsuitable for
high-resolution computer touchscreens.
The great majority of modern touchscreens,
including those running iOS, use capacitive rather than resistive sensing. The
principle is that, when the underside of the display is coated with a
transparent conductor such as indium tin oxide (ITO), touching the surface with
a conductive object such as a finger changes the local electrostatic field,
allowing location of the point of contact. This works best with warm and very
slightly moist skin; if your fingertip is clod and dry, or insulated within a
glove, there’s insufficient change and the screen doesn’t work. You can buy
special conductive gloves or styluses for use when bare fingers won’t work.
Variants in the way that capacitance is produced and sensed account for the
different properties encountered in different types of touchscreen, but these
devices don’t require pressure, only proximity or gentle contact.
As we’ve learned with the mouse and other
input devices, while basic technology is important, our user experience is
largely determined by the way in which that technology is implemented, the
human factor: screw up the ergonomics and it’s useless. Poor implementations of
touchscreens, such as vertically mounted panels, can be very fatiguing,
resulting in what has become popularly known as ‘gorilla arm’. Once of the
greatest conflicts in putting touchscreens into popular use if finding the best
compromise position to optimize both touch and visual access to the display.
We naturally find it easiest to use our fingers when they’re positioned just in front
of the body, well below shoulder height, with the forearms supported. Looking
at a display mounted in that position requires the next to the flexed, and the
plane of the display angled to bring it perpendicular to your gaze. This means
that working for long periods at vertically mounted touchscreens, optimized for
vision, or those positioned for best finger access, is likely to lead to
fatigue and discomfort in some part of the body.
Handy
hints: The standard Trackpad pane in System Preferences has superb video clips
to demonstrate each gesture that it can support
Tablets and phones, being smaller, lighter
and generally used for shorter periods of less-intense user interaction, don’t
commonly result in gorilla arm or neck strain. They’re also normally used with
on-screen keyboards, so you don’t have to switch repeatedly between touching
the screen and tapping on separate keyboard. For heavy-duty text input, a
separate, conventional keyboard remains unrivalled, particularly for
touch-typists.
Coupling a full-size off-screen keyboard
with a touchscreen display causes even worse positional conflicts: while the
display may be slightly better placed for vision, you then end u stretching
further forwards in order to touch it. You can almost hear the personal injury
layers preparing their papers for the next big office ailment after repetitive
strain injury (RSI).
Touch
me: In addition to supporting a wide range of gestures, free ware MagicPrefs
gives you some crude control over global sensitivity
Touchscreens do have some unique
advantages, particularly in enabling the direct manipulation of items being
displayed for instance, moving objects on screen such as pieces of jigsaw
puzzle. For naïve users such as children, many elements of the graphical
interface are far simpler to use, easing access to dialogs, buttons and the
like. Users also find it quicker to achieve proficiency in precision drawing,
as might otherwise be accomplished using a larger graphics tablet. There’s no
doubt that learning to move a stylus over a detached tablet while watching the
results on a separate display can be tough, and many artists have found an iPad
far more direct and expressive. Sadly, for the time being, Wacom’s Cintiq
touchscreens have been too costly for most users to try, and Modbook’s modified
MacBook Pro has also failed to catch on.
