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The Joypad That Became A Rotary Controller
jaromil writes "Speaking of human/computer interface, so simple, so neat, a usb knob to switch among desktops can give us quite some feeling about operating a machine... how about such controls around the monitor?" The knob in this case is switching between different effects possible with EffecTV. This make me wonder what creative uses people are putting Griffin's PowerMate to.
We went from knobs that were attatched to our televisions to buttons that evolved by having remotes and such.
So today I look at this and I see, the knob but for computers of today and I ask myself, is this proof that old but simple technology is still useful today even though we evolved and changed the standard from knobs to buttons/touchpads/screens
As any mouse user can tell you, taking your hands off your keyboard is damaging to your productivity.
My wife is a mouse user, and quite frankly, I don't think I'll ever convice her that the mouse is a productivity killer. While I mysef, having grown up with command line interfaces (MS-DOS 3.1 anyone?) on the PC, I really doubt that Joe User has any sort of shell installed (Cygwin or MinGW MSYS) at all. I may prefer to use command-line tools, but that doesn't mean that all people do. So to answer your point, most mouse users, just like my wife, need the mouse to function. Just because you or I may be able to work more efficiently without one doesn't mean that the vast majority of people could function without one.