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Death of the Button? Analog vs. Digital
mattnyc99 writes "Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds is sick of navigating menus to turn up the heat—while he's trying to drive. His take in the article (as well as a a no-holds-barred podcast) is that modern tech product designers should get back to analog controls before iPhone users get sick of looking down at their touchscreen everytime they dial without a dial. It may be up to you: Whither dangerous auto technology, or long live the touchscreen?"
from the long-live-the-knob dept.
Well, there's a sentiment we don't see every day.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Car, open the door!
I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do it.
I can speak to this somewhat, because I am a moon man from the future and have been dialing my phone via touchscreen for a couple years now.
My futuristic moon man technology is called a "Treo 650". You guys arent advanced enough to pronounce that correctly, but trust me, it's a complete rip off of the iPhone in every way. In my time only the richest kings of the undersea realm of europe can afford a true iPhone.
This device I speak of, has a touch screen, and dialing with it requires you to look directly at it.
However, it is fortunate I am so poor and underprivileged, as this device also has an analog keypad, with numbers affixed to some of the keys. The central of these numbers is marked with a little nib, enabling my advanced moon man fingers to dial by my tactile sense alone.
I wish you great success with your iPhone, this is a new technological age for humanity. You are about to behold the awesome power of "a phone that can play mp3s and also has a camera in it".
I pray you use this technology wisely.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Fund a study of these things as a driving distraction. If they're equally as or more distracting than cell phones, you should be able to lobby a bunch of key, high-income municipalities into instituting an eventual ban on operating touchscreens while driving. Voila, the engineers of taste rediscover analog charm.
OK, maybe it's not that simple. It's still possible.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
But what happens when you tell the car to "double killer delete select all"?
I tried "Arm photon torpedoes." on our Prius, but all I got was, "This command is only available on the map screen." I should bring up the tactical display first I guess.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
It's gratifying to see that you're already taking the first step toward simpler interfaces by eliminating unnecessary letters from the word "knob".
Main Menu:
a: Accelerator (30%)
b: Breaks (0%)
c: Steering (+23 degrees)
d: Extra menu
Please select a control: [abcd]
Yep, the Chevy Astro van would say, "Ruh-roh, Reorge! Roor is Ropen!"
Ok, so it's a cheap laugh and an old joke. Mod me down. I don't care.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I'm still scared of the Hardware Abstraction Layer in my computer...
:)
Way back in 2001, I watched 2001 Space Odyssey. The following summer, I came in to work one day and booted up my computer. And instead of it booting into XP, it gave me some message complaining about HAL. I didn't know that HAL was the Hardware Abstraction Layer, at the time, so I just thought someone had pranked my computer (which someone else had done, recently) and put a Space Odyssey-related virus on it or something.
Anyways, it gave me the creeps. I forget exactly what the problem was, and how we fixed it, but I still remember that even to this day, HAL is hiding somewhere in my computer... (dun, dun, dun! *Cue the scary and dramatic Space Odyssey music*)
I tried the same thing on my Prius, but it replied "Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?"
... and then they built the supercollider.
Well, that's better than "I'm sorry, El Torico, I'm afraid I can't do that." or the more curt, "Access Denied!" or the classic "Does not compute!"
Voice control is great as long as it doesn't get the Temperature and Cruise Control commands confused.
"Honest officer, I couldn't have been doing 75 in a 35 zone, I set the cruise control. You say there's frost on the outside of my windows?!"
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
My Hummer yelled "Yeeee-Haawww" and the car in front of me blew up.
We are all just people.
> You wouldn't try to steer a car with buttons. So why have many product designers abandoned simple analog controls?
.amsrc defines other preferences like my desired units, my desired velocity:direction ratio curve (which slows the vehicle during turns), etc.
Hmm, well as long as those buttons have tactile feedback, I actually would love to steer a car with buttons. Like a Model-M keyboard plugged into an automobile management system that supports a fully customizable command set. I'm envisioning something like:
g 40 # go, and set cruise control to 40mph
g 0 # slow to a stop
ss # stop short
g +10 # go 10mph faster
g -10 # go 10mph slower
b 35 # go backwards at 35mph
a 1.5 # increase acceleration rate by 1.5 current or default
a 0.5 # decrease acceleration rate to 0.5 current or default
r 1 # turn right 1 degree
ar 10 5 # arc to the right 10 degrees over the next 5 seconds
sig r # signal to the right
fl # flashers
fol # follow the car in front of me at my current distance
fol 5 # move 5 feet closer to the car in front of me
fol -5 # move 5 feet back from the car in front of me
tg # tailgate car in front of me
ppl # parallel park to the left
roll r # roll car to the right
roll l # roll car to the left
ww 1 3 # enable windshield wipers at speed setting 1 with a 3 second delay
hl # headlights
dfr 0 # disable rear defrost
r s 91.3 # set radio to 91.3 (default fm)
r v 10 # set radio volume to 10
r v +1 # increase radio volume by 1
r b -1 # decrease bass by 1
mpg | ws # print mpg (default is 5 min. avg) to the windshield display
mpg | r # announce mpg over the speakers
Of course there's much I've left out, but you get the idea. Additionally my
'...I remember seeing a demonstration 10-15 years ago of the latest Spectrum Analyser, where the salesman made a big deal of the battery backed RAM saving the settings when the device was switched off. One of the older engineers said "we've got that on the analogue spec analysers, we call it a knob."'
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From http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/04/02/28/0041
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Good that you never mentioned this on Slashdot. Opportunities here are countless :-)
Even though you just said to arm them? Don't you hate it when your torpedoes go off prematurely?