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Liking Analog Meters Doesn't Make You a Luddite (Video)
Chris Gordon works for a high-technology company, but he likes analog meters better than digital readouts. In this video, he shows off a bank of old-fashioned meters that display data acquired from digital sources. He says he's no Luddite; that he just prefers getting his data in analog form -- which gets a little harder every year because hardly any new analog meters are being manufactured. (Alternate Video Link)
There's plenty of analog meters being made every year. Just look at any automobile dashboard. They experimented with digital dashes back in the 80s and quickly abandoned them. Even Teslas, which have an LCD screen in the dashboard, have analog meters; they're just done in software, no different that a phone or PC that has an icon of an analog clock face.
Interestingly, though, modern cars with analog meters actually have them driven digitally; the indicator is really a servomotor, driven by digital information over a vehicle bus.
The reason analog instruments still prevail is because they can be interpreted easily at a glance (by looking at the position of the needle, rather than reading numerals and having to decide if those numbers are within a good range), and also because they show trends and rates of change which digital gauges do not.
But your point is just about the GUI.
Digital meters can be made to look Analog and provide that exact same feedback.
For a super stupid example, the windows task manager in the sys tray shows CPU load via a veritcal bar, exactly like an Analog vertical meter would.
So it seems to be less about the medium and more about the designed controls.
These are all good reasons to prefer analog gauges over crappy digital readouts. Somewhat hysterically, this guy misses all that with his "analog meter" - which is a clapping monkey toy.
"Now today our monkey here is tied to the Intel stock price, so that every time the stock has gone up since the previous refresh cycle, he will clap for you, but if the stock price has gone down since the previous refresh, then his eyes bug out, he bares his teeth and starts screeching. So you know things are headed in the wrong direction."
The "meter" isn't analog at all - it only represents three states, with no continuum in between. It's simply a periodic binary readout that uses an electric monkey instead of pixels on your screen.
There are two things that analog meters do very well that (most*) digital meters do either not at all or very badly.
One is rate of change. An analog meter in a wild overload condition will begin traveling very very fast, potentially giving you the opportunity to shut down before catastrophe occurs A digital meter will simply update its display a few times without any of the sense of urgency, and it's kaboom.
Another is getting a reasonable estimate from a dithering signal. A digital meter dithering between 100.2 Vdc and 99.8 Vdc will be almost unreadable if it updates too fast, and useless if it updates too slowly, but an analog needle hovering is an easy read. One can also mentally average "where the needle spends most of its time" much easier as well as seeing very short sharp drops.
And yes, I have an analog oscilloscope and a digital oscilloscope, and each have their advantages (I have lots of meters. I do electronics for a living).
AC
* - Fluke, and I suspect some more high-end brands, have a 'pseudo-analog' part of their display that does exactly what an analog meter does - Changes very fast, but not particularly precise. And it does work. AC
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Liking Flash instead of supporting HTML5 video doesn't make you a Luddite.
Have gnu, will travel.