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Star Wars Buttons And Lights You May Have Missed (vice.com)
tedlistens writes: At Motherboard, Alex Pasternack writes: "Star Wars is set in a world of wildly advanced technology. But take a good look at the machinery of Star Wars, and you may be surprised to see how wonderfully analog it all is -- buttons! levers! vector graphics! Yes, there are hyperdrives and lightsabers and hologram Princess Leias and droids that know six million languages (including the language of moisture vaporators, along with various etiquette and diplomatic protocols useful across the galaxy). But it's also a world where sometimes you have to hit a robot to get it to work, like an old dashboard radio, a place where the supercomputers are operated manually and where buttons and control panels and screens seem far removed from our own galaxy: tactile, lo-fi, and elegantly simple." May the 4th be with you.
With my old flip phone I could dial without ever taking my eyes off the road. Same thing with the car radio. I could navigate presets or change tracks on the cd player all by touch. Touch screens look cool, and are highly configurable but cannot be operated with out looking at them. Another nit that I have with car touch screens is that I cannot customize the display. Why can't I put navigation and radio preset options on the same screen? Currently I have to flip through four screens to set the navigation system to take me home, and then back another three to find my favorite radio station. It shouldn't be this hard people.