Comment by TeMPOraL
6 years ago
100% agree with your comment. One caveat though:
Mouse and touch seem like completely different things, but they're more similar when you consider pen/stylus input. 2-in-1 devices running a proper desktop-grade OS[0] are amazing devices, and one thing they're missing are properly designed apps, which are few and far between. 2-in-1 made me actually appreciate the ribbon a bit more - though an overall regression in UX, it shines with touch/pen devices, which I'm guessing was MS's intention all along[1]. 2-in-1s with pen are really magical things; I use one (a Dell Latitude) as my sidearm, and started to prefer it over my main Linux desktop on the grounds of convenience and versatility.
Best pen-oriented apps actually allow you to use keyboard + finger touch + pen simultaneously. You use pen for precise input (e.g. drawing, scaling, selecting), fingers for imprecise input (e.g. panning/rotating/scaling, manipulating support tools like rulers) and keyboard for function selection (e.g. picking the tool you'll use with stylus).
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[0] - Read: MS Surface and its clones.
[1] - For instance, Windows Explorer would be near-unusable as a touch app without a pen, if not for the ribbon that makes necessary functions very convenient to access using finger touch.
I agree with your caveat, but reply with a caveat of my own. The key difference between a mouse and pen/touch is the ability to hover. With a mouse, I can put the cursor over a UI element without "clicking" or otherwise interacting with it. That's difficult to do with a pen and impossible to do with touch. The key use case that hover enables is the ability to preview changes by hovering over a UI control and confirming changes by clicking. A pen/touch UI would have to handle that interaction differently.
Thank you to your caveat to my caveat, and let me add a caveat to your caveat to my caveat: while you're spot on with the hover feature being an important differentiator, it's not in any way difficult with a pen. It works very well in practice. On Windows, even with old/pen-oblivious applications, it works just like moving the mouse - you gain access to tooltips and it reveals interactive elements of the UI. That's another reason I prefer pens over fingers.
(Tooltips usually show when you hold the mouse pointer stationary over an UI element. With pen, it's somewhat harder to do unless you're in a position that stabilizes your forearm, but there's an alternative trick: you keep the pen a little further from the screen than usual and, once over an element you want to see the tooltip for, you pull the pen back a little, so that it goes out of hover detection range. It's simpler than it sounds and it's something you stop thinking about once you get used to it.)
That's very interesting! My only experience with a pen UI is from using the iPad with an Apple Pencil, which doesn't seem to work the same way. As far as I could tell, the Pencil works like a very precise finger. It's great for writing, but I didn't notice any further enhancements beyond that. Of course, it might just have been that the app I was testing it with (Microsoft OneNote) didn't fully support the Pencil at that time.
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