Comment by quanticle
6 years ago
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.
On a Windows 2-in-1 it works more like a mouse with pressure sensitivity. It maintains its separate pointer (which is only shown when the pen is near the screen), so apps that aren't designed around a pen just behave as if you worked with a regular mouse.