Not Alone

[supergee]

We are in the Age of Inadvertent Programming. I am glad that World War III has not been started by someone inadvertently bumping into a touch screen, but I don’t know how long our luck will last.

I am both old and dyspraxic, so it’s not surprising that I have trouble with interfaces, but I just shared/blogged an article about the problem, and many people feel the same way.

I have realized for a long time now that two-valued logic is not a good way of dealing with issues like sex and race, but I miss the days when pushbuttons worked that way. The article notes that the iPhone (which I am fortunate enough not to have) conveys one message if you press it lightly and another if you press it just hard enough. There’s a lot of that going around. Facebook can, as usual, serve as a Horrible Example: When I use wheel on my mouse, I sometimes Like things and offer to friend people because my touch is not delicate enough.

GUIs are gooey. I feel as if they were quicksand I am sinking into.

Comments

[autopope]

Apple seem to have decided that force touch was a bad idea, and have dropped it from their newer phones. It never made it onto the iPad. (Also, there was haptic feedback: if you pressed hard -- and you had to use some muscle -- the device would vibrate as well as showing you a different on-screen state.)

[supergee]

That is good to know. It gives a modicum of hope.