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| Reports Of The Mouse’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated Posted: 31 Jul 2010 11:00 AM PDT
The next generation of input is already here; chances are you have it in your pocket. Yet, advanced as it is, there are fundamental shortcomings that will prevent it from completely supplanting the interfaces we’ve grown up with. The technology I’m referring to is, of course, a touchscreen. One might be tempted to say “but a multi-touch touchscreen is in the same category as a multi-touch trackpad.” An understandable idea — you use similar gestures, pinch and rotate, all that kind of thing. But consider this. When you use a trackpad — or a mouse, critically — you are looking elsewhere and moving a representation of your hand or finger. It’s indirect manipulation. When you use a touchscreen, you are looking at and touching the same thing: direct manipulation. In fact, the new conflict in input is not about which peripheral you use, but whether you use a peripheral at all: the conflict is direct versus indirect manipulation. I wrote quite a bit about this in an article I wrote for another site (Towards a better tablet OS; part 2) if you want to get further into it, but I’ll try to break it down here in less than the 3000-odd words I used there.
UIs have been designed for decades now with the mouse in mind; principles such as accessible corners, various consequences to do with mousedowns and mouseups, hover actions, cursor feedback and so on. It’s just a fact: most modern OSes are built for mice — even when they’re not. Windows 7 is a good example of this: while it’s multitouch-friendly in some ways (the Surface project has contributed a lot to this), it’s also fundamentally organized around the mouse in other, more important ways. Even iOS bears the mark, if only in the fact that it often fails to take advantage of finger input in anything other than superficial ways. It’s only post-current-OS projects like 10/GUI that are built entirely around the idea of direct manipulation. The benefits of direct manipulation are plain; we’ve all been exposed now to how a well-designed touchscreen interface can make many tasks easy and natural, much more so than a mouse. Direct interaction with on-screen glyphs and text is fun and in some cases powerful. Navigating maps, for instance, is both easier and better, and many games benefit from it as well. But you run into weaknesses as quickly as you run into strengths. The direct connection of the user with the UI means there’s tension between “real” gestures like touching and dragging and “artificial” gestures like tapping with three fingers to bring up a context menu on the item the other hand is touching. These things can be minimized with clever UI tricks, but they’re accommodations for shortcomings in the interaction method — just like keyboard modifiers accommodate the impracticality of pressing more than one mouse button at a time. Yet those multiple buttons enable a multiplicity of actions at your fingertips that even a multitouch interface doesn’t approach.
And of course accuracy is reduced by an enormous amount. A psychologist would probably describe it by saying that the amount of cognitive space assigned to a desktop-mouse-keyboard combo is far, far greater than that assigned to a touchscreen. Again, this is not a pure gain or loss on either side. The reduced cognitive load means a touchscreen is easy enough for even a toddler to use. But with the mouse, the huge landscape over which you move your precision tools (arm, wrist, finger) means that you’re working at an incredible resolution, limited only by the mouse’s sensor and the resolution of the screen. This is what enables pixel-perfect art and pinpoint aiming: a large, configurable indirect manipulation space. For those who object, saying that you can make precise movements on a trackpad — yes, exactly, because of feedback only possible with indirect interaction. Note that you don’t know (and usually it doesn’t matter) where you put your finger down to initiate an action. Everything is based on a feedback loop between the cursor, the target, and your finger’s movements. Not so with a touchscreen. If it sounds like I’m speaking gibberish or UI technicalities, just think about how much interpretation goes into determining where you put that fat thumb of yours on an iPhone. There’s nothing precise about it (unless you use a stylus); it’s all about prediction and accommodation. I know there are people who have gotten pretty good at, say, sketching on the iPad, but let’s be honest here: they’re doing parlor tricks, and someone concerned with the precision and accuracy of his strokes isn’t going to leave it up to Apple’s blob-interpolation software. I don’t know what advances are in store for us. It may be that somehow the benefits of indirect interaction will be annulled by some advance in direct input, or by the cleverness of a generation of UI designers working in a mouse-optional world. Yet I can’t see how they can overcome the obvious advantages indirect interaction brings to situations like gaming and art. One thing is for sure, though: you can pry my mouse from my cold, dead hands.
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| Help Key: Watch Netflix from outside the U.S. Posted: 31 Jul 2010 07:53 AM PDT
In Europe we also have online movie services. They are completely useless unless you are prepared to pay 3€ ($5) for a single movie for 24 hours. The content of these services is not very satisfying either. This is of course not an option for people who know that such things as Netflix exist. In Germany for example there are lawyers who make a living off scouting torrent trackers to see if you download a single MP3 or a movie. If they get you they will try to get your name and address from your ISP. First your ISP will refuse to hand your data to the rats. This leads to a pile up of legal costs. Finally 3-4 months later you will find a letter in the postbox saying that you have to pay a 1000€-5000€ + penalty because you downloaded something plus the legal fee that they spent on suing your ISP to give them your personal data. This has happened to many in Europe and while my solution is certainly not the best at least it’s not illegal (at least the swine will not come after you). So let’s get started. Even to be able to open Netflix.com you need a decent VPN service. Fortunately you can give in any address in the U.S. and you don’t need a matching credit card. I pay $11.50 per month for the HydeMyAss pro VPN service and so far I’m satisfied with it. They have Linux/OSX/Win7 clients and they work pretty well. Now the trick is that if you want to have a decent picture quality you can’t use a VPN since it will slow down your connection pretty much. Once you have a Netflix subscription and a VPN service subscription, do the following:
Now I’m able to watch Netflix in HD from Germany (or from anywhere else). You can do the trick with WMC and this should even work with the Xbox 360 extender although I didn’t try. Also when you are watching series you can stay in the session; you don’t have to do the trick every time you want to watch the next episode. Just click play next. Overall the whole thing costs $9 for the unlimited Netflix subscription and $11.50 for the VPN pro monthly. That’s just over $20. Cheaper than a 5000€ fishing expedition. This way you can watch many other online services. For example Top Gear on BBC2 or Hulu. The speed trick, however, only works on Netflix. Be sure to experiment though.
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