5 Jun
2013
5 Jun
'13
12:21 a.m.
On Tue, Jun 04, 2013 at 11:28:28PM -0400, Mouse wrote:
It's stupid how often you find yourself rubbing a box on your desk
to try to get a picture of a finger to press a picture of a button.
(Pretty ridiculous considering most of us have almost a dozen real
fingers and a thing on the desk with more than 100 real buttons.)
The CAD terminals we had in college (IBM 5080 or something earlier?
my mind's gone blank -- it was on a 43xx machine running CADAM) had
external boxes with a gazillion buttons (IIRC the system could make
them light up individually so you knew which ones were relevant right
now), and there were overlay cards that labeled them for the software
you were using (kind of like the rubber keypad overlays for VT100s).
And of course you got to keep your main QWERTY keyboard w/o losing
any of its keys. Not a bad idea...
John
Likewise,
there are lots of MIDI input devices that are just arrays
of buttons and dials, exclusively for the purpose of controlling
auxiliary functions of MIDI devices like rack-mounted synths or
effects devices.
Sure. I'm really more interested in the human-factors questions of
"what kinds of input tasks do this device's human-interface properties
optimize it for?". The obvious one is what it evolved for, namely
music, but there probably are other tasks it's better than a
traditional mouse-and-keyboard for....