Cleaning my USB flash drive

[dhromed]

@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

I'm saying is that the keyboard is increasingly becoming redundant. [...]People are still going to need to enter text from time to time, but it might be a rarely used function

 

Lawl what the fuck?

Are you in this thread? Are you even online? Have you seen websites? You're downplaying the significance of automatic rifles while standing in the middle of a warzone, firing your weapons. Just look at this thread. Half the typed stuff is yours.

You're not seriously proposing that with a less functional keyboard (such as an on-screen keyboard on the iPhone), any sort of large-scale textual production would continue to exist? I'm talking about books, forums, web articles, the lot. It would be gone. No author would be practically able to produce large bodies of text anymore.

You say, "but the key here is that most people never (or very rarely) write anything longer than a twitter message." But that's not a future development, it's already here. I'm pretty sure that with the advent of twitter and SMS, most people have begun producing more text.

That's the one effect computers have had: people write more text. They don't need less keyboard, they need more keyboard! Or rather, they need better keyboards. Certainly they do not the vestigial item that you so happily foresee in your bright future.

It's just the way things are going. I was looking for a holiday on-line the other day, and I didn't touch the keyboard once I'd typed in my initial google search

How would you have performed this task by typing in the first place? HELLO, of course you didn't use the keyboard: you weren't typing text.

Ditz.

In this quote of yours, I've removed the middle part, connecting the crucial start and end:

Next time you're sitting at home browsing the web - not posting on forums, or writing emails, or such. [...] Good riddance.

[davedavenotdavemaybe]

I'm not sure you're doing anything other than reinforcing my point, which is that the discussion here is focussing on how we use computers at the expense of realising that we are not in any sense a mainstream case.

Of course people who input large quantities of text are going to need a text input system at least as effective as a keyboard. That's never going to change. What is changing is the proportion of total users that they represent. Already, a significant fraction of devices that can surf the web - smartphones, Ipads, consoles - don't have keyboards.

As I said, there are an awful lot of people who never write anything longer than a Twitter message on their home PC. They don't actually need a PC as we know it, and the trend is increasingly away from that. To talk about where things are going, instead of just where they've been in the past, you have to understand that good UI design will not be able to assume people have a real keyboard attached.

[blakeyrat]

@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

Already, a significant fraction of devices that can surf the web - smartphones, Ipads, consoles - don't have keyboards.

All three of those things have keyboards. They're software keyboards, but they're there.

@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

To talk about where things are going, instead of just where they've been in the past, you have to understand that good UI design will not be able to assume people have a real keyboard attached.

I'd actually much rather people not assume the pointing device is a mouse. A lot of websites break because their rollover effects don't work if you're using a touchscreen or stylus. Especially bad are the sites that hide functionality behind a rollover, so when you're using your smartphone you're just looking at the site confused as hell because there's no way to reveal the link you're trying to hit.

[davedavenotdavemaybe]

@blakeyrat said:

@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

Already, a significant fraction of devices that can surf the web - smartphones, Ipads, consoles - don't have keyboards.

All three of those things have keyboards. They're software keyboards, but they're there.

I'd class those under the alternative input systems I was talking about. Bloody awful ones, by the way, and not sufficient for entering more than a very few words.

@blakeyrat said:

I'd actually much rather people not assume the pointing device is a mouse. A lot of websites break because their rollover effects don't work if you're using a touchscreen or stylus. Especially bad are the sites that hide functionality behind a rollover, so when you're using your smartphone you're just looking at the site confused as hell because there's no way to reveal the link you're trying to hit.

Absolutely. I'm probably not going far enough. If you want to generalise more, the trend over the whole lifespan of the computer has been away from being tied down by the machines. First you had to have a whole building just for a computer; then you could put a PC on a desk in any building. More recently, we've started to move away from being tied to desks, with things like laptops, wireless input devices, and so on. Eventually, we're going to move away from being tied to a machine at all, rather than just being able to move the machine around easily.

[blakeyrat]

@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

@blakeyrat said:

@davedavenotdavemaybedave said:

Already, a significant fraction of devices that can surf the web - smartphones, Ipads, consoles - don't have keyboards.

All three of those things have keyboards. They're software keyboards, but they're there.

I'd class those under the alternative input systems I was talking about. Bloody awful ones, by the way, and not sufficient for entering more than a very few words.

One word: Swype.

[Lingerance]

@Joeyg said:

Last I checked it was nearly impossible, and with KDE things are not much better.

I don't know about GNOME, but KDE has a huge list of things you can bind to keyboard shortcuts. However, it's extremely tedious to actually make bulk changes to it, so I got frustrated and went back to wmii.
@Joeyg said:

Linux GUI's are a joke when it comes to keyboard accessibility.

Maybe the mainstream ones are. But wmii lets you do anything you'd need to with the keyboard.
@Joeyg said:

One major offender is PCB.

Only thing I could find for "PCB" was a game.

[Joeyg]

@Lingerance said:

@Joeyg said:

Linux GUI's are a joke when it comes to keyboard accessibility.

Maybe the mainstream ones are. But wmii lets you do anything you'd need to with the keyboard.

Thanks. I'll check it out.

@Joeyg said:

One major offender is PCB.

Only thing I could find for "PCB" was a game.

That's another oddity of the project:

http://pcb.gpleda.org/

(To get to it you need to Google 'geda' and follow the gEDA site to the PCB page.)

And the code inside of there is horrific. Saint-like compared to the stuff on this website, but still pretty awful. Lots of repetition (the 'open dialog' function reads the requested window title to determine what filename filters to use), hard-coded UI stuff (every keyboard shortcut) (more than half is in the gpbc-menu.res file, but a lot is strewn randomly throughout the code), and a bizarre event-driven program model, with events triggering other events ad-nauseum. And every event handler looks like this:

[code]
void toggle_button_cb()
{
static gboolean b_in_callback;
if(b_in_callback == 1)
return;
else
b_in_callback = 1;

...

b_in_callback = 0;

}
[/code]

Because otherwise the event handlers would trigger each other in loops.