lapisnev

Don't squeeze me, I fart

Things that make you go 🤌. Weird computer stuff. Artist and general creative type. Occasionally funny. Gentoo on main. I play rhythm games!

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I keep reaching for the power button on a 15 year old laptop because I'm expecting to wake it with a fingerprint unlock.

I keep double-tapping the screen on a 15 year old tablet because I'm expecting to wake it to show me the time.

Weirdly I do NOT do anything quirky with devices that interact via button presses. Form follows function and my brain can tell at a glance that any particular thing works differently from another.

Not so with touchscreens. Everything is a rectangular slab of glass nowadays and the function can change at any time.

What was so bad about buttons?

Also slider keyboards on phones are objectively cool, please give me that back immediately.


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in reply to @lapisnev's post:

i'm still not 100% sure what the point was to remove buttons. reduce mechanical issues? make it more watertight (definitely not)? i expect the main reason was only really to make phones more sleek and cool, but i haven't enjoyed it a ton.

i remember upgrading one of my phones and trying really hard to keep my menu button, but none of the new phones had it. it was important to me because sometimes my phone would lag and i'd hit the menu button to check how responsive it was, but without a physical menu button i couldn't even tell if my phone was registering the button press at all.

i also wasn't allowed a proper phone until the slider keyboard phase passed and im still sad i missed out on it 😔

(doing a quick search it seems like buttons were removed to both reduce chance of mechanical failure AND reduce phone size, since buttons take a good chunk of space, but i do wish there were more of a market for alternative phone designs)

I recall there are some cultures where, because replacing the power and home buttons was such a common repair on iPhones of the time, if you had a phone with a physical home button, you behave as if it's broken at all times and use the on-screen accessibility button instead. And everyone just universally agreed to do this.

So there's SOME market for devices with no buttons, but the thing is that there's still a market for the opposite as well! And since the market has shifted to no buttons, people who want them have no options, or else the random ewaste flip phone running KaiOS with enormous lettering meant for grandma.

yeahhh it's unfortunate 😔 i can def believe that some people just arent fans of buttons

i remember finding out a while back that japan(?) was putting out smart flip phones (not like the fold stuff that's currently going around) but i can't find anything on it right now, would be a signal for other cultures embracing different interests, though

will wait patiently for a smartphone with a slider keyboard...

i got a mixer board for mixing outputs from multiple computers & external devices together because having like thirty knobs is way more satisfying than a volume slider in a control panel

the output to my monitors goes through an analog preamp specifically because it has a physical volume knob I can adjust instead of the little slider in the system tray (I mean also because it has a headphone amp but...)

physical controls are cool, analog shit is cool

i specifically hate car consoles that replaced all the buttons and knobs with context-dependent touchscreens that can change function so there's no muscle memory of where anything is

i don't even drive but every single time i visit my family and there's a car involved, at some point, I'll have to work out how to turn on a defogger or change the radio or something because the menus are unfamiliar and the driver is busy... driving