zandravandra

turning people into catgirls

~author/streamer/gamedev~ appreciator of colorful wigs


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margot
@margot

my friends and i all fantasize about cyberdecks and sometimes i’ll daydream about a pocket sized device i can use as a computer. which is funny bc my phone is literally a tiny computer in my pocket. but it’s so restrictive of course it doesn’t even enter my mind as an option


nex3
@nex3

I really believe that the core issue with phones-as-computers is just the input schema. It's so difficult to type accurately at speed, to select things on screen accurately, or to use any more complex inputs (analogous to right-clicking or keyboard modifiers like ctrl) that it severely limits the possibility space of the devices as tools. Obviously the corporate motivation to make the user beholden to rent-seeking app stores plays into this, but even if you wanted to go off and create a new phone OS that really works like a real computer you'd be dead in the water.

I occasionally fantasize about what it would take to change this. I think you could come up with some sort of gloves that would register specific finger movements as "typing", but they'd take so much work to learn I don't know how they'd ever get enough traction to be feasible.


zandravandra
@zandravandra

like 20 or 30 years ago I always imagined that eventually computers would just be a tiny box or other nice-form-factor easy to carry thing that just projected a screen somewhere and then projected a keyboard onto the nearest flat surface that you could type on

nowadays I'm a little surprised that with all the AR stuff we haven't gotten a phone that can just Do That


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in reply to @margot's post:

Me: wishing I had a tiny clamshell pocket computer with a keyboard and trackpad

Me, everytime I have used a tiny thumbpad keyboard like this: this sucks actually lol

oh yeah they’re bad. i don’t rly have a good solution— i was daydreaming about a little rfid tag in my finger that would let me tap out things in morse code

These days there's a variety of two-fold/tri-fold keyboards that you can stick in a pocket/bag, though the quality is roughly that of a cheap laptop.

Some people build themselves foldable mechanical keyboards using Cherry MX Ultra Low Profile switches, but that's higher-effort.

There is also a "keyboard sandwich" design called ErgoTravelXT.

this is super cool and also like, too large and too thick to be what i'd call 'pocketable' and in just the formfactor where i'd kind of wish i was just bringing a normal laptop with me if i'm putting it in a bag anyway.

in reply to @nex3's post:

Add a stylus. That's it.

Compared to a modern phone, PalmOS devices had tremendously less powerful CPUs, less storage, worse batteries and displays, but crucially they had an input device that made it possible to quickly and accurately interact with relatively dense user interfaces.

A stylus doesn't occlude a display nearly as much as a thumb or finger, and can reach the entire screen with uniform ease, whereas touch displays highly prioritize screen real estate in radial patterns from the corners, where a thumb can reach.

Graffiti was a bit slower than a Blackberry-style thumb-keyboard, but fairly quick once learned, and could easily form a wide range of punctuation characters that are hidden under awkward layers on modern touch keyboards.

I always think about my old e71, which had a good fullish keyboard and basically a dpad. It was so, so lovely to use, dramatically slower in every way than a modern device, but it's hard to think of tasks that it would have actually been much slower at

I've long been surprised that there never was more iteration around dasher-like input. That worked pretty well with a stylus, and had a easier learning curve than Graffiti.

The main issue with dasher was that it got awkward when you needed a word/acronym that the model wasn't trained on. That was the sort of situation where Graffiti-like input excelled.

my only idea is a device w a retractible and small but still technically Full Sized keyboard. it could be thin w not a lot of feedback on the keys but itd be something

that or we all learn steno

I'm skeptical too.

Tap-based interfaces tend to fail for the following reasons: tapping on surfaces with no travel or give for long periods is ergonomically awful, input detection and classification performance tends to be good enough for a demo but not real-world use, the learning curve involved, and cost.

On top of that, there are all the reasons that wearable devices tend to fail. (Fashion, the inconvenience of wearing something that needs frequent charging, comfort & sizing, wear and tear on the device, and situations where a user needs to remove the device tend to be far more frequent than designers think.)

maybe it's finally time for that one-handed keyboard thing from the douglas engelbart mother of all demos... put that on the back of your phone so you can see the full screen still. also make everybody learn a wacky new typing method

it wouldn't help much with typing, but adding some modifier buttons (right click, middle click, control, shift, etc.) down the side (or maybe back) of the phone would certainly improve things

in reply to @zandravandra's post:

There were once some novelty projected keyboard things. Expensive, and the people who tried them all agreed: the springy nature of a real keyboard absorbs impact better than hard desk top.