User Interfaces For Touch Screens? 18
BSemrad asks: "I am writing a large application that must run on a normal desktop PC and in an industrial environment (again on a PC) using only a touch screen for input. I am looking for suggestions on Widget/UI toolkits that make it possible to write an application where the fonts and controls are expanded by about 200% for the touch screen environment and are normal sized for the desktop environment. Using dynamic sizing for dialogs and screen controls this should be possible, shouldn't it?"
Dear god.. (Score:2)
1. Many toolkits aren't resolution independant and don't scale gracefully.
2. GTK can be liquid and slightly resolution independent for the simple UI widgets - but it's really still based around pixels and you can't scale tewers in any such way without breaking. BeOS's toolkit is heavily pixel based (try increasing widget sizes and watch even the preinstalled software break!).
3. Qt is a little better. Java's Swing is quite good for this type of thing, too.
4. If you don't mind the Motif'ish look try Fulltick [fltk.org].
5. I like number 5.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
Just Use Different Screen Resolutions (Score:1)
Do custom interfaces! (Score:3)
But if you're writing something even moderately complicated, you should look at doing custom interfaces for both. Why? A number of reasons.
The big one is that interaction styles in desktop and touchscreen environments are generally pretty different. Early touchscreen proponents ignored this, resulting in a lot of problems, including gorilla arm [tuxedo.org]. Fingers are also much bigger and less precise than mouse pointers. This suggests that touchscreens should work hard to make common choices much bigger, to give more macro-ish buttons that perform common sequences, and generally make frequent activities very easy.
Another important reason is that people sitting at a desk are generally in a very different frame of mind then people at a kiosk or running a big piece of machinery. At a desk, you are generally physically comfortable and familiar with your environment; you're also likely to have fewer distractions and be more familiar with the software. In common touchscreen environments, though, people are usually standing or just stopping for a moment, and they're much more likely to be inexpert users. So with a touchscreen, you should probably make the basic interface much simpler: enlarge or emphasize more important information; shrink or remove less important information; relegate rarely used options to other pages; make on-line help more simple and direct; and so on.
Also, a number of the standard GUI widgets don't work as well in touch-screen environments. You'll note that most kiosks only have buttons, with the occasional radio button or checkbox set; there are no pull-down menus (and especially no hierarchical menus), few pop-up lists, scrolling lists, or tabs. And any text or number entry field has to provide a pop-up keyboard.
But if you really can't afford to develop two UIs, then there's a very simple solution: use the touchscreen monitor at a low resolution. An interface that works pretty well at 640x480 on a 15" touchscreen should be adequate on a 1280x1024 17" desktop. But if you do a combined desktop+touchscreen interface, you must do some user testing. Jakob Nielsen's site useit.com [useit.com] has many good hints, including an articles on doing budget user testing [useit.com] plus boss-friendly explanations of why spending a little money on user testing has big payoffs in the long run [useit.com].
Go look at newer copiers (Score:1)
Many new copiers sport a rather clean looking touch screen interface. There are several things I like about the design of their interfaces:
Similarly, when I look at my Visor PDA, the apps I'm most likely to use when I'm on the run are those with easy to use controls--the kind I can mash with my thumb while I running through an airport! :) The other kind, like the default address book, are handy in their own way, but again, it depends on what the task is.
As a side note, I always thought it would be neat to have a touch-screen "keyboard" that you could reconfigure to support different key sequences (qwerty vs dvorak, or foreign keyboards). It could also be reprogrammed to support games, and even have manipulative controls on the keyboard.
Problem with this thing is the same problem as with most touch screens: humans rely heavily on tactile input to guide the performance of manipulative tasks. It's how we know how hard to grip a full cup of coffee, or how gently to grasp an egg, how we judge how hard to strike the egg to crack it, and how we know when our cracking efforts have been successful.
Suggestion to anyone out there who plays with mechanical engineering type things: make a touch screen-like interface with tactile feedback. You'll make a mint (and get a patent, too ;)
--
touch screens and vectors (Score:1)
basically you have to consider what they are going to veiw it on !
its pointless haveing big borders if the screen size is small (infact the window manager has to take on a differant look altogther see alan coxs small WM project on the Ipaq)
the fonts are pointless if the pixels take up a relitively large amount of the screen (I forget the proper name for this)
the ASPECT counts iff the screen is going to be square (the brutus board from intel featureing StrongARM has surport for 1024x1024 and its seen alot in custom chipsets for POS and information displays )
all of the windowing systems make a hack to run things easy otherwise you end up doing a MultiMuckup in flash/director or your Time to market suffers because you did it right and spent LOTS of time on development
What I AM DOING is looking for a way to heathly displaying ONLINE/OFFLINE content through the same way from something like VeiwML or Mozilla rendering the KDE 1.1 HTML render is very good and should be considered but I have to say that Microwindows is edgeing it for me because of the ease of dev work and how I can get the same program to run under WinCE with a few hacks
*****anyway consider your display env****
regards
john jones
Re:The WIPO Troll (Score:1)
Re:7th Post! (Score:1)
*wanks off for a bit*
Thank you. Carry on.
Re:Java/Swing with custom L&F (Score:1)
Don't reinvent the wheel (Score:1)
Why, oh why...? (Score:1)
Java/Swing with custom L&F (Score:2)
a screen mounted in a vehicle.
I ended up writing my own swing L&F. Actually, just just subclassed Metal.
That seemed to work very well. I limited my use to buttons, dropdown selectons of just 2-3 items, and a type of tabbed pane.
I basically make everything high contrast - black on white and judicial use of color with specific meanings.
The WIPO Troll (Score:1)
Re:The WIPO Troll (Score:1)
Why CmdrTaco sucks (Score:1)
Maybe I'm naturally oversensitive, or maybe someone just slipped me decaf coffee this morning, but Mr. Rob Malda will adopt or abandon any principle to obtain power. First things first: Everything I've said so far is by way of introduction to the key point I want to make in this letter. My key point is that there are some ribald lounge lizards who are contemptible. There are also some who are counter-productive. Which category does Malda fall into? If the question overwhelms you, I suggest you check "both". I oppose his philippics because they are resentful. I oppose them because they are scurrilous. And I oppose them because they will insist that our society be infested with irreligionism, obstructionism, terrorism, and an impressive swarm of other "isms" sooner or later.
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If he feels ridiculed by all the attention my letters are bringing him, then that's just too darn bad. Malda's arrogance has brought this upon himself. I didn't want to talk about this. I really didn't. But because of Malda's obsession with ethnocentrism, honor means nothing to him. Principles mean nothing to him. All he cares about is how best to put the gods of heaven into the corner as obsolete and outmoded and, in their stead, burn incense to the idol Mammon.
Malda's utterances are popular among what I call money-grubbing atrabilious vitriolic-types, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to accept them. I respect Malda's cop-outs, although I challenge him to point out any text in this letter that proposes that his reinterpretations of historic events enhance performance standards, productivity, and competitiveness. It isn't there. There's neither a hint nor a suggestion of such a thing. My intention here is not just to make a genuine contribution to human society, but also to enable all people to achieve their potential as human beings. As I make no claim to be an authority on the subject, I defer to the judgments of an Oxford University professor, who has observed that Malda recently stated that he can walk on water. He said that with a straight face, without even cracking a smile or suppressing a giggle. He said it as if he meant it. That's scary, because he not only lies, but he brags about his lying to his grunts. As is so often the case, his mercenaries have learned their scripts well, and the rhetoric comes gushing forth with little provocation.
Malda's foolhardy uncontrollable publicity stunts bring ugliness and nastiness into our lives. News of this deviousness must spread like wildfire if we are ever to put inexorable pressure on him to be a bit more careful about what he says and does. Malda smells like he anally raped his sister last night, too. If you understand that Malda's blind faith in frotteurism leads him only to corruption, then you can comprehend that Malda is the embodiment of everything petty in our lives. Every grievance, every envy, every intransigent debauched ideology finds expression in Rob Malda. I can repeat with undiminished conviction something I said eons ago: In a recent essay, he stated that profits come before people. Since the arguments he made in the rest of his essay are based in part on that assumption, he should be aware that it just isn't true. Not only that, but his thralls believe that "everything is happy and fine and good." First off, that's a lousy sentence. If they had written that Malda is unable to support his assertions with documentation of any sort, then that quote would have had more validity. As it stands, I cannot promise not to be angry at Malda. I do promise, however, to try to keep my anger under control, to keep it from leading me -- as it leads Malda -- to make mean-spirited pissants out to be something they're not. Malda's positions have no credibility. And here, I insist, lies a clue to the intellectual vacuum so gapingly apparent in Malda's harangues. To sum it all up, Mr. Rob Malda's worshippers amount to nothing more than dodgy party animals riding on the back of a social fungus attacking the body politic.
Re: Why CmdrTaco sucks (Score:1)
Re:Just Use Different Screen Resolutions (Score:1)
Re:fiR5t p0zT (Score:1)
Re: Why CmdrTaco sucks (Score:1)