Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Stray observations:

1. kids are awesome

2. she only got frustrated once, and that was when she couldn't get back to the home screen. With the hint "press the button; the big button" she felt in control (and happy).

3. By this point I'm thinking how I would simulate her investigative behavior in software. It's not systematic, but it's oh so efficient.

4. the confidence with which she dragged the letters to the "learn a word" app. First hesitantly, a moment later she fully expected the scrabble block under her finger to move along. You can spot the difference because she stopped checking whether the letter would follow her finger, she knew it would.

5. Confusion when she put her left hand on the edge of the iPad. This is where the immersion breaks and she needed a hint to get back on track. In fairness, most adults who try an iPhone for the first time make the same mistake, if you can even call it that.

6. The confidence with which the dad goes "Yup", knowing that she can't possibly do any damage to the device.

7. How she immediately goes into "piano mode" when a keyboard app appears on screen.

8 . It surprises me that she makes the same mistakes most adults do when trying a iPhone/iPad for the first time.

So much for my stray observations. Fascinating stuff.

I was about to comment on point 2, when I saw you covered it in point 5. I imagine that the resting touch problem could be solved with software, the iPhone keyboard for exams supports resting a finger on one key while you touch the next. I was surprised that it didn't work on the home screen, eg, ignore the touches from a resting hand.

The glib answer is this: You have a problem. You solve it with heuristics. Now you have two problems.

If I had to guess why Apple designed it this way? Here goes: Apple can't determine what a resting hand is as an abstraction, because sometimes a resting hand should do something (e.g. the pinch gesture; one static touch + one moving finger). So app developers would each have to implement their own heuristics to decide what's "probably" an accidental touch and what's "probably" a deliberate (but sloppy) tap. Result: you won't be able to predict anymore how the iPad will behave. That's far worse than having a predictable but imperfect system.

A good number of laptops I've tried have palm detection on their touch pads, if the contact patch too big to be a finger, then it it is not a finger and it is not a touch.

Probably wouldn't help in the case of a toddler's hands, but, as mentioned, the hand-on-edge is something many have trouble with.

yeah

Agreed. There is an "ignore accidental trackpad input" option in my MacBook's system preferences that I turned off for the first time a couple months ago, thinking "I'm a pro with this thing, I'm sure I don't accidentally touch it."

Boy was I wrong, and I was really surprised at how sensitive the thing was. After a couple minutes of the pointer jumping all over the place, I turned it back on, impressed with the algorithm that had been ignoring those accidental touches all along.

It's surprising how sensitive the capacitive sensor in Macbook trackpads can be. I found an app once that gave a visual indication of where touch events were occurring on the trackpad, and it can detect your finger before you're actually touching the pad.

Of course, the software and hardware is calibrated to have a specific threshold, but the fact that technology is commonplace that can detect when something is near it is just amazing. A former roommate's Dell laptop did the same thing - the controls on the side lit up when your finger got near it, so you didn't have to fumble for the buttons OR deal with annoying LEDs all the time.

This is part of the reason the iPhone always felt so fluid to me. I can flick a list, barely even grazing the screen, and the list will spin like a slot machine. It gives you such an immediate sense of powerful, accurate control that it's very gratifying to use.

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