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Comment by willio58 | Hacker News Reader

This is not a winner-take-all situation. Physical controls are better for some things, touch screens are better for others. Imagine a map without pinch to zoom, yuck. ATMs are an entirely different case. A lot of ATMs I use have _terrible_ touch screens.

Written on a touch screen.

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I have an old handheld gps unit without pinch-to-zoom (or a touch screen!) It has physical buttons for zoom in and out and honestly it works fine. In that I can easily use it one-handed and in the rain it may actually be superior to a touchscreen device.

I'd be interested to hear of cases where touch screens are an obvious win. Zooming a map is great, but you don't need touch for that. Physical controls.

I find zooming/panning/rotating maps without a touchscreen to be awkward on even the most modern car interfaces that I've tried with trackpad joysticks. IMO there's an obvious win there for touchscreens which can do all three in the same fluid movement.

The biggest advantage of touch screens is that they are infinitely reconfigurable. So things like phones where you can have dozens of different types of applications running in the span of a day they provide a clear win.

Another advantage is that you can share control space with display space but I think this is rarely a big advantage (other than the benefits described above in that you can reconfigure what is control-space and display space).

For most devices that aren't general purpose computers I don't think touchscreens are beneficial. For example in a car there isn't that much variability in what you do so there is little benefit of a touchscreen so it doesn't outweigh the downsides.

> The biggest advantage of touch screens is that they are infinitely reconfigurable

Not sure I buy this line of thought. A computer keyboard is an example of an infinitely configurable physical interface

Keyboards aren't really configurable at all. I mean sure, you can decide what each button does in a given context but at the end of a day you have a fixed number of buttons.

With a touchscreen you can change the size of the buttons, because if you have fewer options you can make them easier to hit. Or you can have (limited) other forms of control. You can have "analog" sliders and rotating dials.

Additionally you can configure between output and input which is valuable when you are space constrained. (which is probably not an issue in cars)

I'd happily take a jogwheel over pinch-to-zoom tbh.

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