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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

my point is that most tasks are either ① best done in a good text editing / development environment

Your point is only correct if you replace the word "most" with "my." The fact that trackpads are hugely popular indicates that your needs are not typical, and you should not impose your choices upon others with different needs.

would be better done with a specialized non-keyboard, non-trackpad input device

Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen. Or zoom into a specific object without affecting other objects on a screen. Or configure to have multiple hotspots that when tapped can trigger events or macros.

Again, trackpads aren't your thing. Good for you. Other people love them, and millions of people get real work done on them each day.

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> Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen. Or zoom into a specific object without affecting other objects on a screen.

I agree with you in general, but a trackpad is in fact really, truly horrible for these tasks. As humans we are designed to rotate objects precisely, and that design does not involve using two fingers to slide about arbitrary locations on a flat plane. It involves grasping and rotating with the hand. For rotating and/or zooming, a large knob attached to a high-resolution encoder would be a million times better.

I think you missed the goal of the multi-purpose requirement. Proselytizing custom input controls for every possible task on a portable device is...weird.

Some dials would be pretty cool on a laptop, though... it just makes the lid harder to close.

Some dials would be good everywhere, I've considered buying some expensive keyboards (https://www.daskeyboard.com/) purely for a volume control knob.

A common complaint around here is about how touch screens have taken away better tactile controls, but so have our keyboards.

I also liked the dedicated scroll wheel on MS Office-themed keyboards. They might have gone overboard with the clipboard control buttons, but the wheel felt reasonable.

Ergo the Mac Touchbar.

How about a little sphere or oriented volume that magnetically levitates out of its cubby when the device is powered on -- and maybe the field could be varied to simulate different amounts of resistance ...

If you haven't looked at them before take a look at 3D mice. Commonly used in 3D modeling and CAD drafting they are the best at interacting with items in 3D space but I wouldn't actually like one for text/flat image interaction. Mapping 3D movements to a flat plane is less intuitive than it may seem if you haven't done it. Most the 3D professionals I know use a touchpad or regular mouse for 99% of the non-3D usage.

Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen.

The obvious answer to the challenge is a touchscreen.

I actually buy this conclusion for this use case, but in fairness the debate was "keyboard vs touchpad". So touchscreen > touchpad > keyboard for rotating objects. But for other things, having to reach up to the screen (e.g., scrolling), is worse than touchpad. With a trackpad, I only have to articulate my wrist while my arm remains resting on the surface; with a touch screen, I have to lift my whole arm and articulate my shoulder and elbow if not also my wrist.

> the debate was "keyboard vs touchpad".

I didn’t mean for it to be that exclusively. I tried to say that keyboards are the best text input device, but gaming mice and controllers are the best gaming input device, graphics tablets are the best graphics input device, and video editing input devices like the ones I linked in my original comment are probably best for video editing (while trackpads are at best decent scrolling/browsing devices, but IMHO I personally prefer keyboard scrolling like in the terminal pager less, the PDF and other document viewer Zathura, and vi-inspired browsers/browser plugins like luakit, qutebrowser, and Pentadactyl).

I'm not a touch screen fanatic but I think using your whole arm instead of just torquing your wrist all day is considered a feature?

Obviously it's not as great if the measure you're looking at is "how quickly can I go back to typing?".

I find the mouse better for zooming (scroll wheel) and rotating (click and drag). Second to that, for less articulate but quick performance of same task, using the touch screen to rotate and drag in the same way you would on a track pad but actually interacting with the imagery directly. The laptop keyboard and trackpad combo is fine, but to me they’re merely a convenience until I can get back to a “real” keyboard and a mouse. It’s not uncommon for me to spend hours using the laptop’s HIDs directly, but I don’t think it’s very ergo, and definitely not as productive as a full desktop setup. External trackpads don’t sell well for a reason - simply that if you have the desk space for one, almost everyone is better served by a good quality mouse.

>Your point is only correct if you replace the word "most" with "my." The fact that trackpads are hugely popular indicates that your needs are not typical, and you should not impose your choices upon others with different needs.

But Apple trackpads are not hugely popular, they have a fraction (~10%, likely less) of the global market. Does the fact that non-Apple computers are hugely popular indicate that the needs of Apple trackpad fans are not typical, and they should not extol their virtues to others?

> Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen. Or zoom into a specific object without affecting other objects on a screen. Or configure to have multiple hotspots that when tapped can trigger events or macros.

I’ve previously used a normal Apple mouse and keyboard to do all of these things in Adobe Photoshoshop and Illustrator on macOS and subsequently a random BestBuy mouse and ancient Compaq keyboard to do them in Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender on GNU (with xdotool for hot corners, which I’m counting as close enough to tapping hotspots). A graphics tablet would only work better.

> Again, trackpads aren't your thing. Good for you. Other people love them, and millions of people get real work done on them each day.

Again, non-Apple trackpads don’t seem to be your thing. Good for you. The majority of trackpad users use them every day.

I’ve previously used a normal Apple Magic mouse and keyboard to do all of these things

If you've used a Magic Mouse, then you've used a mouse with a trackpad on its back. Glad you liked it!

And no, rotating in Photoshop with the keyboard isn't the same as rotating with a trackpad. It's an entirely different process that is significantly less efficient, unless you already know the exact angle of rotation you want down to the 0.1°.

> If you've used a Magic Mouse, then you've used a mouse with a trackpad on its back. Glad you liked it!

My mistake. I used a standard Apple mouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Mighty_Mouse). I used its clickable scroll ball and squeeze functionality and suspect I would dislike the Magic mouse.

> And no, rotating in Photoshop with the keyboard isn't the same as rotating with a trackpad. It's an entirely different process that is significantly less efficient, unless you already know the exact angle of rotation you want down to the 0.1°.

IMO the ideal mouse + keyboard rotation style is Blender’s, which is more efficient in this scenario than a trackpad. But I still believe a graphics tablet would be objectively superior.

Have three graphics tablets, while they are FAR superior for art work they are not at all better for rotation. In fact I use blender on Mac and regularly use the trackpad to zoom and rotate because it's far more precise. Similar for 2D drawing, my favorite 2D environment is the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. I still rotate with two finger gestures.

You... you do realize that you can’t order a PC laptop with a Mac trackpad, right? No one is like, “I could have the Mac trackpad for the same cost, but I prefer the stuttery trackpad that moves the cursor and selects shit when my palm gets too close”.

> You... you do realize that you can’t order a PC laptop with a Mac trackpad, right?

You can as long as you can order x86 Macs with Bootcamp.

> No one is like, “I could have the Mac trackpad for the same cost, but I prefer the stuttery trackpad that moves the cursor and selects bleep when my palm gets too close”.

No, but there are plenty of people who think “I prefer no trackpad to accidentally swipe [—even if palm rejection is perfect, I want total hand —including finger— rejection—] at all”, from people who buy Macs and use the setting Apple provides to disable the trackpad when mice are plugged in, to people who use their Mac as a PC laptop and manually disable the trackpad (https://www.lakshmikanth.com/how-to-disable-trackpad-on-boot...), to people who try to more permanently disconnect broken old Mac trackpads (https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/386625/macbook-pro...), to people who physically disconnect their trackpads, to people who buy old thinkpads because eg. at least some x200s have only a trackpoint and fingerprint sensor.

It seems like you've moved the goalposts from your original claim/implication that non-Mac trackpads are more popular to "not everyone likes trackpads". As far as I know, no one has argued that everyone likes trackpads?

My implication was that the fact that many people use trackpads doesn’t somehow prove that trackpads are a good tool (as reaperducer seemed to imply) (despite the fact that people can’t easily get laptops without them) any more than the fact that many people use non-Apple trackpads somehow proves that non-Apple trackpads are better (despite the fact that many people can’t easily get laptops they like without them).

but I believe you can buy a bluetooth apple keyboard with mousepad built in

For iPad.

> But Apple trackpads are not hugely popular, they have a fraction (~10%, likely less) of the global market.

The person you're replying to said "trackpads are popular" with no mention of Apple. Your entire argument so far has been against trackpads in general. Why shift goalposts?

The comment I was replying to was ~⅔ quasi argumentum ad populum. So I replied to their quasi argumentum ad populum with examples of it applied to the broader context of the thread, including the comment I originally replied to, and replied to their other argument with counterpoints both with and without Apple hardware.

Is it even called a "trackpad" outside of Apple machines? I'm pretty sure they're called "touchpads" generally. So maybe "trackpad" is inherently referent to Apple.

> Is it even called a "trackpad" outside of Apple machines?

Yes.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/faqs/laptop-faqs/what-is-a-trac...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-trackpad-settings/...

http://support.blackberry.com/kb/articleDetail?articleNumber...

https://edgeup.asus.com/2019/the-asus-screenpad-2-0-lets-the...

https://wikidiff.com/trackpad/touchpad

Trackpad and touchpad are generic synonyms according to every source I can find.

I'm not sure that they actually are. Touchpad was the name I always heard for that kind of input, remember they're not only used in computers.

I don't have the data but I think this is like the motherboard / logic board split. In other words "trackpad" may be Apple for "touchpad".

> I don't have the data but

I gave you data by showing links where other companies like Blackberry, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Asus use the word "trackpad" themselves for their own devices. Lenovo even cutely capitalizes the P to fit their ThinkPad branding. You could also google around and see random people on reddit and elsewhere talking about the "trackpads" on their dells, hps, vaios, matebooks, and so on.

I'm not saying that "touchpad" isn't more common, but the evidence _clearly_ shows that "trackpad" isn't exclusive to Apple devices.

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