Comment by Tharkun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tharkun | Hacker News Reader

Anything that vaguely pretends it's a button without being one deserves to burn in hell for all eternity. This includes touch screens, capacitive or otherwise, and any other such nonsense. If I'm meant to press it, make it obvious and use a button. If I'm meant to slide it, give me a slider. Turn? Give me a knob. How hard can it be, seriously?

As for engineers moaning about the life time of switches, puh-please. Show me one phone with buttons that has outlived its buttons. You can't? Didn't think so.

What really needs to go is this touchy cult. It's ridiculous. There are a couple of things where it makes sense. Angry Birds is not one of them. Anything else is just a useless fad. Especially touchy keyboardy crap that NO ONE can type on. Show me one person who can type 150WPM (and I don't mean swipe or predict or any such crap) on a touch screen and I'll go out and buy an iPhone.

Alright then. Nothing wrong with peculiar opinions but you know that your opinion is very peculiar, right? Software keyboards, for example, can be valuable for people even if nobody can type 150 words per minute on them.

What input device would be the best way to play Angry Birds, then? Having played the Mac App and Chrome App versions, I definitely think touch makes the most sense.

A custom device including one knob to control the angle and one (physical) slider to control the strength. I know this is stupid when thinking about a casual game, but it would totally make sense to me if my job was to "play angry birds 8 hours a day".

My point is that proper "physical" controls are better for almost every task out there. The obvious downside is that you can't make them appear and disappear depending on the current application being executed ;)

Can anyone type 150WPM on a non-touch screen phone?

That's twice what the typical professional typist can do. But I'm sure some people might be able to hit that speed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute for more.

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