
I was eating my lunch while reading this
It made for a rather uncomfortable few minutes.
Coffee on keyboard icon. Except not coffeee.
Currently, my most generous client has conspired to have me surrounded by shiny glass and plastic rectangles between the hours of 6pm and 6am. Working night shifts always seems a little exotic at first for namby-pampy light-lubbers like myself but the novelty eventually wears off as vitamin D levels decline. iMac monolith …
>> I wouldn't be surprised if the porn industry haven't been pouring large amounts of dosh into the R&D
Congratulations, Andrew, for being the first to identify this week's 'story behind the story'. The potential for innovative porn products is *exactly* what I wanted to write about. However, putting the words 'Disney' and 'pornography' in the same sentence (as I have just done here, I suppose) tends to get our lawyers nervous and Disney's lawyers reaching for the yacht brochures. On that note, you should have seen what I wrote about Will.I.Am before it got cut.
>> Will you be getting a Leap Motion controller, Mr Dabs?
That's double B to you, Dave. Not sure about the Leap - it looks too imprecise for working with windowed software interfaces. Successfully tapping on a close button or choosing a tool from a toolbar could take all day. Mind you, that's what I used to think about trackpads until I became skilled with them.
My apologies, Mr Dabbs.... and I posted from a laptop so I can't blame my error on a touch-screen keyboard.
Re things like the Leap, I'm looking on with interest to see what sort of interfaces people devise. Merely transplanting a 'point and click' interface to it will probably be no more successful than using desktop GUI on a tablet, or using a mouse to control a flight simulator.
"Disney Research – yes, such a thing exists – has been working on a project called Revel that sends an electric current through your body to your fingertips"
I'm pretty sure another el reg columnist has had working prototypes of this for some time now. Paging Mr Travaglia to the Mickey-Mouse shaped courtesy phone!
I had a turn with a capacitative screen a few years ago. Multitouch didn't arise. Accuracy did. And a metal pen
didn't really work, but an old cheap felt-tip pen with all of the ink washed out of it and a hole chopped out of the side of it into the main felt body, which was well moistened, meant that I could hold it and, hmm, capacitate from my hand touching the wet body of the pen, down to the tip. However, for my specific need of onscreen keyboard use (Fitaly is the product, I have a keyboard disability), I preferred Wacom floaty pen pointing combined with an ordinary mouse or trackball to click on what I was pointing at. Oh, and a little circle as cursor pointer instead of the Windows standard arrow.
The screen cleaner probably isn't up to dealing with your grease. Try water with washing-up liquid in, or some sort of human-body-oriented soap, but switch devices off before applying.
Finger grease is surprisingly present, even soon after a good hand wash with soap and water.
It is also surprisingly tenacious on these supposedly oleophobic screens.
The solution: microfiber cleaning cloths. I bought a package of 20 10"x10" disposable ones from a hardware store, and they work great! No cleaning fluid needed. Two or three good swipes & the screen looks new (much too shiny).
The only caution is to make sure the cloths do not pick up abrasive grit (which is hazard regardless of cloth type).
When I first went shopping for an Android phone, the Motorola Droid on display literally looked like the dog had licked it. It had a layer of greasy smears that made me a bit queasy to look at it. The one I bought was no better, but at least all the grease was mine.
My Nexus 4 is a lot better in this department. I don't know if it's the Gorilla Glass or just some new coating but it takes a lot to show a smear.
Speaking of the old resistive screens, they can be made with a rough surface that doesn't show grease, but they also drift in calibration. Note that you never have to calibrate your iPad/Galaxy/Droid but doing the "click upper left/lower right/middle" dance was at least a monthly activity with my Palm units.
My Palm Tx had such a cheap resistive screen that after a few weeks of playing solitaire, the calibration drifted so far that you couldn't click the buttons on the recalibration program. I RMA'ed it and had a 2nd & 3rd unit do the same thing before I twigged that it was the swiping from solitaire. If I stopped playing solitaire and left it sit for a week, the calibration drifted back.