Opposable thumbs make tablets more useful says Microsoft Research Microsoft Research has come up with an interesting idea – user interfaces designed specifically for thumb-plus-stylus use on tablet computers. The company's brain box likes this idea because when you use a stylus-capable fondleslab you devote your strong hand to the task of wielding the stylus while your weaker hand gets the …
>but because other OEMs were making the devices, these ideas were never implemented.
But Microsoft were making the OS and effectively controlled the UI and hence, just as they decided to fix the locations of furniture in window frames, the position of the start button etc. they could very easily have decided to provide a set of on-screen "mouse button" controls placed so that they could be thumb driven. Only as we know one of the problems has been developing touch screens that work well with both finger and stylus input.
"The original Microsoft Tablet PC team worked this out nearly 20 years ago, but because other OEMs were making the devices, these ideas were never implemented."
Do you have any verifiable citations for that, that MS invented the thumb-plus-stylus interface and the OEMs failed or refused to implement it.
I have no proof, but the swivel tops from the early 2000's were most certainly NOT designed for thumb interaction with the screen. In fact, it was recommendef to lay the touch device/laptop in an outstretched arm pivoting it to either your uppet arm or chest, while grasping the bezel firmly in your hand. Look at any manual for a swivel top and you'll see that.
That said, and without proof again, there may of been models that let the holding arm interact witb push buttons (I actually know of one that had a spacebar'ish button, but I never owned it and can't even recall 1 lettet in the manufacturers name... Wacom? Voodoo? Don't know...).
Anyways, is using a thumb to navigate menus really revolutionary? I sat here and typed this entire post, navigated html menus and the character applet with my left thumb.
This may seem like a cool idea at first but all it really does is restrict your options. The more the interface is going to rely on this new selection option, the less you can do while holding the tablet in your hand when you're standing.
But hey... it's about that time of the year when Microsoft needs to introduce something new in order to try and rekindle software and hardware sales I guess.
I don't think it has to *rely* upon this method. Traditional desktop applications already have multiple ways of achieving a single command - menu bar, context menu, alt keyboard menu navigation, ctrl keyboard shortcuts, touchpad gestures, mouse button modifiers, radial menus.
You are right that this control method can't be used all the time, so the return on investment of developing 'muscle memory' will be lower... but it appears to be an easily 'discoverable' input method.
Indeed, the main issue people had with MS's Ribbon interface is that removed the traditional menus. I use an application where a Ribbon-type control palette is an option in addition to menus, and I use both.
>The more the interface is going to rely on this new selection option, the less you can do while holding the tablet in your hand when you're standing.
From watching the video, it is obvious the main envisaged use case is when a person is using their fingers to prop up the tablet and so the thumb is free to move, so to some extent your concern is valid.
However, with a tablet such as the ipad when standing you hold the tablet with the fingers on the back and the base of the thumb on the surround, leaving the thumb free to either provide a third point of contact and stability control or to perform simple actions like pressing the single home button.
So I suggest, provided the thumb controls are kept very simple, like the mouse with 1~3 buttons and possibly a slider/scroll bar, I think they will add to the UX.
Additionally, the use of a handle (https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/3173028 ) through which a hand can be placed and thus enable the back of the hand to be used, would permit the fingers to use simple controls placed on the back of the tablet. This however, whilst probably useful to someone standing using the tablet, would make using the tablet on the lap possibly less comfortable.
That has also been looked at for many years. You could have finger set or chord modes appropriate to cases where tablets are being held. It's not far from having fingerprint sensors on the rear of cameras as a login mechanism - I actually find the current Samsung galaxy rear mounted sensor to be quite easy to use.
Eh? It's Android and iOS tablets that are largely used as content consumption devices.
Engineers, artists, site surveyors, product designers amongst others would have a use for using tablets as productivity tools - indeed MS's Win XP Tablet Edition existed before the iPad and other ARM tablets. Your comment is a little curious, given that the ability to run a large range of existing producivity software is an advantage Windows tablets have over Android tablets.
"Engineers, artists, site surveyors, product designers amongst others would have a use for using tablets as productivity tools"
I always thought that too, but now that I work for an architecture firm, and I discovered that they largely don't.
Sure, some of them have WACOM tablets for freedrawing... but they barely use them. We get them high-end hybrid laptop/tablets... and they ignore the touchscreen and stylus in 99% of cases. The actual cases where you want to do technical drawing freehand rather than in CAD software are pretty small, and the number of cases where CAD software is better on a touchscreen are more or less non-existent - even those few applications which have a touchscreen mode, they usually prefer to turn it off. The only real use case for it is preliminary sketching, which is such a vanishingly small part of the job it's not worth using a device. They just use a bit of paper and a pencil, even though they have electronic sketching available.
Ultimately, the tablet form factor is great for consuming information and friggin' useless for producing it. That's not really likely to change. Nor do I really see any reason why it would have to, aside from allowing Gartner to save some face over their idiotic predictions of the death of the 'traditional PC' back in 2012.
The only real use case for it is preliminary sketching, which is such a vanishingly small part of the job it's not worth using a device. They just use a bit of paper and a pencil, even though they have electronic sketching available.
There is the other real use, markup. For a field engineering project a touchscreen tablet is a really good way of capturing as-found and as-modifed complete with annotations and have the information directly uploaded, rather than have pen and paper and the associated workflows and quality issues that arise from having a third-party transcribe the handwritten technical notes (even if they have been written using an Anoto pen).
However, cost is a big factor. The problems are firstly being able to justify having an 'expensive' device to do only part of the job and secondly for that device to be sufficiently robust for usage in the field environment at a reasonable cost. This problem in my experience has bedevilled Panasonic Toughbook sales - clients want 'Toughbooks' until they see the price premium and then ask whether similar results could be achieved with cheaper mass market laptops...
I think also in the use cases we describe, the capabilities of the technology both in the device and behind the device play a major part in the utility. Thus being able to sketch on a tablet is of little value if the sketch isn't easily and quickly available (ie. with little if any user intervention) on another device eg. CAD station - available to either that user or a relevant colleague; this is a fundamental part of ubiquitous computing. Unfortunately, neither the Apple or MS cloud visions really support full functional ubiquitous computing as demonstrated back in the 1980's at Palo Alto Research Labs and given their current trajectories I don't see either of them massively improving their offering in the next 5 years...
"Thus being able to sketch on a tablet is of little value if the sketch isn't easily and quickly available (ie. with little if any user intervention) on another device eg. CAD station"
Even there, as the construction industry moves away from old-school CAD-based technical drawing (eg, Microstation and suchlike, which basically just allow you to do the same thing architects have done for 300 years only faster) and toward 3D Building Information Modelling, the usefulness of a hand-drawn sketch or markup is slowly disappearing too - the buildings are being literally built in Revit from programming-style classes instead of drawn, so interaction with the model is becoming increasingly dependent on a fully interactive data-rich environment.
Tablets not only lack the sheer grunt needed to open such models, but would be a nightmare to try and interactive with effectively when what you really want is an 8-button mouse and a full keyboard of shortcuts.
Before the iPhone turned smartphones into fashion devices, everybody was doing it, even Microsoft.
Essentially you have a screen on top and a thumb operated keyboard on the bottom. Then you have a pen as a position device.
Here's an example for such a device as Figure 1 of a Microsoft ad:
https://www.microsoft.com/msj/0598/wince.aspx
Here's one you can buy:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA8YE3S81985
And here's one from Nokia with a built-in phone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator
The problem back then was two fold. First of all, back then newer operating systems needed a lot more CPU power than older ones. A 3 year old computer was essentially useless. So on a mobile device, where you have severe hardware limitations, you typically ran some severely stripped down OS, for example Windows CE.
The second problem was, that wireless data connections were rather expensive. Of course Wifi would have been an option, but most mobile phone vendors refused to have it.
Luckily we now have products like the "Pocket Chip", the Pyra and perhaps later the Gemini.
The only thing missing now is a common hardware platform so the software could actually evolve.
Windows tablets for some time have had an option to produce an on-screen keyboard in two halves, bottom left and bottom right corners of the screen. So they''ve already exploited thumbs.
See here: https://www.groovypost.com/howto/windows-10-split-on-screen-keyboard/
I think one previous version included a sort of dial arrangement of keys in the corners, instead of the regular touch keyboard sawn in half.
I prefer the alternate touch keyboard FITALY, leveraged with a macro script that repeatedly located it on top of the Windows task bar - right side or bottom of screen - so that it isn't imposed over an application window. Used with finger touch / swipe or stylus.
the first time I designed a set of web pages to be reasonably responsive to screen size I designed the nav option for small form factors to pop up via an element located in what I thought was the most suitable location for hitting it with a thumb. One side of the screen for tablets, the other side for phones I decided...
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