4 ms·

WHy don't we have the tech to detect hover on touchscreens yet? Being able to hover your finger over certain points and quickly browse the options on a map wou

WHy don't we have the tech to detect hover on touchscreens yet? Being able to hover your finger over certain points and quickly browse the options on a map would be great.

gkya 8y ago
I'm a person without disabilities, rather slender fingers and quite some savvy w/ computers and I have difficult time not tapping stuff by mistake, not sloppily fat-thumbing stuff when I didn't even mean tapping anything or accurately tapping smallish things from among many others. I'd rather not deal with trying to not hover random stuff on top of that.
shados 8y ago
Dunno with fingers, but Wacom has that for their tablets, and it's quite lovely.
rralian 8y ago
Interesting. iPhones have the force tap. I assume android has something similar. We could use that as the hover action.
- rralian 8y ago
  Actually what am I thinking. The long tap (press?) makes sense as hover. And basically acts as that now.
  - Someone 8y ago
    It doesn’t make perfect sense, though, and (possibly because of that) doesn’t quite act as it now. With a mouse, the 3 actions - hover - click - double click form a sequence where each action is an extension of the previous one. Ideally, the actions triggered by them are extensions of the previous one, too. With the mouse, we have that: - hover = tell me more, but don’t really do anything - click = tell me more and select this item - double click = look, select, and open this item A big advantage of that is that it allows the interface to be faster. A GUI can react to a click by selecting an item without having to wait whether it will be part of a double-click, for example. ⇒ if we can’t get a real hover, in an ideal world, a softer or shorter finger tap, not a long one would mean “tell me about this”. I doubt we can shoe-horn that into the UI this late in the game, though.
lower 8y ago
> WHy don't we have the tech to detect hover on touchscreens yet? We do. Samsung used to have this on their phones (not sure if they still do): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRzUzRD9Y8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRzUzRD9Y8k
digi_owl 8y ago
"force touch"? Or adding a bit of that old resistive thingy to capacitive screens?
diabeetusman 8y ago
The Blackberry Storm (and Storm 2) made clicking in the screen the "tap" action and tapping (but not clicking) the screen the "hover"-equivalent action. I really liked the idea (and thought the hardware was pretty good on the Storm 2), but was too unusual on too-unpopular a phone to do much of anything.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  I worked on BB Storm. It was created by request from 'the major carrier that didn't get the iPhone contract' as an 'iPhone killer'. It was done with haste, and with specific, ugly requests from 'up on high' and was rolled out too early. BB never really understood how to do 'experience' - except in things at their core like battery length and keyboards. As nuanced and insightful as they were there ... it's like they considered everything else a joke, or didn't want to go deep. The whole screen on Storm moved - neat idea - should have never made it out of the lab. Or at least, not in the manner it was. It was possibly ahead of it's time as I could feasibly see Apple doing something like this - the new MacPro trackpads are very, very nice. So subtle. But it's all history now :)

WHy don't we have the tech to detect hover on touchscreens yet? Being able to hover your finger over certain points and quickly browse the options on a map would be great.

gkya 8y ago

I'm a person without disabilities, rather slender fingers and quite some savvy w/ computers and I have difficult time not tapping stuff by mistake, not sloppily fat-thumbing stuff when I didn't even mean tapping anything or accurately tapping smallish things from among many others. I'd rather not deal with trying to not hover random stuff on top of that.

shados 8y ago

Dunno with fingers, but Wacom has that for their tablets, and it's quite lovely.

rralian 8y ago

Interesting. iPhones have the force tap. I assume android has something similar. We could use that as the hover action.

rralian 8y ago
Actually what am I thinking. The long tap (press?) makes sense as hover. And basically acts as that now.
- Someone 8y ago
  It doesn’t make perfect sense, though, and (possibly because of that) doesn’t quite act as it now. With a mouse, the 3 actions - hover - click - double click form a sequence where each action is an extension of the previous one. Ideally, the actions triggered by them are extensions of the previous one, too. With the mouse, we have that: - hover = tell me more, but don’t really do anything - click = tell me more and select this item - double click = look, select, and open this item A big advantage of that is that it allows the interface to be faster. A GUI can react to a click by selecting an item without having to wait whether it will be part of a double-click, for example. ⇒ if we can’t get a real hover, in an ideal world, a softer or shorter finger tap, not a long one would mean “tell me about this”. I doubt we can shoe-horn that into the UI this late in the game, though.

lower 8y ago

> WHy don't we have the tech to detect hover on touchscreens yet? We do. Samsung used to have this on their phones (not sure if they still do): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRzUzRD9Y8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRzUzRD9Y8k

digi_owl 8y ago

"force touch"? Or adding a bit of that old resistive thingy to capacitive screens?

diabeetusman 8y ago

The Blackberry Storm (and Storm 2) made clicking in the screen the "tap" action and tapping (but not clicking) the screen the "hover"-equivalent action. I really liked the idea (and thought the hardware was pretty good on the Storm 2), but was too unusual on too-unpopular a phone to do much of anything.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
I worked on BB Storm. It was created by request from 'the major carrier that didn't get the iPhone contract' as an 'iPhone killer'. It was done with haste, and with specific, ugly requests from 'up on high' and was rolled out too early. BB never really understood how to do 'experience' - except in things at their core like battery length and keyboards. As nuanced and insightful as they were there ... it's like they considered everything else a joke, or didn't want to go deep. The whole screen on Storm moved - neat idea - should have never made it out of the lab. Or at least, not in the manner it was. It was possibly ahead of it's time as I could feasibly see Apple doing something like this - the new MacPro trackpads are very, very nice. So subtle. But it's all history now :)