4 ms·

quite old but its a really good experiment, while clicking seems fine for now, its a nightmare a lot of the time on touch screen interfaces, even clicking with

quite old but its a really good experiment, while clicking seems fine for now, its a nightmare a lot of the time on touch screen interfaces, even clicking with my trackpad is annoying. while its not completely without its annoyances, considering the limitations it handles itself pretty well, and is certainly a worthwhile experiment.

jerf 17y ago
It was a very good experiment; it proved to me it's a bad idea and could never work. No sarcasm. Negative results are results. It's demo-ware. Part of what I mean by that term are things that look good in the demo, but it turns out the demo is pushing the idea to the very limits. A demo of a good idea by necessity can only scratch the surface, not exhaust the idea. With demoware, it only works as long as you don't bring the idea into contact with the real world. It looks great as long as you stay in demoland, but that's it. See also: Purely visual general-purpose programming languages, 3D avatar-based chatting (not a game that also functions as a limited chat room, pure 3D chat).
- daleharvey 17y ago
  it didnt prove that to me at all. see the iphone, a usual way of scrolling it to click somewhere around the scrollbar, that obviously sucks especially on a small touch screen, so they use clickless gestures. while this experiment may not have directly influenced the iphone devs, it may have, and its in the same direction. our interfaces are terrible at the moment, anything that pushes innovation into smarter ways of working with computers is good in my book. I do agree that as a demo they pushed it to its limits, and that a lot of the cases its impractical, but there are positive lessons to be learnt that can be applied in real situations (like the iphone)
  - jerf 17y ago
    "they use clickless gestures." This is some fantastic new definition of "clickless" which I have been previously unaware of. You never remove your finger from the surface of your iPhone? I think you may be doing it wrong.
    - daleharvey 17y ago
      urm, I dont see what that has to do with the scroll gestures, unless you count swiping your finger across the screen as "clicking", which it isnt
      - jerf 17y ago
        You're sort of right, but not in the direction you think you are. Finger swipes and gestures carry more information than clicking. The entire point of the clickless interface is for the user to convey less information that clicking; as I've referred to it in another context, the author believes that the solution to the problems of "point and grunt" interfaces is to reduce it to a "point" interface. Modern mouse interfaces actually have more types of grunts (like the relatively recent scrollwheel innovation), and the iPhone multitouch is a way to get several types of grunts onto a touchscreen that previous had just tap and drag. Totally the opposite direction from this demo. If the iPhone developers carried anything away from this Flash demo, it was to head further away from this approach. Interestingly, I was about to post a conclusion to this post based on how nobody has ever adopted this interface for anything, but I just realized that as of yesterday (in the US), I am wrong. Totally serious. The new DS game Knights in the Nightmare uses this interface for combat. It is adapted to the touchscreen by making a persistent cursor that simply stays still if you remove the stylus (which in general is a bad idea in the game), and if you then touch some other part of the screen, the cursor will head straight for it with a maximum speed (so no teleporting around the screen). Weapons are deployed with dragging, commands are triggered with hovering and some light gesturing, and so on. It's interesting, but it's also a decent demonstration of why you don't want to use this for serious work. It's one thing when you trigger the wrong unit in a game, it's quite another when you delete the wrong file. Metacritic page for the game: http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ds/knightsinthenightmare http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ds/knightsinthenig... So, if you want to see who's right, you can now go try this interface out for a real product.
        daleharvey 17y ago
        its getting late so cant reply properly, but I dont believe the clickless interface is trying to make the user convey less information, but instead its trying to interpret information the user is already conveying in a smarter way, so they dont have to produce redundant information (the clicks). Im sure I know of one or two good uses of this in practice, but its late and they arent coming to me right now.

jerf 17y ago

It was a very good experiment; it proved to me it's a bad idea and could never work. No sarcasm. Negative results are results. It's demo-ware. Part of what I mean by that term are things that look good in the demo, but it turns out the demo is pushing the idea to the very limits. A demo of a good idea by necessity can only scratch the surface, not exhaust the idea. With demoware, it only works as long as you don't bring the idea into contact with the real world. It looks great as long as you stay in demoland, but that's it. See also: Purely visual general-purpose programming languages, 3D avatar-based chatting (not a game that also functions as a limited chat room, pure 3D chat).

daleharvey 17y ago
it didnt prove that to me at all. see the iphone, a usual way of scrolling it to click somewhere around the scrollbar, that obviously sucks especially on a small touch screen, so they use clickless gestures. while this experiment may not have directly influenced the iphone devs, it may have, and its in the same direction. our interfaces are terrible at the moment, anything that pushes innovation into smarter ways of working with computers is good in my book. I do agree that as a demo they pushed it to its limits, and that a lot of the cases its impractical, but there are positive lessons to be learnt that can be applied in real situations (like the iphone)
- jerf 17y ago
  "they use clickless gestures." This is some fantastic new definition of "clickless" which I have been previously unaware of. You never remove your finger from the surface of your iPhone? I think you may be doing it wrong.
  - daleharvey 17y ago
    urm, I dont see what that has to do with the scroll gestures, unless you count swiping your finger across the screen as "clicking", which it isnt
    - jerf 17y ago
      You're sort of right, but not in the direction you think you are. Finger swipes and gestures carry more information than clicking. The entire point of the clickless interface is for the user to convey less information that clicking; as I've referred to it in another context, the author believes that the solution to the problems of "point and grunt" interfaces is to reduce it to a "point" interface. Modern mouse interfaces actually have more types of grunts (like the relatively recent scrollwheel innovation), and the iPhone multitouch is a way to get several types of grunts onto a touchscreen that previous had just tap and drag. Totally the opposite direction from this demo. If the iPhone developers carried anything away from this Flash demo, it was to head further away from this approach. Interestingly, I was about to post a conclusion to this post based on how nobody has ever adopted this interface for anything, but I just realized that as of yesterday (in the US), I am wrong. Totally serious. The new DS game Knights in the Nightmare uses this interface for combat. It is adapted to the touchscreen by making a persistent cursor that simply stays still if you remove the stylus (which in general is a bad idea in the game), and if you then touch some other part of the screen, the cursor will head straight for it with a maximum speed (so no teleporting around the screen). Weapons are deployed with dragging, commands are triggered with hovering and some light gesturing, and so on. It's interesting, but it's also a decent demonstration of why you don't want to use this for serious work. It's one thing when you trigger the wrong unit in a game, it's quite another when you delete the wrong file. Metacritic page for the game: http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ds/knightsinthenightmare http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ds/knightsinthenig... So, if you want to see who's right, you can now go try this interface out for a real product.
      - daleharvey 17y ago
        its getting late so cant reply properly, but I dont believe the clickless interface is trying to make the user convey less information, but instead its trying to interpret information the user is already conveying in a smarter way, so they dont have to produce redundant information (the clicks). Im sure I know of one or two good uses of this in practice, but its late and they arent coming to me right now.