Re: (1), I spent a lot of time thinking about this
years ago when light 
pens were "new" again.  The final answer why people
like mice over light 
pens was nothing other than the fact that your arm
gets tired when reaching 
out to touch a screen more than a couple of times.

Tablets are much the same way.  By the time you've got
the tablet close 
enough to you that it is not tiring to touch, it is so
close that it is 
tiring to look at.  According to my eyedoctor, human
eyes are simply not 
built to handle looking at things less than 20 feet
away for very long.  
How close do you sit to your TV?  I put mine as far
away as I can get it.

For a quick note, or perhaps to be less obtrusive than
a laptop a tablet pc 
makes a little bit of sense, but in both of those
cases a Post-It (tm) will 
be even better.  For doing any interesting amount of
work, a desk chair 
will be better for your back than a sofa, and a desk
will be better to set 
your computer on than your knees.  Suddenly, it seems
like a desktop 
computer might actually be _more_ usable than a
tablet, and at 1/3 the 
cost.  Amazing.  (Sorry about the rant, but this has
been brewing ever 
since M$ started pushing Tablet PCs.)

As to why use a mouse when it is "clearly inferior", I
would suggest that 
it is once again a matter of ergonomics and
efficiency.  Being one of the 
few people ever to try to play Quake with a
touchscreen, it is amazing how 
inferior it is to a simple mouse.  In fact, the only
"alternate" pointing 
device I've ever been able to play Quake with is the
little eraser-head- 
pointing-stick on my laptop, and it seems to be about
a 60% penalty.  
Getting away from Quake, with just a little bit of
practice, it is easy to 
relative newcomers to a mouse to move across the
screen and click on a 
button, even with the mouse sensativity set relatively
high.  I can move 
the mouse cursor to anywhere on a 21" monitor with
under an inch of hand 
motion, not counting the movement from the keyboard to
the mouse.  (I just 
checked.)

The company I work for spent a largish portion of two
years ago building a 
touchscreen based voting system.  It was amazing how
even with practice 
both ways, we could navigate our voting system about
3x as fast with the 
mouse than we could with the touchscreen.  Remember,
that this was a very 
simple, touchscreen optimized UI on a 15" display. 
The mouse is simply 
faster.  My theory is that your visual cortex does
better at identifying 
stuff when your hand is not in the way of it. 
Constantly 
obscuring/revealing large portions of the screen just
slows you down.  If 
you believe, as I do, that your eyes and the visual
portions of your brain 
are optimized for the job of looking for dinner
somewhere in the range of 
30' to the horizon, the back of your hand should just
not be between you 
and what you're looking at.

(Having said all that, I feel compelled to admit that
I have a touchscreen 
CRT sitting in my basement that I'd love to figure out
a way to use.  My 
current idea is to have it as a 2nd (or 3rd) display,
and somehow use it to 
replace the keyboard while my other hand is on the
mouse.)

Re: (2), That is probably because that is how many
buttons there were on 
the mice that were being used when Smalltalk was
designed, just as 
keyboards were readily available on all of those
computers.

-andrew

On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 08:50:15 -0700 (PDT), David Faught

<dave_faught at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I have lately been playing with a couple of ancient
tablet PCs that I
> got cheaply off EBay.  Now, I am hooked and hungry
to look for a newer,
> more powerful tablet PC to do some serious
Squeak'ing with.
>
> There are a couple of questions that leap to mind
because of this
> experience though:
>
> 1. Why has the mouse remained so popular when it's
clearly inferior to
> just directly pointing (even with a stylus)?  Surely
the technology of
> the digitizer has gotten much cheaper over the
years.  It can't be just
> a cost issue anymore.
>
> 2.  Why does the Squeak GUI depend on 3 mouse
buttons, when most styli
> (?) have only 1 or 2?  It is desireable (to me
anyway) to have full
> function of the tablet PC without an attached
keyboard, and use the
> keyboard as an optional enhancement.  Squeak seems
to be designed to
> require the keyboard.  Maybe I need to look at Genie
more closely. Does 
> Genie answer this question?
>
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-- 
andrew_c_berg at yahoo.com



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