Comments on: Refreshing Take on the Desktop GUI

By: Dante

Dante — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 14:01:40 +0000

I believe the touchpad would be able to sense whether it is the palm or the fingers touching it. Some new laptops are able to do this with their touchpads already just using the relative sizes of touched area as the guide.

I love the con10uum idea but I feel it would be a lot more useful if the sub windows within an application were stacked vertically instead of horizontally. In my average workspace there will be anywhere from 5-10 Photoshop files , 1-5 Illustrator files, 10-20 browser tabs and probably a few other adobe programs open at any one time. To have to scroll thorough at least 20-30 different windows would be tedious. However, if there were only 5 or 6 with each of their sub tabs arranged vertically below them life would be a lot easier.
Just a thought.

P.S Gotta love *nux, too bad Adobe doesn’t support the platform.

By: andrew

andrew — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 21:50:28 +0000

sounds like a plan, so when can i get one:)

By: Ched

Ched — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:31:06 +0000

Great comment Mark. Though there would probably be some kind of functionality to turn off simultaneous keyboard and pad input, you’re right, it’s not ideal at all. Maybe it would be able to make the distinction between the palms and the fingers?

I think the point is to solve some of the problems we have with the desktop interfaces themselves, rather than the click-type-click-type interaction we may be used to in our work flows.

By: Mark Laporta

Mark Laporta — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:26:16 +0000

This approach looks really promising and offers an appealing alternative to managing multiple windows via mouse and taskbar. Prolonged mouse use, especially including repetitive drag and select operations, have caused me considerable discomfort over time. Your touch pad would eliminate that problem.

Continuous window scrolling and convenient resizing would, I agree, make the user interface both more logical and, eventually more intuitive. As demonstrated, your approach has adapted traditional functions to the way the body actually works. It’s great to see that and I hope you can cross-contextualize this kind thinking to other technologies.

The only problem I see is making this compatible, spatially, with a keyboard.. The illustration shows the keyboard above the touch pad but, especially for people with big hands, there’s no way to type without resting one’s palms on the surface.

This would magnify the accidental commands entered via laptop mouse pad 1000 times, I’d think. Yet if you had to deactivate the touch pad each time you want to type, that would be very inconvenient, even if the keyboard were incorporated in the pad itself. Have you designed this so the touchpad commands would be disabled the moment users start typing?