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Comment by rcthompson | Hacker News Reader

I once owned a Dell laptop that used a strip of touch-sensitive regions for volume and media control. In practice they were completely useless, because without looking, it just felt like one continuous bar with nothing differentiating the buttons, so the lack of any tactile feedback made it impossible to use those "buttons" without looking at them. In my 4 years of owning that laptop, I was never able to build any muscle memory for hitting those buttons. I'm worried that the same will be true of this magic toolbar.

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In practice they were completely useless, because without looking, it just felt like one continuous bar with nothing differentiating the buttons

With Escape at the extreme left top, it should be possible to differentiate that stop by feel. I'll have to try it when it gets into the store. In the meantime, I'm still very happy with my 2012 MBP.

Well, that covers one of the 14 keys on that row, 2 if you also count the other end. I don't see any possible solution for the other 12.

? There is no escape key?

They probably mean the virtual one, which, if Apple is smart, will always be in the top left, so you'll know where it is in relation to tilde/backquote f.e.

I took the GP comment to mean "the physical Esc key will help you get your bearings without looking at the KB" but I might have mis-interpreted the comment.

I haven't seen anyone working on a screen+touch surface that can be be programmed to change physical texture per pixel such that you can for instance raise the pixels forming the border of an onscreen button allowing the user to feel it without having to look at the screen.

It's been done. I recall a company made a screen that could vary the amount of friction a finger experienced.

Tanvas does this. I recently used one of their devices, it was a pretty cool experience. https://tanvas.co/about/

As someone who spends most my workday in Visual Studio, I can relate. I would have a real tough time breaking that muscle memory.

I guess it was Dell Studio.

I believe it was an XPS 13.

Something tells me Apple knows a bit more about how to build a touch interface than Dell does.

If the core issues are that there's no tactile feedback and that button locations can shift depending on context, then Apple made the same mistakes that Dell did. The problem is that no matter how well-designed it is, a keyboard used for touch-typing is the wrong place for a smooth, capacitive sensor.

Both haptic feedback and pressure sensitivity are within Apple's capabilities. This could actually be an improvement (imagine feeling a virtual volume slider scroll with dampened resistance).

I'm not a fan of haptics when physical keys are an option. I believe that Apple can make a nice demo with vibrating indications of when the user's on a key, then detection of when they push down on it. What I don't believe is that it will be a better experience than feeling the edges of the keys and the actual descent and tap when depressing the key.

This seems like increased complication without any real gain. It's more sleek than usable, kind of like the touchpads with virtual buttons, rather than physical separate ones.

I agree that an actual volume slider would be useful, but I still doubt that there's a good way to present a row of buttons on a smooth flat surface in such a way that they can be touch-typed. Haptic feedback doesn't let you manipulate a typical phone app UI without looking at it.

Just wanted to point out that that's exactly what people said about software keyboards on phones vs hardware keys (and some still do, but most phones are now all software). It turns out that a big innovation in the first iphone was dynamically adjusting the touch boundaries of the keys + smarter autocorrect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-9UggQV9BM

Or as Steve put it once "Your thumbs will learn"

I don't think anyone would argue that a touch screen is better to type on than a physical keyboard though. It's just a sensible compromise given the size and weight limitations of an iPhone. Harder to justify on a (relatively big and heavy) laptop, but we'll see.

I can't type on my phone as accurately or as quickly as my keyboard. I also have to look at it or accuracy drops precipitously.

A phone's soft keyboard is a compromise for size. Compared to a hardware keyboard, it sucks to type on. If you want to type anything but gibberish, you stare at the keyboard the whole time you're typing.

A laptop with a hardware keyboard is large enough not to benefit from that compromise. I mean, a little touchscreen's not without its uses, but don't get rid of the keys that I expect to be there.

I'm with you on this one.

Everybody complained about the lack of haptic feel on the original iPhone keyboard, and look at what kind of interface we are all typing on today.

You touch type on an iPhone?

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