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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

If you really want to make the question more interesting, throw a touchscreen at it.

For general UI purposes, mice are hopeless when you compare them to your fingers touching the screen directly.

Selecting text with a touchscreen is the pits. My big fat fingers obscure what I'm trying to select and most of the UXes fit touchacreens make text selection a second class citizen.

> Selecting text with a touchscreen

is really not that inconvenient with the force-touch-on-keyboard on iPhones, and two-finger-swipe-on-keyboard on iPads.

I find it to be a big pain on my iPhone. You have to tap and hold for a long time, very carefully not moving the finger so it doesn't interpret the gesture as a scroll, then probably adjust its selection using those tiny fiddly little blue touch thingies, and if you mistap at any point it resets everything. Then you need to long tap again to bring up the options, but not medium long tap because that will reset everything, nor have any wiggle since that will scroll, nor super long tap since that does nothing...

The best I can say is that it's better than nothing. I use it from time to time, but only because I have to.

> You have to tap and hold for a long time, very carefully not moving the finger so it doesn't interpret the gesture as a scroll, then probably adjust its selection using those tiny fiddly little blue touch thingies, and if you mistap at any point it resets everything.

That isn't what I was referring to. Force-pressing on the on-screen keyboard lets you move the caret around like a mouse pointer, by sliding your finger on the keyboard. Pressing again/harder begins a selection.

I said “general UI purposes” rather than “everything” very deliberately; certainly touch is ghastly for some things.

I dunno. I keep screwing up when picking an entry from a list of them on my phone. Perhaps because there is no way for me to correct by dragging my finger elsewhere unlike with a mouse (outside of web links most mouse actions happen on button release, not button press).

I'm not sure if that applies to a 32" 4k display that is positioned about 10" away from the user in a typical desktop setting. I can't only imagine the pain in my shoulders.

I guess that is why Microsoft added the hinge on their Surface Studio.

To be honest, if we could somehow make an effective pen technology, that would beat both hands down in many scenarios.

There's a reason we don't write things using our bare fingers :)

I use my Surface Book with touchpad (pointer/mouse), keyboard, touch and pen. Pen and touch can work quite nicely together, e.g. in Maps using touch to pan and zoom and pen to write, all in the one hand. But it certainly requires the software to have been designed with all of these possibilities in mind.

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