Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Phenix88be | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

Phenix88be

I don't know who they are targeting with this concept, but, as a developer, a lot of thing are wrong :

- Anything that require the mouse make me slower.

- Trackpad gesture require a ... trackpad, and trackpad are worst than a mouse.

- Speaking of the trackpad, anyone can put 6 fingers on it ? look painfull to me.

- Animation are nice, but useless, they make the computer slower and takes time to complete.

To me, this look anything but productive.

View on HN

> Trackpad gesture require a ... trackpad, and trackpad are worst than a mouse.

Interesting, as an engineer I prefer my trackpad 100x over a normal mouse...almost solely because of the gesture abilities.

Agreed on the rest of your points.

I mainly use a workstation on a large desk in an office. If you use your laptop everywhere, on small table, desk, knee, trackpad are great because a mouse is basically unusable. But on a desk with plenty of space ?

Also, from a medical point of view, I think a mouse is better than a trackpad. But I m not an expert in that field.

On a Windows box I would agree, but on macOS gestures are so productive that you actually lose quite a bit of productivity by using a mouse - even Apple's Magic Mouse.

Yea - I use a separate magic trackpad at my desk, always. I don't even own a regular mouse.

Honest curiosity: How many gestures do you regularly use? How many buttons does your mouse have?

Not the person you're asking, but on my macbook I frequently use:

two-finger swipe right (go back) four-finger swipe up (overview) four-finger swipe down (change between multiple windows of the same program) four-finger swipe left-right (change virtual desktops) pinch to zoom in/out

The first four would be easy to bind to a mouse button, but the pinch zooming is really handy.

I got sick of not having a pinch to zoom gesture on my Windows desktop, so I bound Ctrl to a mouse button and hold it while using the scroll wheel. It's pretty handy, I wish I could do it on all mice.

In a lot of Windows applications, and in the mainstream browsers, holding down the CTRL key and spinning the mousewheel gives you a zoom functionality. It's built in by default.

Not OP, but I use gestures religiously. Four fingers to the side to switch desktops (useful for 'categorizing' multiple projects), four fingers up to view all windows in a desktop, four fingers down to view all windows of the active app. Insanely useful and productive.

I don't have a regular mouse, so 0. I probably use 5-8 gestures regularly? Mostly just two and three finger swipes in various directions.

I use gestures all the time on my Magic Trackpad 2. Let's say I'm just surfing the web on my iMac. I might use:

- two-finger swipe left and right to go back and forwards - two-finger double tap to zoom in and out - pinch to zoom in and out - pinch to view all tabs - three-finger double tap to look up a word in the built-in dictionary, which I do a lot to get the definition of Japanese words in English - three-finger drag to copy images or downloads to a folder or into another window, especially if I'm editing a document - four-finger swipe up to switch to another application's window, especially if I'm dragging something - four-finger swipe down to switch to another browser window

I'm using these gestures frequently to efficiently move things around when I'm editing a document, making a presentation, or even when restoring a file to a previous version or copying something out of a file's previous version to drop into the current version.

> trackpad are worst than a mouse

Not if you pair it with eye tracking, like they're suggesting. It might actually be significantly better than a mouse in that scenario; though I'd have to try it myself to know for sure.

They try to replace the keyboard and the mouse for more than a decade now, and the only thing they have done is to improve the keyboard and the mouse, or make it worst.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Just because previous efforts have failed, doesn't mean we should just give up on trying to design something better.

I'd also argue that touch screens already have replaced the mouse for the average user, so it really doesn't make sense to imply that the mouse is unbeatable.

I'm very doubtful that eye tracking works nearly as precise, reliable and fast as a standard mouse. Although I do prefer touchpads in situations where high precision isn't required; it just feels more comfortable to me.

That's why the article suggests using eye tracking in conjunction with the track pad. That way you get both precision and speed. (At least in theory; again I'd have to try it to see how well that'd work.)

> Trackpad gesture require a ... trackpad, and trackpad are worst than a mouse.

For values of "trackpad" not manufactured by Apple. General consensus seems to be that Apple's Magic Trackpad is God's own input device, which has rendered mice forever obsolete.

> Speaking of the trackpad, anyone can put 6 fingers on it ? look painfull to me.

It's a UI designed for Count Rugen.

>> Trackpad gesture require a ... trackpad, and trackpad are worst than a mouse.

> For values of "trackpad" not manufactured by Apple. General consensus seems to be that Apple's Magic Trackpad is God's own input device, which has rendered mice forever obsolete.

Apple fan boy spotted ! I use to carry a mouse with my Macbook for long coding session. Don't get me wrong Apple trackpad are really good, but the hand position on any trackpad isn't great.

Your sarcasm detector is either on the blink or not tuned to the band I was emitting sarcasm in.

Rat wrestling is bad enough as it is, but with an actual rat involved at least I can attain reasonable precision with coarse muscle fibers. With fondling the rectangle, not so much, especially when clicks are involved and forget about dragging. I need two hands to achieve what even the rat lets me do with one.

But then again I'm old and cranky. Millennial hands seem calibrated to the fondlepatch, preferring it even to the rat, and I keep hearing gushes about Apple's fondlepatches in particular on Hackernews and r/programming.

The "you're a fanboy, your opinion isn't valid" approach to discourse is needlessly dismissive.

> the hand position on any trackpad isn't great

Seems fine to me on my Magic Trackpad 2.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com