Hacker News Reader

Comment by Aperocky | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised you're allowed mission-critical or even non-critical inputs on that touchscreen.

It might be OK if the entire screen was READ-ONLY. Anything else sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.. I also don't understand why companies race to have their laptop display touch, but then again I'm just a random software engineer.

View on HN

Military planes - Super Hornet, for example - have been using touch screens (UFC, in this case, the thing just below HUD) for over two decades now, and they seem fine with it, and newer ones use it even more. They don't seem to cause any problems.

Granted, stuff that's absolutely critical - like gear or the arm switch - is still mechanical, but UFC is still pretty mission critical, controlling eg IFF, autopilot, or radios.

F-35 has a 20" wide by 8" tall touchscreen. However, just about everything that you do on the touchscreen can also be done with various switches and selectors on the stick and throttle. There's even an equivalent of a mouse that will let you move a cursor around the screen and select items.

About the only things you cannot do on the touch screen are giving stick/throttle inputs and MASTER ARM on/off.

Physical switches since they are moving parts, have a high failure rate. Apollo 11 they broke an important switch donning their spacesuits. In Apollo 14 the Landers abort switch was falsely triggering so they had to hack the computer to ignore it.

Most of the cars I’ve owned have been recalled/needed to have some switch replaced in the first year or two of ownership. Jury is still out on touchscreen, but they seem to have lower mortality (it could be a simple numbers game, several dozen switches vs 1 touchscreen).

> I also don't understand why companies race to have their laptop display touch

Try using your laptop in bed, on couch, browsing something with a partner, etc. The flexibility of Yoga style 2-in-1 devices is amazing in this regard.

For productivity I don't find it extremely useful (maybe if I was a designer and combined it with a pen), but for casual use - a lot of UI these days is touch friendly and feels natural with touch screen.

Why is it a disaster waiting to happen, according to you?

I'm also curious about this disaster waiting to happen. They've emphasized an escape capability all the way into orbit. They emphasized various types of automation (also used by other spacecraft).

Touch screen is still very inaccurate and you don't develop muscle memory.

You are more likely to touch wrong button on touchscreen than on physical ui.

I can buy the muscle memory part, sure but are they really very inaccurate?

I can select very small text on my phone with my bigger fingers. And also with a touch screen you may have more options in a smaller space.

Sure, that may suck for critical things, but there probably are a lot of settings and so forth that could be hidden that are not critical?

But I understand what you meant, I prefer physical buttons as well.

Personally, it seems I touch wrong buttons quite a bit on my phone. I also click wrong buttons when using mouse but that is rarer than pressing wrong button on my phone.

The most annoying part is using touch screen in my car for GPS. It might be bad UI but also viewing angle might be making it hard to press right button. But then again I would not expect a physical keyboard in a car.

In physical land, it is very rare that I press a wrong button. Maybe when playing intense video games, I press jump too soon or use wrong gun. Oh and of course while typing.

Touch screen are too sensitive to be safe. Also there is a very high chance to mis-click (see HN upvote/dowwn-vote buttons). Much safer to use regular old mechanical buttons with tick-tacks.

I noticed during the stream one of the astronauts selecting some input on his screen, pausing for a moment, and then pressing the physical button below the screen to confirm the input. So that's probably their defense against misclicks: any action other than just changing the display mode or opening a checklist has to be confirmed through the physical "Execute" button (there seems to be two of them, one for each astronaut).

Even then, you surely want the data you're reading to be correct, and not, say, from half an hour ago because Chrome was having a bad day.

> It might be OK if the entire screen was READ-ONLY.

Why? displaying incorrect data that might lead astronauts to taking the wrong actions could be just as deadly.

Why is READ-ONLY incorrect? I mean as in the input on the screen have no write ability and it is only used to control the interface that display the information.

I might have misunderstood your point. I thought you referred to the fact that the touch screen was based on a non-realtime system rather than it being a touch screen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com