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Comment by frankPants | Hacker News Reader

I am at odds to argue with Tufte but I will. The issue with touch screens is not that they lack the same surface texture as the objects they're imitating. It's that they're imitating real world objects in the first place. I think most people would agree with sculpture and painting, that the high point of those media was reached during the point of pure abstraction. When paint was allowed to simply be paint. Painting stopped being a way to represent the real world on a canvas and was allowed to be itself, the real advantages of paint came out.

Well, let's stop pretending that the tablet is a representation of the real world, and let pixels be pixels. Why pretend they're anything more than that? "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" as Magritte so eloquently put it in '28-29.

Pixels, while not having the 3 dimensional qualities of the real world, surely have many of their own unique qualities; that while we attempt to copy the real world, remain unexplored.

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I think the fundamental problem isn't one of emulation, it's the lack of any kind of tactile feedback. I write music software and there's a world of difference between a real knob on a synthesizer or a real piano key and any representation you put on a screen. Touchscreens have unique strengths and weaknesses.

I'm totally with you. After I've aquired a smartphone (HTC Desire), I've come to the conclusion that the only thing that touchscreens are good for is scrolling. I hate writing on it, I hate pushing buttons and links, I hate that the virtual objects that I interact with gets occluded by my fingers, I hate that I have to hold my phone in awkward ways so I don't accidentally "push" virtual "buttons". Many of these irritations stem from the fact that the interface has no tactile feedback, and does not respond to different levels of pressure (like ordinary buttons).

Touchscreens are a regression in user interfaces, and I hope that the future will bring a comeback of more tactile input devices, like keyboards.

This is why I got a HTC Desire Z instead of a HTC Desire.

I think touchscreens are going to become the cheap, ubiquitous, lowest-common-denominator interface for general tasks. But I agree that they're really not that interesting for anything more than browsing. You'll notice that most apps don't go far beyond basic tap, pan, swipe and pinch gestures because anything more complex is too awkward and error-prone. That leaves a lot of the expressive potential of the human hand untapped.

This has been Tufte's point since long before iPhones and iPads made touch screens so popular. He wrote a whole book called "Escaping Flatland" after all.

It's not at all that he doesn't appreciate the potential of pixels---he's been a long advocate of pushing them to perform at the levels he desires---but instead that he believes that the information lost in graphs, charts, interfaces is incredible. He is constantly studying methods to attain significant data density in graphic representation.

His argument here is that we have so many sensory signals we pay attention to naturally and garner great amounts of information from. Touch screens manage to interact with just one or two of them.

It ends quaintly, too. Not with a call to arms to improve touchscreens, but more like Brett Victor's essay, with a call to remember to appreciate the physicality of the world.

> the high point of [painting and sculpture] was reached during the point of pure abstraction

On what criteria do you base this assessment? What’s an example of “pure” abstraction? Do e.g. the impressionists make the cut, or are they too representational to be part of the “high point”? What about Rodin?

I'd go with either Mondrian, or Pollock myself. Impressionists, such as Monet began working towards abstraction for sure, but for Monet, it was more about capturing the fleeting nature of light on a canvas, however still within the confines of a landscape.

Surely painting as a pure form of expression, unbridled by anything more than simply paint, reached it's high point with the likes of Mondrian, Pollock, Kandinsky etc during the early 20th century. When composition, colour and form were key and principle elements of the canvas, not nature, and the natural world around. They may have drawn inspiration from the world around but they did not seek to visual represent it on the canvas per se.

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