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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

If you're a button, you have one job: to transmit Morse code from the finger to the machine, Morse code representing a complicated POSIX shell command. And also to power down this entire one-button terminal with a 3 second press, power it up on any button press, with a firmware reset if powered up by a 30 second press.

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Now I am imagining a typewriter with just two huge round buttons, next to each other horizontally, and a spacebar bellow them:

     *-----*      *-----*
    |       |    |       |
    |   ●   |    |   Ω   |
    |       |    |       |
     *-----*      *-----*
     
      [================]

A press of each round button rotates the typing ball accordingly, pressing the space prints the chosen letter and resets the ball to the neutral state. This whole thing should probably be electric lest you'd have to press the space bar by smashing it with both fists.

Apple still did it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

Now remove the spacebar, combine the two buttons into a single one for "tone" and adapt it to morse code. All the buttons still do only one thing and now there's only one button!

And, you don't have to worry about what to do in the case that someone hits the "rotate ball" button while it's still rotating.

> And, you don't have to worry about what to do in the case that someone hits the "rotate ball" button while it's still rotating.

Eh, it's a pretty trivial problem, comptometers have it figured out more than a hundred years ago.

If you're suggesting that the different columns of a comptometer would relate to different rotational axes of the ball, you will likely run into gimbal lock in 3D.

You could build an interface in 4D around quaternions but that is much more complicated than my suggestion (even including the part where you learn morse code).

The quoted part of my comment is in reference to the core topic of TFA where iOS and Nothing/Android photo apps handle the "pressed again during rotation" action differently. That "rotate the typewriter ball" interface runs against the same problem, by necessity of rotating a physical ball.

I am suggesting that the whole keyboard can lock during the time the physical ball rotates; the comptometers and pinwheel arithmometers of the yore had this functionality: while the mechanism was performing the addition of the number just entered, the user was blocked from fiddling with the input mechanism.

I get that's what you're suggesting. The locking per-axis or across all axes is fine but doesn't address the problem I'm talking about. In gimbal lock, which many graphics programmers first encounter by using only sequential rotations around the camera's axes, you can get into an orientation where you lose one of the three degrees of freedom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbal_lock

Seeing this makes me think of the controls from the original arcade version of Street Fighter 1.

The power button of my pc also has the job to tell wether the PC is turned on. So do bulb switch buttons that have a pilot light, and so on

Yeah, sometimes, when I am sitting before my computer and typing comments on the Internet, I have a thought: "Is my computer turned on?" With a quick glance under my table I can reassure myself that it is indeed on and continue using it. No idea what I'd do without that small blue LED.

The pilot lights are slightly more useful in those stupid cross-wired double switches that for some weird reason implement a sort of XOR (or sometimes XNOR because why not) gate for controlling a single light: if it's on, then the bulb is depowered and you can safely change it without turning off the entire power rail. But then one day the pilot light itself burns out...

You can safely change a bulb in a socket that is powered on. Just don't stick anything else in it but the bulb.

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