The HP TouchSmart PC

HP’s got an advertising blitz going on for their new touchscreen interface PC. It looks pretty damn cool on the commercials, and I mean come on, is the mouse really the best input device we can come up with?

But the thing is, despite HP’s Hudsuckeresque “Touch the Future Now” slogan, this has actually been tried before. Back in the 80′s. I was a computer geek long before it was cool, and I remember the first time touch screens and light pens were all the rage. So if this awesome futuristic technology is actually over 30 years old, how come we’re still using the shitty old mouse?

Well, let’s try an experiment. Pretend you’re reading this post on a touchscreen. Pretend that you can navigate just by touching links. There should be a whole shitload over there on the right. Spend five minutes touching the links, pretending to navigate around. I’ll wait.

Now, how does your arm feel? Is it sore? Does it ache? Congratulations! You’ve got gorilla arm!

Gorilla arm was a side-effect that destroyed vertically-oriented touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. Designers of touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans are not built to hold their arms at waist- or head-height, making small and precise motions. After a short period of time, cramp may begin to set in, and arm movement becomes painful and clumsy — the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; “Remember the gorilla arm!” is shorthand for “How is this going to fly in real use?”. Gorilla arm is not a problem for specialist short-term-use devices such as ATMs, since they only involve brief interactions which are not long enough to cause gorilla arm. Gorilla arm also can be mitigated by the use of horizontally-mounted screens such as those used in Tablet PCs, but these need to account for the user’s need to rest their hands on the device. This can increase the amount of dirt deposited on the device, and occludes the user’s view of the screen.

There’s an old saying about those who don’t learn from history being doomed to repeat it. Or maybe there’s a marketing saying about how most people won’t remember the failed technology of the past and they might buy some expensive hardware until the lessons are relearned. At any rate, we’ve been here before, and there’s a very good reason these things didn’t catch on the first time.

Bile Duct is Four

Today is the fourth anniversary of my first post. See it here, and marvel at the denial.

In four years, I’ve managed to write 93 posts (including this one). That’s not quite one post every two weeks. Prolific I ain’t. That being said, the vast majority of them are more substantial than this one.

So Long, Mitch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiMu_ZSbKn4

My Favorite Arcades: Introduction

I hated the 80′s. Fucking loathed them. I hated Reagan, hated the music, the consumerism, and the yuppies who lived it. I hated the vast majority of my peers, who’s superficial pursuit of mindlessness was perfectly reflected in the droning synth-pop bullshit they sent shooting up the charts. The 1980′s will surely go down in history as the most culturally desolate decade in American history, a span of 10 years that we still haven’t completely recovered from. And it was in this climate that I spent my tenth through nineteenth years.

But that’s not to say there weren’t bright spots. I had a handful of like-minded friends, and when we weren’t in Bill and John’s basement hacking on their Trash-80 Color Computer, we were hanging out at the video arcade.

Now back in the early 80′s, arcades were not the slick corporate affairs they are now. They were small, locally owned joints with character. Most of them were downright seedy. The lights were low, the floors were dirty, the machines were loud, and the control panels were scarred with cigarette burns. Pre-pubescent boys and post-teenage stoners mingled without incident. The smells of smoke, sweat and high-fructose soda hung in the air. And there was always that one shirtless long-haired dude who could exploit the pterodactyl bug or play Galaga forever on a quarter, but we put our quarters up for next game anyway. Observing his godlike skill was almost as fun as getting our eventual turn. Arcades weren’t the kind of places our parents liked us hanging out, but we went there anyway. By bike or by foot, we could always get to an arcade and we could always beg borrow or steal a few bucks to drop into a Dig Dug machine a quarter at a time.

I don’t know if kids even go to arcades anymore. I doubt it. The only arcades I’ve seen in ages are Dave & Buster’s and Gillian’s, and places like that only have the personality their board of directors decided on. When I have to venture into a mall (which is rare these days), I never hear the siren’s song of a hundred arcade machines beckoning me to come and spend my quarters. Or maybe I just don’t recognize the sound anymore, now that it isn’t eight-bit bleeps and bloops and the machines all have card-readers instead of coin slots.

Even though I despised the 80′s, my memories of the arcades are some of the fondest of my childhood. If I had to choose a single moment to spend the rest of eternity trapped in, it may well be a moment in one of those dirty old arcades.

This post is the first part of a series. Look for new installments in the coming days.