They're both emphatically not fine from any erudite informed perspective of what has been better in the past.
I've used small-form factor DOS luggable-bricks, miniature Windows7 7" diagonal laptops (Fuji B112, B2131) obsessively since the epoch, also exotics like Fakespace NDOF dataGloves, yada~ and my usual combination of trackball magicMouse and 3D connextion SpaceNavigator on my desktops. Now I've got an Android tablet and an iPhone which are decidedly not 50 years better.
Neglecting the exotics, UX experience in DOS sometimes was better than, e.g. explicitly touching (yes DOS could do that) somewhere in the middle of a paragraph only to have the cursor leap to the beginning, end, select the entire paragraph (iOS18 or so..) or invoke some unintended 'gesture', and then require twenty more touches of adjustments to getthe selection right.
Using external near-fullsize BT keyboards which actually make typing tolerable on my iPh and DroidTab, I'm constantly taken 'aback' (to memories of the past) by having to remove a finger from the keyboard to the screen to accomplish some cursor positioning that might just as well be done with less trouble with a keyboard touchpad or mouse. I do use a tiny tactile feedback BT keyboard with it's own tiny thumb-trackPad which works nominally better than on-screen keybooards when I'm crunched for space and can't use near fullsize kbs.
Oh.. there's speech-to-text these days. Something about my present set of afflictions is holding me back from venturing forth into that void.
Auto-spell correct, anything that interrupts the cadence of typing, because waiting for CPU cycles or accomodating network delays - none of those 'helpful' things 'intruded' into UXs historically. These Gaffes could be easily wiped away by local high-priority code executing on handhelds which actually pays attention to the people trying to use devices these days, andm actually, timely respons to that.
One can see this pathologically simply by repurposing some old, deprecated thing like a Nexus4 phone not as a thermostat but as a Web client for music steaming. The Nex4 actually has a 1/8" mini audio-out jack!! Web pages are so hopelessly loaded down these days the Nex4 struggles, rendering them only slowly. Button presses may go completely unacknowledged for seconds until the button glyph actually changes. Almost like delays in auto-correct!!
In an epoch of no tactile feedback on glass (maybe audio clicks..) Devs, frameworks, dn toolkits largely ignore all except 'the most recent browser' on 'the latest hardware' case, doing nothing and likely relying entirely on someone/thing esle (is there an acronym ofr this, like DNRY? It's someone ele's problem? >>ISEP<< to acomplish 'low level' requisite confirmations real humans depend on and use to see they've done something that affects the UI, and can continue on, e.g. type-ahead as was the case as of old. Gesture forward!, perhaps.. the UI will catch up.
Yeah. What I'm used to. All those big keyboards, redundant left AND right handed mice, trackballs, ouch-tablets, and 46" diagonal screens that are still not big enough to not have annoying piles of windows scattered across half-dozen virtual screenspaces each filled with windows still obscuring one another .. while I'm confusedly and involuntarily warped back and forth between unrelated workspaces when all I 'intend' is to open yet aother window of some app like textEdit to use in/with whaterver I'm working on _in the screen I'm working in_. (OSX/MacOS are you listenting?)
MacOS (as of Monterey, haven't gotten fa/urther) yet - has that 'application' (read: not _user_, nor _context_, nor _task_ centered behavior, _by design_. all AAPL genius, I'm sure. Yes I really want to see *all* my textEdit windows in Spaces. That makes a lot of sense when I have half dozen different unrelated tasks going on and need only another textedit window. Sure, hide *ALL* an applications windows when I hide only a single one. Like I don't exist and it won't take me half hour to find the one I need again. Forget that in X-Windows omg that's _dead_, Jim!! one could push a single window to the bottom of the window stack to get it out of the way and not have to minimize it to go search for it later in a micro-dock stripe with only enough room for half-dozen minimized (oh and fully descriptive) window icons beside all those appicons.
The iPh sub-oops automagic rearrangements of screenfulls of colorful bouncing icons is particulay visceral insanity, All rearranging unpredictably when one is stuck amongst others, like some kind of entertaining visualization of a cocktail party. Android tries to rise to this level with some obscure thing in settings which completely obliterates perhaps tens of minutes of careful arrangement of multiple screenfulls of icons- all gone! with what of course what is de-regeur in mobile smart-space now, no hint of 'back' or 'undo', anywhere.
If you want a summary, put an iPh1 next to a Droid, neglect the fact they absolutely will not talk to one another without multiple intervening clouds and laborious and error-prone interactive shovelling of 'takeouts' and exports of data involving visting dozens of WebPges, and likely only though some full sized PC/Mac intermediary, and simply contemplate how wildly baroquely different they are.
Before I actually got one, I literally was incapable of using an iPh1, despite years of experience with Android and dozens and dozens of prior systems. I could say I'm yet pretty incapable now, a year on. a dozen years of OSX time doesn't help either. So many colorful icons I _NEVER_ use, filling my tiny little screen, glaring at me like they are hoping to induce a seizure.
Most glaring - what is abjectly absent with both Android and iOS. 'Messages' well there are different Icons, who wrote the App? Is that Meta's, or Apple's, or Google's, or someone else's messages? Oh my phone buzzed; some notification appears then disappears, irretrievably. Does one have to go the the AppStore, Play, or 'settings' to find out these things in the middle of trying to figure which app to use to reach someone??
No 'info' hover-over (no hover over ever, I guess for touch, yet an uninvented 'gesture') Obscure and infuriating and undocumented (guess one has to buy the book, or read the mags, and fawn for a while) things like the phone UI changing such that the button to hang up a call, even the entire phone UI disappeared over on some other appView perhaps.. That one might search and find three identical names in contacts, none which can be edited with all the data of all the others still visible. None which can usuall be edited _AT ALL_ unless one is deep within the bowels of 'Contacts'. A name but no a phone number displayed. Which of that persons phones am I calling?
DNRY - a mantra of devs, seriously the bane of UX. forced modeful dives into app ratholes when something is right in front of you and you don't have ten minutes to go into its' 'responsible' app to fix it. And Certaianly *NO WAY* can you edit it right then and there. No one ever would think some magic invocation might be possible to enable doing literally anything which is possible to to with something that's right in front of you, displayed on your device. Sort of the non-authentication triple-A: anywhere, anytmie, anyplace.
I've used some remarkably baroque UIs - seems every single CAD package of any sort has it's own. Some like Blender resembling the empty bridge of the NC1701 Enterprise void of helpful crewmembers. Want to know hoa to use something? Nothings' 'idempotent' anymore - gotta go Google it.
Evolved over decades, CAD UIs takes years - longer than the replacement cycles of smartPhones - to become proficient at using them (and zillions in edu-industry tuition fees) Gamers it seems build stuff today with apparent intent that products they produce are 'affectively' challenging, archetype of a game. Perhaps this is intentional? After all the more attention,good or bad, or the money you have to pay to learn how to use something, the more ingratiated you are to continuing to use it, damn all the competition. Forget that like most all affective coding, cognitively burdens conseqently corrodes your abilities to acompplish higher-order objectives unrelated to navigating UIs to accomplsh your intentions.
No drag-and-drop, have to thumbsType everything character by character. Copy/cut/Paste selections when not impossible, barely controllable. Time is displayed but not the date. <eyes wander, sees clock at top of screen>
That’s a lot of words to say “if I don’t like something it’s objectively wrong” - also your wild rant went on so long and on so many tangents surely I’m not supposed to take you seriously.
Yeah I’ve run into a few of these recently. I can’t work out if there’s just a few unhinged individuals on here or this is some kind of hyper-specific to HN trolling. Maybe a bit of both.
relevation!! Someone who actually levels well-deserved anti-synchophany against the IT majors!!! Volumes can be written about the collective abuses which reduce hundreds of millions to squinting at tiny impossibly illegible displays and noncontrasting fonts, typing at 5WPM with two thumbs, further reduced (3WPM?) by battles against 'auto-correct' and 'assistive cursor control'.. I use full-size BT & AAPLS wireless keyboards with my iPh and DroidTab. I have a 19" diag HDMI display via WiFi widget that actually makes the iPh screen landscape and readable. I use 'Assistive' crippling which overlays an actually visible orange cursor in a textline losenge over the ultraviolet-invisible unchangeable default one. I have maybe 800 notes (more than Googl has sent me false positive security alerts) of every Gaffe and insult going back to the Xeros Dorado epoch. Keep it up. Start a revolution!! The word needs more posts of the realities of these afflictions. I use the Futo onscreen kb on Android, and the devs there say there's nothing they can do to control when of how it pops over and obscures something you're tying to type. Typical of AAPL and GOOG tyranny and 'our way or the highway'. There's more to fill hundreds of pages to get distracting ad-injected, poorly implented UX back to un-affectively efficient realizations which don't foment vsceral aggravation, but I've had it with this little textbox here, and I'm not going to shuffle this comments back and forth to a text-editor to improve it. But thanks HakerNews hopefully for letting me post without forcing me to go find mycredentials to login!! Othersie this entire post -pfft-
Your "shared language of touch screen interactions" is and will forever be unrealized as endless 'innovations' 'novelties' of creative developers and companies remain unfettered by any requirements for compliance voluntart or otherwise to UI 'standards'. Software developers are focused on myriad depths and constraints of toolkits and frameworks languages and libraries to get network, cloud, and actual functionality right, and immersed in those worlds, burden users with their own vast congitive prejudice that their application is the only one in the world, figuring 'users' have unlimited time to decipher undocumented UIs effectively gamified and unique across hundreds of spplications by not only gestures but by required and precise cadences to correctly effect those gestures, cadences which are overloaded and confounded by network and device delays and zero haptic or audio or visual feedback on what may have been 'commanded' or what is yet to be acomplished and displayed onscreen.
I might be tired, and this isn’t meant as anything other than constructive criticism, but good grief I think you need to use full stops a little more. I had to re-read that 3-4 times to make out what you meant.
I've used small-form factor DOS luggable-bricks, miniature Windows7 7" diagonal laptops (Fuji B112, B2131) obsessively since the epoch, also exotics like Fakespace NDOF dataGloves, yada~ and my usual combination of trackball magicMouse and 3D connextion SpaceNavigator on my desktops. Now I've got an Android tablet and an iPhone which are decidedly not 50 years better.
Neglecting the exotics, UX experience in DOS sometimes was better than, e.g. explicitly touching (yes DOS could do that) somewhere in the middle of a paragraph only to have the cursor leap to the beginning, end, select the entire paragraph (iOS18 or so..) or invoke some unintended 'gesture', and then require twenty more touches of adjustments to getthe selection right.
Using external near-fullsize BT keyboards which actually make typing tolerable on my iPh and DroidTab, I'm constantly taken 'aback' (to memories of the past) by having to remove a finger from the keyboard to the screen to accomplish some cursor positioning that might just as well be done with less trouble with a keyboard touchpad or mouse. I do use a tiny tactile feedback BT keyboard with it's own tiny thumb-trackPad which works nominally better than on-screen keybooards when I'm crunched for space and can't use near fullsize kbs.
Yeah. What I'm used to. All those big keyboards, redundant left AND right handed mice, trackballs, ouch-tablets, and 46" diagonal screens that are still not big enough to not have annoying piles of windows scattered across half-dozen virtual screenspaces each filled with windows still obscuring one another .. while I'm confusedly and involuntarily warped back and forth between unrelated workspaces when all I 'intend' is to open yet aother window of some app like textEdit to use in/with whaterver I'm working on _in the screen I'm working in_. (OSX/MacOS are you listenting?) Evolved over decades, CAD UIs takes years - longer than the replacement cycles of smartPhones - to become proficient at using them (and zillions in edu-industry tuition fees) Gamers it seems build stuff today with apparent intent that products they produce are 'affectively' challenging, archetype of a game. Perhaps this is intentional? After all the more attention,good or bad, or the money you have to pay to learn how to use something, the more ingratiated you are to continuing to use it, damn all the competition. Forget that like most all affective coding, cognitively burdens conseqently corrodes your abilities to acompplish higher-order objectives unrelated to navigating UIs to accomplsh your intentions.No drag-and-drop, have to thumbsType everything character by character. Copy/cut/Paste selections when not impossible, barely controllable. Time is displayed but not the date. <eyes wander, sees clock at top of screen>
Gotta go.