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theweaselkingThat's right, today there is a useless goddamn piece of shit touchpad that ISN'T attached to a MacBook. In fact, it's worse than the Mac ones, which appears to have taken a fair bit of design effort. Our offender? HP.
This is the touchpad and part of the keyboard of a brand new HP Paviliion dv6:
I mean, we'll leave aside things like their bold decision to stick a "calculator" button where CTRL is supposed to go and where most laptop-UI-fail morons stick the Fn key, or their mislocation of the \| key to the *wrong goddamn side* of the keyboard.
Take a look at that touchpad.
Those look like buttons, don't they.
They aren't.
Those are part of the touchpad.
Those white lines are raised and can be felt with your fingers so you can tell when you enter those zones without looking, which is the ONLY good thing about this pad. Everything else, well, let's get started.
#1: Moving your finger on the "button" moves the cursor.
#2: Placing your finger on the "button" is detected as a multi-touch, a move of the cursor, AND a tap. And you haven't clicked yet. If you took your first finger off the touchpad, it's only detected as a move and a tap.
#3: Leaving your finger on the "button" as you move the mouse is sometimes interpreted as a multi-touch, sometimes as a move of the cursor from your main-pad finger to your button finger, sometimes as what you ACTUALLY wanted to do which was move the cursor while just leaving your finger on the button without clicking yet.
#4: The *entire touchpad*, not just the buttons, is clickable. Which is nice, in theory - however, clicking the main portion of the touchpad does nothing AND is not configurable in software. What happens when you click either "button" zone is configurable, which is kind of nice - but what happens when you TAP the button zones is not. That's always left-click or right-click, depending on whether or not it thinks you have one finger or two fingers on the touchpad at the time. Bonus: "tapping" the right button left-clicks, because "one-finger tapping means left-click".
#5: The "button" zones are imprecise when clicking. The touchpad will often register a click near the border of one of the zones as being in the next zone over - so, left-click instead of right, no-click instead of left or right, or a click because you accidentally pressed too hard when moving the mouse on the touchpad zone.
#6: Disabling tapping is possible, which is a positive since tapping is terrible and constantly provides misclicks and false clicks. You can also declare zones of the touchpad with different functions - adding a scroll zone to the side or top, all that standard stuff that all touchpads do. Sounds good, right? You're wondering why this is in my list of crap anti-features? YOU CAN'T DISABLE OR REBIND TOUCHPAD FUNCTIONS FOR THE BUTTON AREAS. Those are ALWAYS "moving the cursor, multi-touch detecting" zones. They're tap-detecting too if you're an idiot who hasn't disabled tapping, but at least they disable THAT properly.
Congratulations, HP. You have made a laptop touchpad interface WORSE THAN APPLE'S. You have defined the new gold standard of terrible laptop interfaces. You get a banana sticker. BE PROUD.
(PS: Compaq Presario CQ61, also dropped on me this morning: simple multi-touch touchpad, separate clickable buttons. See, HP, you DO know how to make non-shit touchpads, GO DO THAT INSTEAD.)
This is the touchpad and part of the keyboard of a brand new HP Paviliion dv6:
I mean, we'll leave aside things like their bold decision to stick a "calculator" button where CTRL is supposed to go and where most laptop-UI-fail morons stick the Fn key, or their mislocation of the \| key to the *wrong goddamn side* of the keyboard.
Take a look at that touchpad.
Those look like buttons, don't they.
They aren't.
Those are part of the touchpad.
Those white lines are raised and can be felt with your fingers so you can tell when you enter those zones without looking, which is the ONLY good thing about this pad. Everything else, well, let's get started.
#1: Moving your finger on the "button" moves the cursor.
#2: Placing your finger on the "button" is detected as a multi-touch, a move of the cursor, AND a tap. And you haven't clicked yet. If you took your first finger off the touchpad, it's only detected as a move and a tap.
#3: Leaving your finger on the "button" as you move the mouse is sometimes interpreted as a multi-touch, sometimes as a move of the cursor from your main-pad finger to your button finger, sometimes as what you ACTUALLY wanted to do which was move the cursor while just leaving your finger on the button without clicking yet.
#4: The *entire touchpad*, not just the buttons, is clickable. Which is nice, in theory - however, clicking the main portion of the touchpad does nothing AND is not configurable in software. What happens when you click either "button" zone is configurable, which is kind of nice - but what happens when you TAP the button zones is not. That's always left-click or right-click, depending on whether or not it thinks you have one finger or two fingers on the touchpad at the time. Bonus: "tapping" the right button left-clicks, because "one-finger tapping means left-click".
#5: The "button" zones are imprecise when clicking. The touchpad will often register a click near the border of one of the zones as being in the next zone over - so, left-click instead of right, no-click instead of left or right, or a click because you accidentally pressed too hard when moving the mouse on the touchpad zone.
#6: Disabling tapping is possible, which is a positive since tapping is terrible and constantly provides misclicks and false clicks. You can also declare zones of the touchpad with different functions - adding a scroll zone to the side or top, all that standard stuff that all touchpads do. Sounds good, right? You're wondering why this is in my list of crap anti-features? YOU CAN'T DISABLE OR REBIND TOUCHPAD FUNCTIONS FOR THE BUTTON AREAS. Those are ALWAYS "moving the cursor, multi-touch detecting" zones. They're tap-detecting too if you're an idiot who hasn't disabled tapping, but at least they disable THAT properly.
Congratulations, HP. You have made a laptop touchpad interface WORSE THAN APPLE'S. You have defined the new gold standard of terrible laptop interfaces. You get a banana sticker. BE PROUD.
(PS: Compaq Presario CQ61, also dropped on me this morning: simple multi-touch touchpad, separate clickable buttons. See, HP, you DO know how to make non-shit touchpads, GO DO THAT INSTEAD.)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 03:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 03:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 03:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 03:29 pm (UTC)at least with the ipad you're able to just drag the gorram thing you want to move.
though not having a cursor is a pain in the arse when you're writing/editing text. sure you can hold down and get something *like* a cursor. but it's *under* you damn finger, innit. half the time you can't even see where it is until you let go. i'm getting used to it, but a free cursor would be awesome.
the dell i'm using to write this has a touchpad with two separate physical buttons. and the whole rig - pad and buttons - can be customised through software.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 03:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 03:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 03:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 03:53 pm (UTC)The short version is: the lack of buttons means you have to do your "clicks" on the very sensitive mouse-control surface, which makes clicking imprecise. The focus on "tapping" instead of clicking means they're constantly registering misclicks. The complete inability to use left and right in quick succession is annoying. They require too many fingers - the only time anyone ever VOLUNTARILY uses a trackpad surface is when they can't just plug in a mouse because they have no space, no mouse surface, or are carrying the laptop, or something else like that, which means that if you're using it at all, it's a pain to need to multi-touch.
Touchscreen surfaces, like the iPod Touch and iPad interfaces, or Android, largely avoid these problems. The biggest reason is that your fingers actually *are* on the target area, not controlling a pointer that you're then aiming, and the areas themselves tend to be larger.
So it's easier to hit the right place AND easier to detect what the user wanted. Oh, and unlike a computer, context-clicking is rarely required to effectively and rapidly use the interface.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 03:57 pm (UTC)Aaaaaaaa!
Why, why do people meddle with what's not broke?!
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 04:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 04:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 04:06 pm (UTC)You've been listening to the latter. Don't. They are lying to you, to try to convince themselves.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 04:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 04:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 04:19 pm (UTC)And, really, I'm carrying *my* laptop everywhere and setting it up. I have an awesome ergonomic mouse for doing mouse stuff, but I don't always have room to set it up, or I'm carrying my laptop to a new place to show something and I have to drop the power or mouse for a few minutes, or....
So yeah. I care much more.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 04:31 pm (UTC)Just DOESN'T Work
Date: 2011-03-22 04:40 pm (UTC)I've been an anti-Mac person for the greater part of two decades. After listening to one of my tirades and losing patience, a fanboy friend asked how much time I had actually spent using a Mac. Muttering to myself and realizing he was right, I went out and bought a MacBook Pro as what I now refer to as The Great Failed Experiment(tm). Having used just about every version of Windows over the years, as well as several flavors of UNIX and Linux, I can safely now report that Apple users are suffering a mass delusion of cognitive dissonance. It Just Works is a wonderful marketing slogan, but it is 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag. Try to do something useful in a mixed environment and you'll pound your forehead flat on the closest hard surface.
OSX is just as flawed as every other OS, even though the exact problems are subtley different. I include the widely loved OSX user experience in this claim. The real problem is that when other OSs are flawed there is usually some configurability to fall back on to help. Apple instead dictates how it shall be done and Stevie thinks any other way is wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 04:49 pm (UTC)First, if something DOES go wrong, there's nothing you can do about it.
Second, they "Just Work" on a low-level amateur simple-function level. Experts, power users, or even people who just have a LOT of stuff to do are most often frustrated by the lack of advanced functions available.
Third, I hope your workflow matches that of whatever specific designer was on duty that day. Because there is ONE WAY to do things, and all other ways have been deliberately, actively, knowingly, maliciously sabotaged.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 04:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 04:53 pm (UTC)Every time I have to use a Mac I'm always stuck working around some intractable annoying problem that would be simple in *Linux*, let alone Windows. It's been that way since the System 7 machines I was first exposed to.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 05:15 pm (UTC)However, that was on zoom-in. Zoom-out, I noticed that while the Xoom - and my phone, which I tested as well once I noticed this - both loaded and kept in memory the entire page, the iPad seemed to only cache the visible area. Zooming out more than 150% from where I had zoomed in left a small square of visible text in the middle of a big crosshatched blank space, which didn't start to load until I released it. It was fascinating to me - something as simple as zooming in and out was beyond the capacity of the Apple product to do. The slightly snappier animation performing the function was a tradeoff for the complete crippled uselessness of the actual function I was trying to use. Which is Apple in a nutshell, really.
So, no, at least in this regard, I wouldn't say that the Apple product "Just Worked". I would say that it actively did not work, at a very simple task that will be repeated constantly.
Out of curiosity, is there any way in iOS to rearrange the icons on the home screen? I checked a display model iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and for all of them it looked like it was just a list of everything installed on the thing in what must have been chronological order, because it sure wasn't alphabetical, and nothing I could think to try would rearrange them at all.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 05:19 pm (UTC)After five minutes of struggling to find a way to do that, I eventually had to disable her AirPort and reenable it, which took another five minutes of waiting. Elapsed time: 10 minutes for what on any Windows machine would have been a 20 second process. There might have been a simpler way to do that, but it must be one of those things you have to already know how to do, because there sure as shit wasn't any way to determine it from context.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 05:26 pm (UTC)Oooooh, I do feel the burn of this at work every fucking day.
After 31st of this month, I will cease to believe in iPhone and iCrapanything -- they are just as mythical as Highlander 2 and Master of Orion 3. They fucking don't exist. (At least for me.)
Doing tech support for those POS is like being condemned to Heck and being forced to listen to their random number generator drone "nine" on a loop for all eternity and waiting for antacids to kick in.
"Have you tried to boot it by holding down home and power button? Yes? Several times? And it did not work? Oh, I'm so sorry, then you'll need to send it for warranty maintenance, no you can't even remove the battery yourself..."
Fucking. Scam.
And don't get me started on iTunes + Windows combo.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 05:27 pm (UTC)First: it defaults to chronological order, yes. New apps go on in the last available free slot.
Second: it IS configurable, although I'm not 100% sure how since I haven't done it recently and I don't have one handy. I BELIEVE it's like the Android method - press and hold on any icon, wait a second, and you'll see the "icons start going all wiggly" mode that indicates the ability to drag-and-drop icons rather than dragging the screen or clicking the icon.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 05:29 pm (UTC)And, really, why would it? Just because it's the obvious intuitive way to rearrange, or because click-and-drag has been the standard way to move things around since forever? Pshaw.