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#touchscreen

2 posts1 participant0 posts today

#KDE is my #DE of choice because I feel it brings, for me anyways, a solid desktop experience. However, the story changes with a #touchscreen-enabled laptop. I feel that #GNOME is really good for touchscreens, and I must say how impressed I am with GNOME's touch support! It's very clean!

Great job GNOME (and surrounding) devs! The only thing I recommend is enabling the minimize button by default because I feel it can help with decluttering open windows. I honestly don't care about the maximize button, however, as I find myself hardly using it.

Learned a little trick with `onboard` and using the Autoscrolling feature of Firefox.

Firefox, for those who don't know, supports a feature called autoscrolling… if you middle-click (click the scroll wheel down), a little circular icon appears in the spot where you clicked. Moving the mouse cursor up or down will scroll in that direction, with the speed determined by the distance from that icon.

Clicking again stops the scrolling.

On a graphics tablet with three buttons, this works great. At work I have a cheap Wacom, and I find this more comfortable than scrolling with an ordinary wheel mouse. Just click the middle mouse button, then swing the stylus up or down.

Turns out, you can do it on a touchscreen using Onboard. There are buttons on the virtual keyboard that affect the mouse: tapping one of these will make the next mouse click use the specified button (middle or right). So you can tap the middle mouse button on Onboard, tap somewhere on the webpage, and the autoscroll icon appears, then hold your finger or stylus on that icon: slide up to scroll up or down to go down. Very simple.

Replied in thread

By the way, the slides ⬆️ were prepared with #XournalPP. That's still not quite the right took for an handwritten talk of quality (no convenient overlays, duplication in place, etc) but that's the best I've found – #Inkscape has multipage support but it's also still patchy, and the convenience of handdrawing is less in terms of interface.

Still, if you have a #touchscreen and #stylus, I fondly recommend #Xournal.

xournalpp.github.io/

xournalpp.github.ioXournal++ - Xournal++

I recently drove a car whose whole control and entertainment system was a gigantic iPad-like thing mounted to the dash. It caused me to have a realisation about the #Ui and #UX of touch screens.

There is no way to touch a touchscreen without it treating that touch as intentional. What I mean is: without taking my eyes off the road, I can grope across the dashboard, find a knob or button—by touching it—without activating any function. Touching the volume button or temperature knob doesn’t DO anything until I do it with more force and intentionality. Not so for a #touchscreen.

My mobile #phone (an #iPhone 13) has no dead space in its face. There’s no part of the phone face I can touch without it assuming I meant to do that and I wanted to activate whatever was under my finger. Old iPhones that had physical home buttons also had dead space to either side: a safe space to hold the phone without DOING anything.

Computer keyboard have little raised pips on the F and J keys so you can find them by touch without looking. I do this all the time. But I don’t type the letters F or J. Touch screens have no such affordances.

I look at the #blackberry keyboard in this photo and I see a raised space bar. It’s an #affordance that lets you orient your fingers, and orient how you hold the phone, without looking.

I miss buttons.

mobilesyrup.com/2025/02/15/bla

MobileSyrup · BlackBerry's iconic keyboard patent has expiredLet's all close our eyes and go back to 2009 so we can feel the thrill of typing our first email on the go.