I agree. The radios I've seen with touch screens are a real compromise in usability. Either the screen is too small to be useful, or it is so big that many hard controls are sacrificed to avoid making the front panel too large. The worst are the PC-based interfaces, where all hard controls are eliminated.
The IC-7300 is a case in point. When I first encountered one, I gave up trying to figure out how to change bands, and had to ask the owner. Of course, you just touch the MHz digit on the display! Obvious, I suppose, in retrospect. The problem with touch displays is similar to 'hidden' mouse movements on PCs. Unless you've read the manual or had someone show you, it is entirely not obvious how to do cool things with the mouse. How many folks know that on Windows 7/10 if you drag a window to the right or left side of the screen, that it will magically re-size to fill just the right-half or the left-half of the screen? Makes it super simple to place two instances of the file explorer side-by-side to assist in doing drag 'n drop operations between windows. How many know that if you drag the winnow top edge (as in a resize operation) to the top of the screen it will automatically fill the screen top to bottom? And if you subsequently drag it off the top, the window will snap back to its original size and position? How many know that if you grab a window title bar, and shake the mouse, that all other windows will minimize? And if you shake the window again, they all come back? I'd bet that at least some of you just learned something about your PC that you didn't know before. There is a least another dozen cool things (like using Ctl-Windows-right or -left arrow on Windows 10 to access multiple desktops of windows). So, how do you implement cool touch- or mouse-movements without leaving novice users in the dust? That's the $64,000 question. 73, -- Dave, N8SBE -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Elecraft] K4? From: Wayne Burdick <[email protected]> Date: Mon, March 25, 2019 12:56 pm To: Bert <[email protected]> Cc: Elecraft Reflector <[email protected]> The trick is to provide a full complement of "hard" controls for functions accessed most frequently, "in the heat of battle," as they say, while leveraging the touch screen for its versatility. Touchable fields can be added as a backup/shortcut to hard controls. A touch screen inherently offers immediate context-sensitive feedback and in many cases reduced time/effort. Examples include signal selection, zooming, etc. Zooming should also be done right, by resampling at narrower resolution -- is shouldn't just be a "blow-up" of the original pixels, as implemented on some existing radios. Ultimately, get what you pay for. That said, current prices for "high-end" super-radios are ridiculous; they're two to four times higher than necessary. Not only that, they're not configurable or upgradeable. Very un-Elecraft like. Wayne N6KR ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
