Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Thursday July 09 2015, @10:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the where's-my-pencil dept.

From a recent issue of Wired:

Study after study shows we remember things better when we write them—our brain stores the letter-writing motion, which is much more memorable than just the mashing of a key that feels like every other key. We think in fragments, too, in shapes and colors and ideas that just don't come through on a keyboard. "Think about how many things that are built start as a drawing," Bathiche says. "Most things, right? Everything you're wearing probably started as a drawing."

You can't type out the folds of a dress, or the gentle curves of a skyscraper. Drawing with your stubby finger on a touchscreen isn't much better. Humans are tool-based creatures: Our fingers can do amazingly intricate things with a pen, a brush, or a scalpel, that we can't replicate with a mouse or the pads of our fingers. Our computers are giving back that kind of detailed control. In turn, the pen is opening up new ways of digital expression, new tools for communication, new ways to interact with our tech.

My wife's cousin's husband is a cartoonist for the New Yorker. He uses a high-end Wacom digitizer. Hasn't the problem of the high tech pen been solved?


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @01:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @01:42PM (#206966)

    I concur that the new web today is not as good as the old web -- as far as user capabilties are concerned.

    If my cab driver or Uber driver took me to 30 different locations that all registered that I visited, I would be beyond pissed and smack him (or her, I am an equal opportunity vengeful passenger). Ghostery shows me that if I go to www.whatever.example.lol, the browser is often accessing places I didn't intend to visit. And often asking to place cookies about tracking ID with expiration dates either as Dec 31st 1969 or Dec 31st 9999. No, do not want. k thx.

    I have some older hardware that works far better if I set the user agent string to something like lynx. Otherwise, abominations like www.yahoo.com/tech are... well.. it's unusuable no matter what you do. Faking the browser ID isn't going to save you there.

    The fact that the PC is now expected to do so much work, I wonder why we are called clients when we're the ones tracking ourselves and allowing for other sites to just read the tracking markers while our PCs and other devices hang on the scripts, waiting for the client run process to finish--only to learn it was to better identify what ads we need to see.

    At least modern flash doesn't install on older browsers and hardware. I'd still use XP if various clients I work with didn't require the use of software that refuses to run in XP but otherwise is still a web application in a cloud somewhere. It is strange to have such requirements for a dumb terminal, but I guess MS doesn't let things compile to run on XP anymore.

    I hope there is a revolution soon and plain websites with menus that are easy to use makes a come back, but I think the days of a PC oriented website as the norm are long gone. You'd think that at least with "responsive web design" they'd be responsive to whether it's a PC or tablet or phone connecting, but all that seems to mean is that the website looks like the same tablet on all devices, except it also only uses a fraction of my screen on the PC. That other article about pens... someone included a wacom link, and the link was to a 2560x1440 monitor/tablet of theirs. My monitor is 2560x1440, and the website itself was not designed to use that resolution. half the screen was wasted and it was hard to appreciate their great marketing for a device with the same resolution as mine, due to it being formatted for what looked like 1300x700 or whatever the default is for crummy resolution.

    Starting Score:    0  points
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   1