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Touch screen

8 (50%)

Mouse and keyboard

4 (25%)

Other

4 (25%)

Total Members Voted: 16

[gt93grad]

Just wanted to get an idea of how many people are using touch screen monitors, vs. other methods.

[imugli]

Predominantly IR remote via USBUIRT. I do have a touch screen though, just don't use that functionality for much at all...

[benn600]

I use the Keyspan remotes.  I believe I own 8 of them.  I have taken a lot of time to program the buttons to optimize their abilities while making them simple to understand.  I've had ambitions to create some touch screen systems but have never actually created one.

[dgilgonzalez]

Touch screen will become a must when Win 7 becomes available as it will support touch in a native mode, besides the HP’s TouchSmart PC all leading Taiwanese PC giants as Asus, MSI and Shuttle showed touch PCs at CES for $500. Ideally, all the key features in the regular view should be transferred to the Theater View. The new Obsidian View is a big step forward but still lacks full touch support (some menus get hidden and can only be accessed with the mouse or cursor) and lack key features that force to switch to the regular view (iPod synchro, music import, etc.)

[aussie1]

I agree. Theater view and other parts of MC should be touch screen enabled. PC technology is heading this direction. Touch screen capabilities are available now and will be standard functionality in the OS and many apps next year.

[JimH]

I agree. Theater view and other parts of MC should be touch screen enabled. PC technology is heading this direction. Touch screen capabilities are available now and will be standard functionality in the OS and many apps next year.

We agree that touch screen is coming and that it's important.  Our proposed answer is Theater View's Obsidian interface.  Any problems using that interface with touch screen should be reported in the build threads.  Thanks.

[Bill Kearney]

I was asking for more touch-friendly UI features five years ago.  I've long since given up expecting it to actually happen to MC.

[benn600]

Do you mind me asking what additional touch screen features you want?  As I understood it, a touch screen should simply act as a mouse button clicking.  If that is the case, then pretty much everything should work fine except for the recent removal of the left-side play control buttons.  What would be a few features you need?  Looking uninformed, it seems like touch screens would work pretty well out of the box.

[newsposter]

an inexpensive way to play around with interfaces and human factor stuff is to get an old Phillips Pronto and start writing config files for it.

I really wouldn't mind at all if JR would look into adopting the Pronto file/programming format as the basis for enabling touch screen on MC.  No sense reinventing the wheel when you've got this tech that's all debugged and in use.

For a third-party Pronto config file editor that can work with screens of any size, try this:

http://giantlaser.com/tonto/

Tonto hasn't been maintained for about 15 months now, but the author (at the time anyway) was pretty enthusiastic and responsive to his user community.

Also, the pronto freaks over at remotecentral.com are pretty knowledgeable.

[Bill Kearney]

As I understood it, a touch screen should simply act as a mouse button clicking. 

The point of a mouse cursor isn't the same as the tip of a finger.  A finger requires a much larger target area.  Trying to navigate through tiny tree lists and annoyingly recurring pop-up action windows makes it unnecessarily difficult.  Even something as simple as zone changes as a button was too much to ask.   

[JimH]

I was asking for more touch-friendly UI features five years ago. 

Please make a list of what playback won't work from Theater View, Obsidian skin.

It's not reasonable to expect Standard View to work with touch screen only.

[Bill Kearney]

To work entirely from touchscreen?  No, of course not.  But a few things would certainly help make it even practical.