Soft touch "buttons" vs regular mechanical buttons.
Soft touch buttons are the bane of my existence. With most buttons, there's no feedback as to whether or not the button has been pressed. It's also difficult to develop muscle memory so you can you use the buttons without looking. For this reason I can't stand typing on an iPad's screen keyboard. Also the reason turning on a modern TV involves me dragging my fingers all over the bottom hoping I hit the power button.
The extreme of this is newer Macbook touchbar. Vim is a nightmare to use. Did I even press ESC? Can't tell.
After Apple ruined the podcasts app in iOS 11, I switched back to my old way of listening to podcasts: download on the computer and listen on a Sansa Clip+ player (with Rockbox on it).
Especially the first few days were pure delight. A player with.. hardware buttons! I can skip tracks, jump back and forth, pause, everything without even looking at the thing! Several years of using touchscreen-smartphones for this had me totally forget how it is to use an MP3 player with physical buttons. Really, I didn't expect at all how much I'd love it. I've now gotten used to it again and going back to anything touchscreen-based is not an option at all anymore. And on top of that the joy of knowing that there's no ad-company tracking how/when/where I'm listening.
I have nothing against your solution, but for those of us who prefer not to have to carry and sync another device, you can get (wired) headphones with volume + skip buttons for just a few bucks.
My only experience with the Clip+ was as a runner, but I switched away from my phone because I was terrified of breaking it. But the downsides of the Clip+ drove me back to my phone and a good, hard case for it.
- had to hook it up to my Windows computer and download songs instead of just making a playlist on Apple Music or queueing up podcasts in Overcast
- if the sun was out, I had to hold the Clip right against my eyeballs to make anything out
- no 30 second skips, no chapter selection
And honestly, I'm not sure why you'd give up on the phone altogether without researching other podcast apps. Overcast is the best.
Note that I'm using the Clip+ with the Rockbox [0] replacement firmware, which adds features such as configurable skip lengths, etc. Without Rockbox, the thing isn't nearly as good :-)
> And honestly, I'm not sure why you'd give up on the phone altogether without researching other podcast apps. Overcast is the best.
I looked at them, didn't find a single trustworthy one. Overcast is a good example of that: it's often recommended, but it wants me to make an account, which is completely superfluous and probably just a way for them to collect data about my podcast habits. No thanks. I only want podcasts, I don't want a cloud service to go with it.
Just FYI, the creator of Overcast is a notorious anti-advertising and pro-privacy curmudgeon, and he even wrote Skeptic's FAQ for people put off by the account thing: https://overcast.fm/skeptics_faq
I have a Ford Fusion 2013, AC and radio is controlled with those soft touch buttons, man I hate those buttons, I don’t want to take my eyes from the road just to change the radio! I don’t get why the obsession about putting “touch” functionality to every single damn thing, they don’t provide a single UX improvement.
They don't (well, soft touch radio/heat/AC/etc. buttons). And in my opinion, this is one place where some more safety regulations really are needed to force a return to physical buttons.
But they _do_ provide an additional line item in the list of "comparison specs" to show a check-mark for their car and no check-mark for a competitors product. And that is the reason for the 'race' to add touch screens for everything that used to have a hard button. Look at our car, it has so many more "features" than theirs....
That, and the fact that a single touch screen can replace a whole host of hard buttons, eliminating the design, tooling, manufacturing, shipping, and assembly costs associated with all the old hard button devices.
I moved from a cheap Toyota Yaris to an expensive Subaru Legacy.
Not only do I have a touchscreen radio, but the climate control section is a large array of buttons, with the exception changing the temperature with a knob.
Every single fucking action I need to perform in that area requires that I take my eyes off the road. Want the heat on my feet instead of my face or the windshield? Then I need to press up/down and iterate through the air directions. Need to increase/decrease the air speed? Find the left/right arrows and press them. Oops, I pressed the Defrost button which turns on the windshield vents full blast! Oops, I pressed the "Auto" button which does... something. No fucking clue what that button does.
As shitty as my old Yaris was, I had a knob for air position, another knob for speed, and a button right in the middle of the knob for rear defrost. The knobs were huge and clunked into place. After a week in the car I knew exactly what to do without ever looking down, and I miss it dearly.
And my touchscreen radio takes like 10 seconds to boot and it warns me never to look at it while I'm on the road or some bullshit. If I need to change stations I need to look down and find the touchscreen buttons. I'm all mad thinking about it now, wish I could return the car just for this shit.
And in my opinion, this is one place where some more safety regulations really are needed to force a return to physical buttons.
...I've always wondered, if it weren't for some regulations, would manufacturers replace the steering wheel, pedals, and gearshift with a touchscreen? That would be really scary. The value of the feedback of physical controls can't be underappreciated.
Huh, downvotes. Seriously, I was there, working in a related field at the time of the iPhone and iPad hypes, and that was exactly when ill-advised uses of touchscreens popped up everywhere. They became the thing every product needed to have to be perceived as modern.
Just to remind you how hypey it was, "tablets will replace PC-type computers for most consumers in the next few years" and "world's first iPad DJ". I wish I was making up the last one.
Smartphones are something else, they are the most useful computers given the limitation that they have to fit into a pocket. Touchscreens make good use of available space there, that's all.
Soft touch buttons are the bane of my existence. With most buttons, there's no feedback as to whether or not the button has been pressed. It's also difficult to develop muscle memory so you can you use the buttons without looking. For this reason I can't stand typing on an iPad's screen keyboard. Also the reason turning on a modern TV involves me dragging my fingers all over the bottom hoping I hit the power button.
The extreme of this is newer Macbook touchbar. Vim is a nightmare to use. Did I even press ESC? Can't tell.
Another great example: http://www.homecrux.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/GE%E2%80%...