If you're a button, you have one job: to transmit Morse code from the finger to the machine, Morse code representing a complicated POSIX shell command. And also to power down this entire one-button terminal with a 3 second press, power it up on any button press, with a firmware reset if powered up by a 30 second press.
A press of each round button rotates the typing ball accordingly, pressing the space prints the chosen letter and resets the ball to the neutral state. This whole thing should probably be electric lest you'd have to press the space bar by smashing it with both fists.
Now remove the spacebar, combine the two buttons into a single one for "tone" and adapt it to morse code. All the buttons still do only one thing and now there's only one button!
And, you don't have to worry about what to do in the case that someone hits the "rotate ball" button while it's still rotating.
The author says: “Now, I’m going to exaggerate the problem a bit and tap 90-degree rotation quickly eight times.” I was wondering why the Nothing one stuck upside down after that, and expected a rant about Android not registering all taps or something. But the article got ahead with explaining how the Nothing’s solution was better. Huh?
The iPhone was eight taps. The Nothing was six. (Yeah, I could have noticed it while watching, but I was situationally incapacitated; namely, I’ve just waken up.)
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Regardless! I still find the iPhone one more pleasant to look at, because the animation doesn’t stop. But if you press quickly enough, I guess what they could do is animate until the taps stop, then:
• if the image will arrive to the desired state: finish up the current 90°;
• if it’ll still be 90° away: finish up then show one more 90°;
• if it’ll be 180° away: flip it upside down, then finish up the current 90°;
• if it’ll be 270° away: flip it upside down, finish up, and show one more 90°.
But that’s not a very practical thing to implement I suppose.
Then I definitely need to get some caffeine I guess *yawns*
> And it would be so much more predictable and pleasant if you could just tap the button three times at any pace you wanted without thinking, without paying attention, without getting your UI blocked by an animation that no longer helps you.
I'm not sure exactly how you're misreading it, but you are.
The Nothing isn't executing all the taps, some are blocked by the animation. It is responding visually and haptically to all of the taps, but some are blocked from doing any work by the animation.
You also said the Nothing was 6 taps but I'm not seeing anywhere the article says that. I believe it was 8 taps on both.
My rule of thumb is that animations need a purpose, otherwise you are just showing off and it gets tedious. This animation carries more purpose than most, conceptually you might understand which orientation will be next but it takes your brain a second to validate, and it is much simpler if you can see the path that it took.
This is literally the type of thing that caused the THERAC-25 disaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25). Experienced users hitting keys faster than the app could process them, resulting in safety features being inadvertantly bypassed.
And, you don't have to worry about what to do in the case that someone hits the "rotate ball" button while it's still rotating.
Eh, it's a pretty trivial problem, comptometers have it figured out more than a hundred years ago.
The iPhone was eight taps. The Nothing was six. (Yeah, I could have noticed it while watching, but I was situationally incapacitated; namely, I’ve just waken up.)
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Regardless! I still find the iPhone one more pleasant to look at, because the animation doesn’t stop. But if you press quickly enough, I guess what they could do is animate until the taps stop, then:
• if the image will arrive to the desired state: finish up the current 90°;
• if it’ll still be 90° away: finish up then show one more 90°;
• if it’ll be 180° away: flip it upside down, then finish up the current 90°;
• if it’ll be 270° away: flip it upside down, finish up, and show one more 90°.
But that’s not a very practical thing to implement I suppose.
No? It makes the opposite argument.
> And it would be so much more predictable and pleasant if you could just tap the button three times at any pace you wanted without thinking, without paying attention, without getting your UI blocked by an animation that no longer helps you.
Am I misreading this?
The Nothing isn't executing all the taps, some are blocked by the animation. It is responding visually and haptically to all of the taps, but some are blocked from doing any work by the animation.
You also said the Nothing was 6 taps but I'm not seeing anywhere the article says that. I believe it was 8 taps on both.