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Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin 2025-12-26 14:10:02

Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? | Ubuntu Summit 25.10 — Nice talk, but this particular 34:10 insight how mobile detecting "scroll event" before you even lift your finger and it'll recognize "tap event" made it a "consumption machine" at the expense of text editing productivity — that's a jaw-dropping insight connecting low-level "technical" decision to the high-level f eeling of computing. 💡

(see jenson.org/text for details on his research into improving mobile editing)

Marek Rogalski 2025-12-26 15:24:15

I've read the notes about Eloquent. Really cool! I don't think that pressure sensors are really common on mobile though. Out of all my devices with touchscreens, none of them actually have it (except mechanical click on my laptops synaptics touchpad - though that's not a proper touchscreen). In my house it is actually only present on my wife's Pixel. On the other hand, touch contact size is a pretty common signal (palm rejection relies on this) but I'm not sure if it's easy to use for text...

One more thing re text editing is that when text is being edited, the user can typically use more than one finger to perform actions on screen. That could be something to look into.

Ivan Reese 2025-12-26 22:37:55

Touch contact size is (at least on iOS) too coarse-grained to be a useful signal. We recently experimented with 3d-printing little "tokens" with various patterns of dots using conductive filament, and while we can do a fair bit with the arrangement of the dots, using the size of the patches as a differentiator proved basically useless. The smallest recognized contact size is already quite big, especially if you need reliability, and the larger sizes become so big that you eat up significant physical space if you want more than one dot.