[Elecraft] Things to Come

[lstavenhagen]

Great post, IMO. One of the takeaways we could have from aviation is the
notion of cockpit resource management (CRM), part of which is the idea that
technology should reduce the workload of the pilot rather than increase it.
Or, if there is an increase, it involves a reduction somewhere else (that
is, learning to use, and paying attention to a heading bug to relieve the
pilot of turning to a heading manually, etc).

In amateur radio UI's, panadapters and spectrum scopes have a really
revolutionary potential in terms of presenting the contents of the band to
the user - you have a full visual representation of which signals are where
and a real potential in terms of QSY to those signals. 

With respect to user interfaces and touch-screen, let me make a couple
observations:
- touch-screen on a panadapter is intuitive; it's a natural way human beings
have evolved to deal with the environment. We see something in our space and
our bodies are tailor-made to reach for them with our hands, fingers etc.
- touch-screen for a menu system is NOT intuitive because a menu system
doesn't present quite the same task to the brain and body. Putting it
another way, it is my contention that a T-S interface offers no benefit to
the user over a mouse or buttons for operating a menu-driven system. 

The iOS touch-screen interface I complained about before is a good example.
When you're in an application where touch-screen is intuitive for a human
being (say scrolling and panning in a web browser) it's heaven. When you're
trying to actually operate the device with T-S it's miserable: windows pop
up all over the place, rotating cubicle things fly around and the device
goes into a catatonic state with no apparent thing on the screen you can
touch to recover it. The Big White Button at the bottom of the device is
your only resort. Horrible!

To sum my comment up: I think it's easy to overreact with touch-screen
technology and try to use it for _everything_: not just the applications
where it's great, but also where it doesn't help or even hinders the use of
the device (re: the distinction I made above). 

So going forward with amateur radio, I think T-S technology should be
carefully considered and not done with the Hog Wild method Apple chose for
the iOS interface. That's where the IC-7300 goes overboard, for example, as
I alluded to in my other post: it overreacts and attempts to use T-S for far
too much functionality in the device. 

If Elecraft goes down that road, I would hope for a more balanced approach,
one that's more suitable for the way humans respond to the environment, when
it contains both natural (i.e. spectrum scopes) and unnatural (i.e. menu
driven systems) items.

My .02,
LS
W5QD



--
View this message in context: http://elecraft.365791.n2.nabble.com/Things-to-Come-tp7615662p7615668.html
Sent from the Elecraft mailing list archive at Nabble.com.