Author Topic: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.  (Read 437551 times)

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Offline IDEngineer

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2600 on: November 26, 2022, 06:48:01 pm »
Both a mouse and trackpoint are directional tools. Neither one provides absolute positioning (as a touch screen or graphics tablet does). They’re both relative, in that they indicate the direction to move the pointer. The difference is that the amount of a  mouse’s movement translates into an amount of pointer movement, while a trackpoint’s movement translates into the velocity of pointer movement.
I slightly disagree. Most OS's and mouse drivers allow you to choose the acceleration rate, including zero, and zero makes the mouse absolute. Likewise tablets can have nonzero acceleration rates. Even touchscreens can have acceleration - "flick" a scrollable screen and it will often continue to scroll after your finger has left the surface. Trackballs are another reasonable choice, which work like an upside down mouse with all of the same configuration options. Even a traditional joystick (with ratiometric output, not just bang-bangs) can work positionally, even absolute position.

The Big Loser is the eraserhead. It ONLY conveys direction, which abstracts the user an additional degree from what is almost always intended: Position. It's not just less useful, it is impossible to configure an eraserhead to operate in any kind of positional mode. All of the other input devices can be dumbed down to act like an eraserhead (if desired), but an eraserhead cannot be configured to act like the others. It is a fundamental failure of the design.

I do respect those who really love their eraserheads. It's a small niche market group but they do exist and my hat is off to them, being able to achieve some measure of usefulness from such a fundamentally limited device.

EDIT: To be fair, there is a potentially improved eraserhead mode. It requires an eraserhead that senses pressure on its two axes. If you have that, theoretically you can translate that pressure to relative distance, yielding a positional offset from point of origin. Two limitations immediately become apparent. First, it requires a remarkable degree of fine motor control in a single finger to achieve any sort of positional accuracy. Second and more crucially, what should happen when you release the eraserhead? Should the cursor snap back to its original location? Or should the driver assume you meant to leave the cursor wherever it was when you released? What defines "release", and should the driver accept or ignore (what it interprets as) small unintentional movements just prior to release? Or just anchor to the "greatest excursion"? If the latter, note you cannot reverse direction without an intermediate release of the eraserhead, to "reset" its idea of greatest excursion. These are not small problems, and we studied them back when I worked on Human Input Devices in the 80's. The eraserhead was the butt of many jokes for some valid reasons.
« Last Edit: November 26, 2022, 07:21:34 pm by IDEngineer »
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2601 on: November 26, 2022, 07:11:29 pm »
The Big Loser is the eraserhead. It ONLY conveys direction, which abstracts the user an additional degree from what is almost always intended: Position. It's not just less useful, it is impossible to configure an eraserhead to operate in any kind of positional mode. All of the other input devices can be dumbed down to act like an eraserhead (if desired), but an eraserhead cannot be configured to act like the others. It is a fundamental failure of the design.

I do respect those who really love their eraserheads. It's a small niche market group but they do exist and my hat is off to them, being able to achieve some measure of usefulness from such a fundamentally limited device.

I don't class myself as someone who loves them, but I am able to use one without any great difficulty. It's one of those things where you get used to it and then you don't even really notice it anymore, a bit like walking, you think about where you want to go or where you want the mouse pointer to go and it just happens, you don't really have to think through the whole mechanical process. The eraser has a significant advantage for those with carpal tunnel or other similar issues as you don't have to actually move anything, just apply force.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2602 on: November 26, 2022, 07:14:11 pm »
Try to rake leaves behind or between bushes or in between bushes and fence, or sweep leaves with a broom from the driveway. Leaf blowers have their application, but often people buy shitty models that are only good to blow 0201 resistors from the PCB. Seems your neighbour did not get the right tool.

I have a cordless electric one that I use to blow leaves off my roof and out of the gutters, occasionally I'll also blow off the walkway up to the front door and the driveway since it's steeply sloped and a slipping hazard. Otherwise I just leave the leaves where they fall and let nature take care of it, it doesn't bother me to have leaves on the ground and I see little point in blowing them around from one place to another.
 

Offline IDEngineer

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2603 on: November 26, 2022, 07:24:37 pm »
See 0:51:

 

Offline coppice

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2604 on: November 26, 2022, 07:28:38 pm »
Otherwise I just leave the leaves where they fall and let nature take care of it, it doesn't bother me to have leaves on the ground and I see little point in blowing them around from one place to another.
If we just the leaves to go where they may they form a damp slippery layer on the sloped driveway that lets cars slide down into the main road. A blower is useless to us, though. The critical leaf falling time it also a high rainfall time, so they have to be raked up.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2605 on: November 26, 2022, 07:43:08 pm »
Both a mouse and trackpoint are directional tools. Neither one provides absolute positioning (as a touch screen or graphics tablet does). They’re both relative, in that they indicate the direction to move the pointer. The difference is that the amount of a  mouse’s movement translates into an amount of pointer movement, while a trackpoint’s movement translates into the velocity of pointer movement.
I slightly disagree. Most OS's and mouse drivers allow you to choose the acceleration rate, including zero, and zero makes the mouse absolute. Likewise tablets can have nonzero acceleration rates. Even touchscreens can have acceleration - "flick" a scrollable screen and it will often continue to scroll after your finger has left the surface. Trackballs are another reasonable choice, which work like an upside down mouse with all of the same configuration options. Even a traditional joystick (with ratiometric output, not just bang-bangs) can work positionally, even absolute position.
You’re using the terminology in a way inconsistent with standard industry practice. “Absolute” in the context of pointing devices means an input device that conveys absolute position: graphics tablets, touchscreens, light pens, etc.

A mouse is relative: if you pick up a mouse off the desk and put it down somewhere else on your desk, it doesn’t know it’s been moved. (Since it’s designed to detect motion along the surface.) When you pick up the stylus of a graphics tablet or finger of a touchscreen, and put it down somewhere else, the pointer instantly moves there because it’s an absolute position device.

In other words: the native output of an absolute input device is an X-Y coordinate, while the native output of a relative input device is an X-Y movement.

This has nothing to do with acceleration. A mouse without acceleration (an awful experience, by the way) is still a relative input device. And a graphics tablet in “relative mode” (or any trackpad, for that matter!!) is simply the software parsing absolute position information into movement commands for the mouse driver. Under the hood, it’s an absolute device.

And scrolling inertia is a software function having nothing to do with the hardware. (We just don’t normally implement it for non-touch interfaces.)

As you hinted at: a joystick is fundamentally an absolute device, in that they use potentiometers to determine the stick’s position. And indeed there have been some specialized graphics systems that used non-spring-loaded joysticks as pointing devices, with the joystick’s position corresponding to the pointer position on screen. (Don’t ask me what it was, I unfortunately don’t remember.)
« Last Edit: November 26, 2022, 07:44:39 pm by tooki »
 

Offline IDEngineer

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2606 on: November 26, 2022, 07:58:17 pm »
All of this is why I led with "slightly disagree".

My points were from the perspective of the user. My work in HID's always started with that. If you keep the focus on the user experience and don't worry so much about the technical specifics, the limitations of the eraserhead surface early and don't go away. Some users are able to achieve remarkable results with them, but they remain fundamentally limited because of everything I wrote above.

Case in point: Yes, if you lift and move the mouse it doesn't "know" it has moved. But if you move the mouse, the cursor moves in an intuitive manner related to the mouse movement. Not true for the eraserhead, which may estimate your intentions using some of all of 1) direction of tilt, 2) force applied, 3) rate of force application (aka acceleration!), 4) duration of force application, and 5) rate of force release (deceleration, or negative acceleration), and 6) area under the resulting curve. We experimented with all of those. That's why eraserhead proponents impress me, that's a lot of variables to skillfully control with a single finger.

I'm not an Apple fanboi (I can't think of a single Apple product I own) but they spend a LOT of money doing a LOT of research into human factors design trying to make "the computer for the rest of them".  >:D  They have the money to make anything they want. Yet I've never seen an eraserhead on any Mac or MacBook. Apple was fast to adopt the mouse, but since the 80's they've apparently never found the eraserhead to be superior to a mouse or a trackpad. Just another data point.

This is another case of "Glad there's so many different options to choose from". Buy what you prefer, I do!
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2607 on: November 26, 2022, 08:08:01 pm »
Apple puts a lot of effort into the design of their products but I wouldn't make the assumption that just because Apple doesn't do something it's not a good idea. For all the good design choices they make there are a lot of bone-headed decisions too. Ditching all the ports and going with only USB-C, the awful butterfly keyboard, the glued in non-user-replaceable battery, that ridiculous notch in the iPhone and newest Macbook screens, the useless and annoying touchbar, the ridiculous round mouse on the original iMacs, the list goes on.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2608 on: November 26, 2022, 08:10:41 pm »
My current pet peeve: SolidWorks. I am very much a novice at 3D modeling, but anything but a novice when it comes to computers and applications, including pro apps, and I have never, EVER had a program cause me frustration the way SolidWorks does.

In terms of anything vaguely graphical, I’ve learned lots of professional graphics design software (FreeHand, PageMaker, Quark, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and more), Altium, Avid (pro video editing, back in the days when it ran only on custom hardware), Final Cut Pro, and rapid UI prototyping software.

I’m not afraid of complexity, having mastered all manner of other pro stuff back when I worked as a computer tech/consultant/system integrator.

But SolidWorks is doing my head in. Wild internal inconsistency, with things working sometimes, or not. Error messages that provide zero hints as to how to resolve the problem. Searching the web finds instructions… which don’t work. Official documentation referring to commands and user interface elements that don’t exist. Zooming seemingly designed by a moron. (I know, controlling 3D motion with a 2D input device is not trivial. But it doesn’t need to be brain-dead.) Using it is not only death by a thousand paper cuts, there’s also rusty razor blades hidden between the pages, and sometimes a dusting of itching powder that blows in your face just for fun.

All hyperbole aside, even my boss, who’s fairly experienced with SolidWorks, runs into oddities, and has been unable to explain or resolve some errors and problems I’ve encountered. (And I’ve seen him run into inexplicable inconsistencies, too.) I accept that professional software has a learning curve. It’s fresh in my mind, since I had never touched PCB layout software until just a bit less than 3 years ago. In that time I have become fairly proficient at Altium, which is not devoid of complexity, and does have a learning curve, albeit a fairly gentle one for pro software. I had some moments of frustration, sure, but nothing like what SolidWorks has caused. In Altium, I was always able to figure out why something didn’t do what I expected, and understand that 9 times out of 10, it was actually just some feature that I didn’t know how to configure to work for me, causing it to inadvertently work against me. So the problems led to me learning more about what Altium can do, and solving problems led me to learn how to use the software better. SolidWorks has been entirely unforthcoming with any such revelations.
 

Offline IDEngineer

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2609 on: November 26, 2022, 08:24:59 pm »
Apple puts a lot of effort into the design of their products but I wouldn't make the assumption that just because Apple doesn't do something it's not a good idea. For all the good design choices they make there are a lot of bone-headed decisions too. Ditching all the ports and going with only USB-C, the awful butterfly keyboard, the glued in non-user-replaceable battery, that ridiculous notch in the iPhone and newest Macbook screens, the useless and annoying touchbar, the ridiculous round mouse on the original iMacs, the list goes on.
100% agree on every point. You do not need to convince me that Apple ain't perfect! I swear their OS and overall user interface is designed on some foreign planet by aliens. Everything is different than I would logically expect it to be. I'm amazed at their ability to be so consistently opposite to my expectations. To be clear: Opposite as in different, not necessarily "wrong" or "broken".

My point was that Apple's biggest claim to fame since the first Mac has been "ease of use" or some similar phrase yet they've never done anything like an eraserhead. If there was some - any - advantage you'd think they'd have tried it sometime in the last ~40 years of offering pointing devices.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2610 on: November 26, 2022, 08:31:25 pm »
All of this is why I led with "slightly disagree".
Again, it’s just that you were using the terminology incorrectly, so it was unclear to me whether you actually understood what I was saying!  (Agreement/disagreement can’t even really be established if one isn’t even on the same page regarding meanings.) :)

My points were from the perspective of the user. My work in HID's always started with that. If you keep the focus on the user experience and don't worry so much about the technical specifics, the limitations of the eraserhead surface early and don't go away. Some users are able to achieve remarkable results with them, but they remain fundamentally limited because of everything I wrote above.

Case in point: Yes, if you lift and move the mouse it doesn't "know" it has moved. But if you move the mouse, the cursor moves in an intuitive manner related to the mouse movement. Not true for the eraserhead, which may estimate your intentions using some of all of 1) direction of tilt, 2) force applied, 3) rate of force application (aka acceleration!), 4) duration of force application, and 5) rate of force release (deceleration, or negative acceleration), and 6) area under the resulting curve. We experimented with all of those. That's why eraserhead proponents impress me, that's a lot of variables to skillfully control with a single finger.

I'm not an Apple fanboi (I can't think of a single Apple product I own) but they spend a LOT of money doing a LOT of research into human factors design trying to make "the computer for the rest of them".  >:D  They have the money to make anything they want. Yet I've never seen an eraserhead on any Mac or MacBook. Apple was fast to adopt the mouse, but since the 80's they've apparently never found the eraserhead to be superior to a mouse or a trackpad. Just another data point.

This is another case of "Glad there's so many different options to choose from". Buy what you prefer, I do!
Totally agree with you on all of that!


I use both Apple and Windows products, and while newer Windows stuff is infinitely better than in the past, I’m still surprised at how bad trackpads are on Windows. The trackpad on my HP laptop (which is Windows Precision Touchpad compliant) is not bad, but it isn’t as nice to use as even Apple’s very first generation of multitouch trackpad*. Even the non-multitouch trackpads from Apple were always really nice. (OK, other than the first ones in 1995. Those kinda sucked.) Part of the lousiness is, with 100% certainty, due to the drivers, since an Apple multitouch trackpad that works gloriously well in Mac OS works like garbage with the Windows drivers provided for dual-booting, on the very same computer.** But part of the suckiness is due to the careless selection of trackpad surfaces on most Windows hardware. Apple’s trackpads are textured glass, with them once boasting of the gazillions of different textures they tested in order to get it just right. And I know from reading bare trackpad module datasheets/app notes that an OEM needs to tweak various settings to match the trackpad sensor electronics to the trackpad surface material, thickness, etc. It’s clear many Windows hardware manufacturers simply don’t spend enough time doing that. :( I tried buying an external Windows Precision Touchpad for my work desktop, but abandoned it because of the god-awful textured plastic surface. (Think mid-90s mouse mat, the kind with the textured rigid plastic with foam rubber backing.) Like so many PC trackpads, managed to be simultaneously too sensitive to spurious inputs, but not sensitive enough to deliberate ones.


*in the original MacBook Air, introduced in January 2008. Fun fact: I worked for the fruit company at the time and actually was one of the staffers at their booth at the Macworld Expo, demoing the MacBook Air to visitors and press!
**with my usual caveat that I last tried this with the original 2010 Magic Trackpad, up through Windows 7. I do not know whether the later Windows drivers for newer OSes, or for the Magic Trackpad 2, are better or not.
 

Offline IDEngineer

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2611 on: November 26, 2022, 08:43:15 pm »
If the surface matters that much, I'm surprised we don't see more emphasis on cleaning those surfaces. I'd think accumulated grime, skin oils and cells, particulates, etc. would overwhelm modest texture differences rather fast. I got out of the HID business before touchpads got that picky.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2612 on: November 26, 2022, 08:44:17 pm »
Apple puts a lot of effort into the design of their products but I wouldn't make the assumption that just because Apple doesn't do something it's not a good idea. For all the good design choices they make there are a lot of bone-headed decisions too. Ditching all the ports and going with only USB-C, the awful butterfly keyboard, the glued in non-user-replaceable battery, that ridiculous notch in the iPhone and newest Macbook screens, the useless and annoying touchbar, the ridiculous round mouse on the original iMacs, the list goes on.
100% agree on every point. You do not need to convince me that Apple ain't perfect! I swear their OS and overall user interface is designed on some foreign planet by aliens. Everything is different than I would logically expect it to be. I'm amazed at their ability to be so consistently opposite to my expectations. To be clear: Opposite as in different, not necessarily "wrong" or "broken".
When I worked at the fruit stand, 9 out of 10 Macs we sold were to people who’d never owned one before. My experience was consistently this: users who expected to find things on the Mac in the same place or work in the same exact way they expected/knew it to be on Windows would find the transition extremely frustrating. The ones who approached it from “where would I expect it to be/how would I expect it to work if I’d never seen Windows before” picked it up quite quickly and without frustration.

In other words, Apple designs its things fundamentally from a philosophy of “where would it make sense for this to be/how would it make sense for it to work” independent of prior knowledge. “Intuitive” is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot, but that is something Apple genuinely strives for. (Before anyone jumps down my throat: no, not worth 100% success. And they’ve made a number of usability design decisions in more recent times that I found perplexing or maddening. 99% of the time I create a floating window on the iPad, it’s by mistake, and getting rid of it is the polar opposite of intuitive. Still better than SolidWorks, though!)
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2613 on: November 26, 2022, 08:53:45 pm »
If the surface matters that much, I'm surprised we don't see more emphasis on cleaning those surfaces. I'd think accumulated grime, skin oils and cells, particulates, etc. would overwhelm modest texture differences rather fast. I got out of the HID business before touchpads got that picky.
The differences in textures aren’t “modest” by a long shot. What’s on the market range from perfectly smooth to very rough.

Apple’s glass trackpad surfaces are a satiny finish that doesn’t easily collect gunk (I’ve never had any accumulated dust or sweaty grime; I have oily skin so I do clean that off periodically) and exhibits absolutely no wear (becoming shiny) even after a decade of use, very unlike plastic ones. The surface texture is just right to not feel sticky like smooth glass*, but not feel rough like paper. And being glass, it is easy to clean without fear of damage.

*many glass touchscreens use oleophobic coatings that, in addition to reducing fingerprints, make your fingers stick less, making sliding across them take less effort. No squeaking-down-a-window sound.
 
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Offline unknownparticle

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2614 on: November 26, 2022, 09:46:22 pm »
Try to rake leaves behind or between bushes or in between bushes and fence, or sweep leaves with a broom from the driveway. Leaf blowers have their application, but often people buy shitty models that are only good to blow 0201 resistors from the PCB. Seems your neighbour did not get the right tool.

I have a cordless electric one that I use to blow leaves off my roof and out of the gutters, occasionally I'll also blow off the walkway up to the front door and the driveway since it's steeply sloped and a slipping hazard. Otherwise I just leave the leaves where they fall and let nature take care of it, it doesn't bother me to have leaves on the ground and I see little point in blowing them around from one place to another.

I just leave them, wind blows them away eventually, any that are left just decompose, good for nature.  Some people seem to be obsessed with neat and tidy!!!
DC coupling is the devils work!!
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2615 on: November 26, 2022, 09:49:46 pm »
Try to rake leaves behind or between bushes or in between bushes and fence, or sweep leaves with a broom from the driveway. Leaf blowers have their application, but often people buy shitty models that are only good to blow 0201 resistors from the PCB. Seems your neighbour did not get the right tool.

I have a cordless electric one that I use to blow leaves off my roof and out of the gutters, occasionally I'll also blow off the walkway up to the front door and the driveway since it's steeply sloped and a slipping hazard. Otherwise I just leave the leaves where they fall and let nature take care of it, it doesn't bother me to have leaves on the ground and I see little point in blowing them around from one place to another.

I just leave them, wind blows them away eventually, any that are left just decompose, good for nature.  Some people seem to be obsessed with neat and tidy!!!

I tried benign neglect of the leaves on my small front lawn (roughly 10 m by 5 m) one autumn.
After a winter with normal snowfall, the leaves formed a non-woven tight carpet over the grass that ruined the lawn in the next spring.
 

Online Nominal Animal

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2616 on: November 26, 2022, 09:53:54 pm »
I know, controlling 3D motion with a 2D input device is not trivial. But it doesn’t need to be brain-dead.
Please, please tell me they're not using Euler or Tait-Bryan angles for the rotation.  (It is one of my pet peeves I described here recently.)

If dragging horizontally rotates the view around the vertical axis, and dragging vertically around the horizontal axis, and rotating one 180° causes the other to be mirrored (can happen with only one of the axes, depends on the Euler/Tait-Bryan model used), they are.

Anyone writing such code should be shot severely scolded, and forced to do a few weeks of tier-1 user support via phone as a penance.

It's not like the intuitive virtual trackballs are any more difficult to implement, you just use versors/bivectors for tracking the core orientation.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2617 on: November 26, 2022, 10:58:38 pm »
I know, controlling 3D motion with a 2D input device is not trivial. But it doesn’t need to be brain-dead.
Please, please tell me they're not using Euler or Tait-Bryan angles for the rotation.  (It is one of my pet peeves I described here recently.)
I wish I could tell you, but I literally don’t even know what those are! :p

If dragging horizontally rotates the view around the vertical axis, and dragging vertically around the horizontal axis, and rotating one 180° causes the other to be mirrored (can happen with only one of the axes, depends on the Euler/Tait-Bryan model used), they are.

Anyone writing such code should be shot severely scolded, and forced to do a few weeks of tier-1 user support via phone as a penance.

It's not like the intuitive virtual trackballs are any more difficult to implement, you just use versors/bivectors for tracking the core orientation.
I just know that changing to a view I want is annoying as hell. The fulcrum of the rotation axes is wherever you click, so unless you want things flung off into space you have to carefully center the mouse first…

And the zooming… two detents of the mouse wheel and you’re out in space looking at your model shrunk down to the size of a caper. While I understand the logic of zooming into the spot where the mouse is, it zooms out using some algorithm that isn’t quite intuitive, upshot is, when you inevitably fail to reach the zoom level you wanted and try reversing your action, by the time you’re done your once-centered model is now off in the weeds.

It also blocks you from rotating beyond certain points, making it nearly impossible to view certain angles with a certain rotation.


I’m sure I’m explaining it poorly (and since I’m not at work I can’t fire it up to try and characterize it better, so just going off my clouded-by-frustration memory)…
 

Offline TimFox

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2618 on: November 26, 2022, 11:11:51 pm »
The Euler angles are used in classical mechanics to discuss the rotation, nutation, and precession of a rotating solid body.
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/EulerAngles.html
Each of those processes (for example, in a child's toy top) is the evolution of one of the three Euler angles.
I haven't seen them used in computer-graphic interfaces, but that's not my field.
 

Offline IDEngineer

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2619 on: November 26, 2022, 11:16:58 pm »
I keep telling myself I need to learn SolidWorks, but I also keep reading comments like those in this thread. If it's that bad, how has it become the standard 3D CAD package? I can't remember the last vendor, customer, or consultant we've worked with who used anything else.

And: Their eDrawings viewer tool, which I use so I can view the .STEP and .SLDPRT files generated by everyone else, has all the same translate/zoom/rotate idiosyncrasies as described here for SW itself. I'm constantly having to inconveniently switch between rotate and translate modes to recenter a rotate or zoom. Each mouse click is a huge percentage of zoom factor so it's basically impossible to dial it in just right.

I use a Gerber viewing tool to do PCB reviews and it has this simple, elegant "Fit" feature. Press the F key and it automagically resizes to maximally fill the present window size. I have yet to find its equivalent in eDrawings, but man do they need it.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2620 on: November 26, 2022, 11:50:33 pm »
As best I can tell, in terms of usability, it’s just that everything else is even worse!  :palm: :o  |O  :wtf:

I am of the opinion that while professional software has the right to be complex, it doesn’t need to be needlessly hateful. Final Cut Pro, InDesign, and Altium are three great examples of that: widely used, capable professional software that put a lot of work into good user interface design.

I think CAD software has the unfortunate burden of being some of the very first graphical software ever designed, in an inherently complex discipline, so some CAD user interface conventions got settled on way back then, which are at odds with how our user interfaces in general work.

But some of the problems are just… come on. Find a fucking way to offer a solution to an error, rather than just display “SORRY NOPE CAN’T DO IT BYE”. Or find a better way to do the thing I need to do, so I don’t run into that error in the first place.

(For context, it’s ludicrously difficult to do something I would think to be a very, very common task: modify existing models. Like taking the model of an enclosure and making holes in it for other things to poke in and out of. I don’t care whether SolidWorks is the easiest tool for making new models from scratch, because that’s not the task I was given.) 
 

Offline timenutgoblin

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2621 on: November 27, 2022, 12:05:44 am »
One thing I've found indispensable on a laptop is a Fn keystroke to disable the trackpad. Otherwise on many machines it picks up the heel of your hand and suddenly the cursor is "somewhere else".

I beg your pardon. Language, please!  ;D
 

Online Nominal Animal

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2622 on: November 27, 2022, 12:07:56 am »
The Euler angles are used in classical mechanics to discuss the rotation, nutation, and precession of a rotating solid body.
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/EulerAngles.html
Each of those processes (for example, in a child's toy top) is the evolution of one of the three Euler angles.
I haven't seen them used in computer-graphic interfaces, but that's not my field.
Using Euler or Tait-Bryan (yaw, pitch, roll) angles to describe orientation or free rotation in 3D is wrong, because
  • There are 24 different definitions: 6 axis choices for Euler, 6 for Tait-Bryan, and both can be using either intrinsic or extrinsic rotations.
    Nobody agrees to exactly which one is which.
  • Gimbal lock.
What you do, is use a bivector or unit quaternion, a four-component description of type R=(r; i, j, k).
One useful interpretation is that if (x, y, z) is your unit axis vector (x²+y²+z²=1) and φ is the rotation around that axis, then r=cos(φ/2), i=x·sin(φ/2), j=y·sin(φ/2), k=z·sin(φ/2).  After any operation on this description, you normalize it by dividing the four components by sqrt(r²+i²+j²+k²), so that r²+i²+j²+k²=1 always.  This normalization does not induce any directional or rotational bias, unlike e.g. matrix orthonormalization does.
There are rules on how two rotations are combined (Hamilton product, not associative).  Just like with matrices, a series of rotations is applied from right to left.  There is a 1:1 mapping between these and 3×3 orthonormal matrices, although the matrix-to-description has three branches, depending on which of the three diagonal elements in the matrix has the largest absolute value, for numerical stability and accuracy with e.g. floating-point numbers.

Now, consider a virtual track ball, i.e. the rectangular window in which some 3D view is shown.
Choose some diameter, usually around half the smaller edge of the rectangular window or slightly more, and think of a circle of that diameter in the center of the window.

When the user drags outside the circle, apply a rotation (using the aforementioned axis-and-angle definition) in the plane of the display, i.e. with the axis perpendicular to the display plane.  This lets them rotate the view by dragging near the wider edge of the viewing window.
When the user drags within the window, consider the drag path as if a finger on top of the virtual sphere.  This gives you an axis and an angle with respect to the virtual trackball, but note that both change as the drag continues.  (So, during the dragging, the rotation is with respect to the orientation before the rotation started, and both the axis and the angle can vary.)
If the user drags outside the window, use the point where the circle exits the line between the drag start and endpoints as the virtual sphere endpoint, but increase the rotation based on how far outside the sphere the user dragged.  I recommend using nonlinear, even square, "acceleration" here, so that the user can do larger (180°) rotations faster than having to drag three or four times over the virtual trackball.  But make sure the transition outside the circle is smooth.

It is the most intuitive interface I know.  When the point on the surface of the virtual sphere that the drag started at tracks the drag end point closely, you know you got it right.

One thing I've found indispensable on a laptop is a Fn keystroke to disable the trackpad. Otherwise on many machines it picks up the heel of your hand and suddenly the cursor is "somewhere else".
I beg your pardon. Language, please!  ;D
What? It's the name of the effin key.  Oh.  Oooh.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2623 on: November 27, 2022, 12:08:37 am »
Off at a bit of a tangent, back in the day, I worked for a time repairing hearing aids.

The particular brand we supplied got around the problem of requiring tiny, but rugged pots by using tiny spring loaded centre zero toggle switches.

The volume was adjusted by pushing the switch multiple times, with each push of the toggle producing a pulse, which depending upon the direction of the push made the sound lower or higher.
A change in volume required a series of pushes to produce the required pulses.
Clever idea, Mr EE----not!

People over the years had become used to the volume controls on TV remotes, where you press & hold the + button to become louder, & the - button for softer.
This expectation led them to expect that toggling the switch from the centre zero position would continue to make the sound louder or softer as long as you held them in that position.

Thus it came to pass that large numbers of aids came in with broken volume switches, as when nothing happened, people just pushed harder!

They were horrific things to replace, too!

Back on topic:
The trackpad on my laptop works "OK", but was annoying to use, so the first thing I did was to buy a cheap cordless mouse.
I had been using an older ipad for quite a while, & the laptop was a welcome change.

The ipad touchscreen is, to me, just plain, clunky, as at least on the old one, there is no priority of sensitivity to touches, ie, an accidental touch at the screen edge immediately changes the display, putting up some junk I'm not interested in.
 

Offline timenutgoblin

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Re: Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.
« Reply #2624 on: November 27, 2022, 12:36:34 am »
One thing I've found indispensable on a laptop is a Fn keystroke to disable the trackpad. Otherwise on many machines it picks up the heel of your hand and suddenly the cursor is "somewhere else".
I beg your pardon. Language, please!  ;D
What? It's the name of the effin key.  Oh.  Oooh.

I thought it was pun-worthy.
 


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