Does anyone use the touchscreen to work in GH?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Armin Seltz on November 29, 2016 at 2:19am

Probably pretty terrible. In Grasshopper you are constantly using right-click and middle-mouse-click. I have tried using it with the Trackpad of a Macbook Pro and it just wasn't fun at all, but possible, because you just click the trackpad bottom right for right-click. So with a touchscreen I would think it was even more difficult.

I would say it would be a huge pain!

But just as big a pain would be to not have a keyboard to type things (or using a screen keyboard).. and if you have a keyboard with a touchscreen device, you might as well use a mouse too.

Touchscreen monitors are terrible anyways. We had a 24" touchscreen monitor and its impossible to use for a longer time, because your arm will get so tired. I can see the appeal of the Microsoft Studio, but again I think using your finger or a pen - ie. lifting your arm - for something that can be done by mouse input AND wasn't designed for touch input won't be any fun in the long run.

Permalink Reply by Andrei Raducanu on November 29, 2016 at 6:40am

Thanks for the answer! I was thinking in the same lines, but wanted an input from someone that actually tried it.

Permalink Reply by Stephen Yoshida on November 12, 2017 at 6:34am

I have a touchscreen laptop (read: not a tablet) and run GH on it. It can be handy but there's still some shit to work out for sure. For instance, not having to mouse to everything all the time is great - no more looking for cursor in order to poke at the toolbar, double tapping the canvas to place new components etc. etc.

But those are fairly standard touchscreen features. Compared to companies you would expect to have high-end touch screen support, Adobe for instance, GH has a long way to go. Navigation is a huge pain and I use the touchpad for that almost exclusively. 

There has been some work done though and progress is on-going. Zoom works like you'd expect and as you can see here David Rutten is working on the navigation thing in some capacity for future release. Definitely wouldn't attempt it on a tablet only platform though.

All in all, I think it's totally usable now though. The other commenter from last year raises some good points but there are still plenty of good features. 

Permalink Reply by Birk Binnard on November 12, 2017 at 1:51pm

For a desktop system I'd say the touchscreen is a solution looking for a problem. Touchscreens are fine for handheld devices for which there are no keyboards, mice, or other pointing/selecting devices. But applying them to desktop systems really makes no sense to me at all.

Many years ago I was a developer for the first 3D graphics software used in any production environment. We used a device called an IBM 2250. This was a 2-color (green & black) raster based video screen coupled with a typewriter keyboard, a "function keyboard" with (I think) 24 programmable buttons, and a device called a light pen.

The light pen was the system's pointing/selecting tool. It had a light sensor in the end that was spring loaded. Pressing it against the screen tripped a microswitch that turned on the light sensor. When the sensor detected the light from the CRT's internal electron beam it created a software interrupt containing the 2250's screen X and Y coordinates at that instant. We used that data to determine what the user was pointing at when the lightpen was pushed against the screen.

It was tiresome and time consuming to have to switch between the keyboard, function keys, and lightpen. We made some jokes about a new breed of 2250 user who somehow grew a third arm and hand to deal with the lightpen while they were pushing keys on the keyboard or function key box.

The whole system would be laughable today, but back then it was the state of the art. Fortunately technology has progressed to the point where current day devices are both intuitive and easy to use. Trying to use a touch screen on a desktop system would be a step backward indeed.

Permalink Reply by Stephen Yoshida on November 12, 2017 at 2:10pm

That's what I thought. But have you tried it?! It's so freaking nice not having to use a mouse for absolutely everything. 

Permalink Reply by Johann Magnus Kjartansson on November 18, 2017 at 2:46am

I think you guys are pretty negative about this. Right click could be acheived with a two finger tap and middle click could be a double tap :)