tom@PHOENIX.PRINCETON.EDU (Thomas C Hajdu) (06/21/88)
(please excuse me for my first dodo posting, it was a very dark and stormy late night...) Does anyone have the e-mail address for the Foresight Institute based in California? Does it still exist? thanks in advance
oster@SOE.BERKELEY.EDU (David Phillip Oster) (06/21/88)
Recently Eric Drexler's wife asked that his e-mail address not be distributed because he his getting too much e-mail. I may have misunderstood the message, but _I_ am not going to give out his address. The paper mail address for the ForeSight institute is: The Foresight Institute Box 61058 Palo Alto, CA 94306
FRUIN@HLERUL5.BITNET (Thomas Fruin) (06/24/88)
Did anybody notice how little was really said of the user interface on the screen? There were some vague references to 'icons' and 'popup menus' but nothing new. The stylus of course, but just as a more accurate input device ... Maybe the other entries looked too much like Apple's new System 7.0 :) -- Thomas Fruin fruin@hlerul5.BITNET University of Leiden thomas@uvabick.UUCP University of Amsterdam dibs@well.UUCP hol0066.AppleLink 2:512/114.FidoNet (will _you_ be at EuroCon II this evening? )
ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap) (06/25/88)
|Did anybody notice how little was really said of the user interface on |the screen? There were some vague references to 'icons' and 'popup menus' |but nothing new. The stylus of course, but just as a more accurate |input device ... Well, there was a little blurb about using editorial gestures to edit text, e.g. slash a paragraph to delete it. To investigate further look at papers from conferences like CHI. Ken
ANDYG@wwu.EDU ("Dr. Megabyte") (06/26/88)
I like the pressure-sensitive LCD panel with a stylus as input device, and when I was reading the discussion of handwriting and character recognition as the user interface, it occurred to me that most people write with their hand resting on the writing surface. I'd think this would cause trouble with the pressure-sensitive panel, and not being able to rest one's hand on it might make delicate stylus movements awkward. I suppose one could always rest one's wrist on the edge of the case, and extend the hand with the stylus out over the panel, but it might take some getting used to. And just for the record, I think the ability to broadcast personal information at regular intervals is a great idea. The only drawback I can come up with is that perhaps not quite as much work would get done around the office... but, heck. Andy Gillcrist Internet: andyg%wwu.edu@relay.cs.net or: @relay.cs.net:andyg@wwu.edu (better) "Things fall apart -- it's scientific!" -- Talking Heads The above might represent the opinions of the Western Washington University Computer Center. Then again, it might not.
oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster) (06/26/88)
Actually, the hand resting on the sensitive surface is more of a problem with current digitizing tablets than it would be with Tablet=dynabook. Some tablets work by broadcasting low power radiowaves. The problem is, the hand acts as an antenna. I've held the official stylus in one hand, and got the cursor to track using my the bare index finger of my other hand, tracing on the tablet! Tablet=dynabook can deal with this easily: if the input behavior looks like writing with a stylus, then ignore the large, mostly static lump below the penpoint. We know that the input manager of Tablet sees the entire faceplate as a bitmap: you login by just placing your hand on the faceplate. Current tablets just return the x,y coordinates of where it thinks the pen is. Put your hand near it, while you are holding the pen, and those x,y s change slightly. Many pressure to electricity trnasducers, (for example piezo-electric crystal) are bi-directional: press on it, you get a current. Send a current to it, it deforms slightly. The dynabook I designed in '77 used this effect to use its entire faceplate as a speaker/microphone.