Old Listener,
I'd echo your last post essentially verbatim. Excellent description, at both the abstract and detailed level.
I'd expand on a couple of points:
- I think that there is nothing inherent in touch interfaces that keeps them from satisfying the requirement of more flexible browsing. Things like the iTunes Remote application are simply limited by the vision and constraints imposed by their designers. I'm working on an iPad/general tablet webapp for myself that is quite promising, which I'll release freely if it pans out.
- Images are useful at a certain level of abstraction, but overall are an insufficient replacement for language. I could recognize the album cover for "Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" anywhere in the world, but an image of Schubert might easily be confused with one of Liszt or Schumann, while the names of these composers are easily distinguished in a matter of milliseconds by anyone reading this board. And what picture would be universally recognized as "symphony #3"?This is precisely why language is represented as a collection of lower-level, context-specific symbols, rather than pictures per se. All of which is a pretentious way of saying, you're right, text is generally more useful than pictures.
I'd echo your last post essentially verbatim. Excellent description, at both the abstract and detailed level.
I'd expand on a couple of points:
- I think that there is nothing inherent in touch interfaces that keeps them from satisfying the requirement of more flexible browsing. Things like the iTunes Remote application are simply limited by the vision and constraints imposed by their designers. I'm working on an iPad/general tablet webapp for myself that is quite promising, which I'll release freely if it pans out.
- Images are useful at a certain level of abstraction, but overall are an insufficient replacement for language. I could recognize the album cover for "Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" anywhere in the world, but an image of Schubert might easily be confused with one of Liszt or Schumann, while the names of these composers are easily distinguished in a matter of milliseconds by anyone reading this board. And what picture would be universally recognized as "symphony #3"?This is precisely why language is represented as a collection of lower-level, context-specific symbols, rather than pictures per se. All of which is a pretentious way of saying, you're right, text is generally more useful than pictures.