Originally Posted by salomc

Not necessarily. It's enough if both methods are available all the time

Originally Posted by benny1967

No, not really. The only thing crappy are the large GUI-elements that waste so much space on the screen. Make them smaller (as they were before OS2007) and its the perfect "micro-laptop" UI.

Originally Posted by benny1967

One of the things I like most about the concept of the tablets is that they use well-established desktop technologies (such as GTK). End users dont care about this, but it makes it easier to bring already existing applications to the tablets without re-writing too much.

Breaking with well-established concepts might (not necessarily has to, but there's a risk) cause incompatibilities here. Its not that thousands of developers work on 3rd party apps for the tablets right now, right? I wonder if this number would further decrease if completely new UI-concepts would require devs to re-learn everything from scratch and make it harder (or impossible) to port desktop-application to the tablets.

Originally Posted by Texrat

I like the ability of a long click to represent a right mouse click. As a former product designer (and thus heavy user of parametric modeling tools such as SolidWorks) I am a big, BIG evangelist for context-sensitive UI approaches. Hide what the user doesn't need, and bring up what he/she does need based mainly on current context. Beautiful. Reduction of used real estate, reduction of clicks, win for the happy user.

I don't see a better way for right clicks to be emulated on the tablets, unless one considers combining touch with a hardware button press-- and I just don't see that as better. But to each his own.

Originally Posted by Texrat

In my opinion what's called for here is a revolutionary approach that throws old paradigms out the window and starts from scratch. Some time back we had that discussion here but unfortunately it seemed to have ultimately gone nowhere.

I want to forget conventional menus, zooming, scrolling, etc, and come up with an approach that is specifically designed around the tablets' capabilities. That means, IMO, increased usage of gestures and decreased emphasis on things like dropdown menus. Long clicks, finger motions, multitaps, etc. I'll take heat for this from traditionalists I know but something that borrows heavily from Canola, iPhone and other similar approaches.

Out with the old.

In with the new.

Originally Posted by Bundyo

Gah... I'm so late for the fun

Okay, I've always imagined a context-sensitive finger-friendly interface. For instance - imagine you have a fullscreen browser without any toolbars or scrollbars. You drag somewhere on the page and scroll. Or you can click close to the right/left edge where a scrollbar is supposed to be and a biiig scrollbar appears (over the page, without re-layout, maybe transparent) - you scroll and after you get your finger up, the scrollbar disappears. You click on the bottom edge and you've got a toolbar the same way - do what you want, press a button and it is gone. How does that sounds as a finger friendly not wasting space interface?

Originally Posted by qole

You can never be too careful, you could end up looking like a real click.

Originally Posted by Karel Jansens

Well, except for the multitaps. That's just plain silly.

Originally Posted by Bundyo

I can say the same but the other way round - old and well established desktop technologies are ***** to program a new and usable interface,