shithub: touchuichal

--- a/touchuichal.txt

+++ b/touchuichal.txt

@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

]]]

 While older computer systems are designed with specific devices for human interaction—for example computer screen, keyboard and mouse—modern computer systems often embed many of those devices into one—a single touchscreen.

-Going from that to a ‘single device for everything’ is not a big step, especially when combined with cloud computing.

+Going from that to a `single device for everything' is not a big step, especially when combined with cloud computing.

 This trend comes with a cost:

 Most operating systems were—and often still are—designed for a computer system with dedicated screen, keyboard and mouse.

@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@

 Due to the increasing amount of touch devices—especially on the mobile market— and increasing hardware support¹ of Plan 9 it's important that we think about touch user interfaces.

 [[[ms

.FS

-¹ Ports of the Plan 9 distribution ‘9front’ to devices like the PinePhone are being worked on.

+¹ Ports of the Plan 9 distribution `9front' to mobile devices like the PinePhone are being worked on.

.FE

]]]

@@ -44,19 +44,19 @@

 # Why do we need a Plan 9-specific user interface?

 When reading this far, the first thought might be:

-“Let's just use what we have and put it on a touch device”.

-While this though is the most obvious one, it's also a naïve thought.

+``Let's just use what we have and put it on a touch device''.

+While this is the most obvious thought, it's also a naïve thought.

 Even big and expensive operating systems like Microsoft Windows tried that, and failed.

 A much more important point is that the best touch user interfaces are designed for touch from the ground up, most notably Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

-Both systems are widespread and their handling of touch interfaces is often seen as the ‘de facto’ standard.

+Both systems are widespread and their handling of touch interfaces is often seen as the `de facto' standard.

-This ‘de facto’ standard doesn't fit the Plan 9 operating system too well though.

+This `de facto' standard doesn't fit the Plan 9 operating system too well though.

 Plan 9 has its own, very specific idea of important aspects of user interfaces.

 For example, it has its own mechanism for inter-process communication, it's own view of resources and has a unique user interface, which leads to a very distinct user experience.

 Let's assume that we try to achieve this same user experience using the commonly known standard of touch user interfaces.

-Many interactions just don't ‘feel’ right.

+Many interactions just don't `feel' right.

 Sending some data to another program?

 Sure, on Plan 9 we'd probably use the plumber.

 On modern mobile operating systems we often find a system that's quite similar.

@@ -63,7 +63,7 @@

 But what if we want to copy and paste some text?

 Sure, just LMB-sweep, MMB-click, RMB-click to snarf, then LMB-click and RMB-click to paste… which is mouse driven, but feels natural to a Plan 9 user.

-Now try to achive this ‘feel’ with a pure touch screen interaction.

+Now try to achieve this `feel' with a pure touch screen interaction.

 This natural Plan 9 user experience is very hard to achieve using current standards.

 That's why we believe that we need a specific touch user interface for Plan 9 systems.

@@ -73,6 +73,7 @@

 Since the scope of a paper is way too small, and the scope of designing and implementing user interfaces are way too big, this paper will focus on the design challenges only.

 To do that properly we'll have to take a look at what Plan 9 users experience when interacting with the operating system.

+To gather more insight, a survey was done to ask users about their habits and how important various features of Plan 9 are. [Meyer]

 But before we do that, we'll quickly remind ourselves about general challenges of touch interfaces.

@@ -114,3 +115,12 @@

 - How to visualize and manage namespaces on Plan 9, using touch UI.

 - Dynamic, per-process namespaces are an integral part of Plan 9.

+# References

+[[[ms

+.LP

+[Meyer] J. Meyer, ``Survey: Plan 9 and Touch User Interfaces'', 2023

+.br

+]]]