ref: 97d5882bba0f9a24a27d68e39707e3e216d359fb
parent: d33a256d6eae5fa0a6ff296bd8099974ce1ba31f
author: sirjofri <sirjofri@sirjofri.de>
date: Fri Sep 8 11:55:04 EDT 2023
adds more text
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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.
-Actual contents:
+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.
+Plan 9 is not different, although it allows for various combinations of hardware due to its strong networked nature.
+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.
+.FE
+]]]
-- Many modern computer systems come with touch screens only, without traditional input methods.
# Why do we need a Plan 9-specific user interface?
-- Plan 9 OS is much different than other OSes.
-- It has very specific idea of IPC, user interaction and what a computer is.
+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.
+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.
+
+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.
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+
# Challenges
-## Well-known user interface challenges
+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.
+
+But before we do that, we'll quickly remind ourselves about general challenges of touch interfaces.
+
+[[[ms
+.\" refer to survey!
+]]]
+
+## Well-known touch user interface challenges
- Different screen sizes (phone, tablet, much bigger differences than on PC).
- Touch challenges (thumb size, multi touch, ...).