shithub: touchuichal

--- a/touchuichal.txt

+++ b/touchuichal.txt

@@ -22,13 +22,13 @@

 The world is changing.

 Especially in the last two decades computer systems changed from expensive pieces of hardware to much smaller systems that embed everything into one device.

-While most computing expensive tasks are moved to the cloud, a full computer system is often not bigger than what can comfortably fit in your hand.

+While most computing expensive tasks have moved to the cloud, a full computer system is often not bigger than what can comfortably fit in your hand.

 [[[ms

 .\" quote of some dude stating that, if I can find it.

]]]

 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 mobile 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

]]]

@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@

 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 probably wouldn't `feel' right.

+Many interactions probably wouldn'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 achieve 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.

@@ -71,7 +71,7 @@

 # 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 design challenges only.

+Since the scope of a paper is way too small, and the scope of designing and implementing user interfaces is way too big, this paper will focus on 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 are². [Meyer]

 [[[ms

@@ -89,7 +89,7 @@

 ## Well-known touch user interface challenges

 Many challenges arise when designing touch user interfaces in general.

-Most of them are very well known today and big development houses like Apple and Google found good solutions to those problems.

+Most of them are very well known today and big development houses like Apple and Google have found good solutions to those problems.

 The first big challenge that comes to mind is a large variety of different devices.

 Big devices like tablets or multimedia screens as well as very small devices like smartphones or even smart watches provide touch hardware interfaces, which requires a solution that covers a variety of screen sizes.

@@ -130,7 +130,7 @@

 Plan 9 provides a few important aspects of user interfaces.

 Unlike its predecessor UNIX it tries to find a perfect mix of text interfaces, graphics as well as input devices like mice.

-This paper describes these three `pillars' in more detail.

+This paper describes these three ``pillars'' in more detail.

 We'll also take a smaller look at the results from the survey. [Meyer]

 ### Text interface

@@ -147,7 +147,7 @@

 Changing the output or previous commands is possible, as well as sending it to the prompt for execution.

 Furthermore, it is possible to access the text inside rio shell windows.

-This way, applications can extend the text shell even further.

+This way, applications can extend the functionality of text shells even further, for example by providing access to the history of recent commands.

 [[[ms

 .\" Using rio windows to handle graphical applications will be discussed in the next pillar.

@@ -170,12 +170,12 @@

 Standard computer systems usually come with a mouse and keyboard setup, which is often needed for interaction with graphical systems.

 Usage of the keyboard is often very simple if you forget about special keys and shortcuts.

-The mouse however often faces `philosophical input behavior'.

-While the `standard' behavior describes a single mouse button to behave as a simple click-pointer, mice often have more than one button and it's up to the system to decide how these extra buttons should be used.

+The mouse however often faces ``philosophical input behavior''.

+While the ``standard'' behavior describes a single mouse button to behave as a simple click-pointer, mice often have more than one button and it's up to the system to decide how these extra buttons should be used.

 Plan 9 has a very unique style of using these extra buttons:

 Clicking with any button shows a different behavior depending on the context and the button used.

-While this is very common among different operating systems, modern operating systems mostly agreed on a single standard, which Plan 9 slightly deviates from, but that's not too different to discuss in more detail in this paper.

+While this is very common among different operating systems, modern operating systems mostly agreed on a single standard, which Plan 9 slightly deviates from, but it's not too different to discuss in more detail in this paper.

 What Plan 9 does completely different is mouse chording:

 By clicking multiple buttons at the same time the user can describe another input behavior the system uses to control other forms of interaction.

@@ -188,13 +188,13 @@

 For example, in acme it is possible to execute commands using the middle mouse button.

 Mouse interaction on Plan 9 scored 2.9 out of 5 points in the survey.

-It is noticeable that some users clearly don't like to use the mouse or to chord.

+It is notable that some users clearly don't like to use the mouse or to chord.

 A few users pointed out that nowadays true three-button-mice are rare.

 ## Integrated system components

 In addition to the obvious user interface components we discussed earlier, there are other system components that are important for a Plan 9 system.

-Although they can't really be counted as `user interfaces', they still have an enormous impact on the user experience.

+Although they can't really be counted as ``user interfaces'', they still have an enormous impact on the user experience.

 These components are usually invisible, but users tend to interact with them using dedicated user interfaces, like the shell or menus.

@@ -213,7 +213,7 @@

 Even the plumber itself doesn't need to know about this structure, but the configuration tells the plumber what to do with it.

 There's also no limitation to what can be plumbed.

-From simple text strings, to binary data like images, to full documents or other plumb messages: Nearly everything is `plumbable'.

+From simple text strings, to binary data like images, to full documents or other plumb messages: Nearly everything is ``plumbable''.

 The survey shows that some users don't use it much directly, others don't know if it's useful in other applications than what's already using it.

 One user admitted that the plumber is ``integral'' to their workflow.

@@ -269,7 +269,7 @@

 On Plan 9, this is done with many applications and system components.

 From low-level system features and drivers (e. g. /dev) to high-level components (e. g. webfs) and applications (e. g. acme), the general feature allows for much flexibility and simple access to how the software works.

-Everything else about this feature is already handled in the section about namespaces.

+Everything else about this feature is already discussed in the section about namespaces.

 ### Factotum

@@ -293,9 +293,9 @@

 # Future work

 In this paper we took a deeper look into various challenges that encounter when designing user interfaces for touch devices while keeping in mind the unique nature of Plan 9.

-While it is possible to find very different solutions for those challenges, there probably can't be a single one.

+While it is possible to find very different solutions for those challenges, no single solution will work for everything.

-In the software world, there's often more than one way to do it, and that's a good thing.

+In the software world, there's often more than one way to do something, and that's a good thing.

 Developers should get into discussions to find innovative solutions and build incredible software.

 While we still have a lack of general support of touch screen devices, I really hope that this issue will be solved soon enough and we can see Plan 9 on touch devices, with a wave of new user-friendly applications.