Klas, you wrote,
>Turning a real hardware knob or slide - or doing it with your mouse,
>are two completely different things. I'm not talking about the
>quality of the result, but of the interaction between man and machine.
>How nice would it be to drive a Ferrari by pressing a keyboard?
Exactly. Digital machinery seduces designers into including more and
more features that are harder and harder to manipulate. I call it
"the digital watch syndrome." It leads to awful ergonomics. The
archetypical example is the VCR blinking 12:00 because most users
never even figured out how to set the clock, let alone program a
recording.
What you pay $1000 more for in a professional recorder is ruggedness,
big knobs and buttons for everything important, and meters.
I think there must be a niche market for digital products--watches,
cameras, cell phones--that have big, easy-to-operate controls. E.g. a
volume control instead of tiny up-down buttons that also double as
track selectors or something. Ergonomics is at a nadir in consumer
products.
-Dan Dugan
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