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Why is it a disaster waiting to happen, according to you?


Touch screen is still very inaccurate and you don't develop muscle memory.

You are more likely to touch wrong button on touchscreen than on physical ui.


I can buy the muscle memory part, sure but are they really very inaccurate?

I can select very small text on my phone with my bigger fingers. And also with a touch screen you may have more options in a smaller space.

Sure, that may suck for critical things, but there probably are a lot of settings and so forth that could be hidden that are not critical?

But I understand what you meant, I prefer physical buttons as well.


Personally, it seems I touch wrong buttons quite a bit on my phone. I also click wrong buttons when using mouse but that is rarer than pressing wrong button on my phone.

The most annoying part is using touch screen in my car for GPS. It might be bad UI but also viewing angle might be making it hard to press right button. But then again I would not expect a physical keyboard in a car.

In physical land, it is very rare that I press a wrong button. Maybe when playing intense video games, I press jump too soon or use wrong gun. Oh and of course while typing.


Touch screen are too sensitive to be safe. Also there is a very high chance to mis-click (see HN upvote/dowwn-vote buttons). Much safer to use regular old mechanical buttons with tick-tacks.


I noticed during the stream one of the astronauts selecting some input on his screen, pausing for a moment, and then pressing the physical button below the screen to confirm the input. So that's probably their defense against misclicks: any action other than just changing the display mode or opening a checklist has to be confirmed through the physical "Execute" button (there seems to be two of them, one for each astronaut).


I'm also curious about this disaster waiting to happen. They've emphasized an escape capability all the way into orbit. They emphasized various types of automation (also used by other spacecraft).




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