Top all-time · #1306
Bill Buxton
Personal blog · billbuxton.comdesignhardware
Bill Buxton's personal blog at billbuxton.com covers design and hardware. Since 2008, 57 different Hacker News readers have linked it 86 times, most often “Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known (1982)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known (1982)26 people · 31 mentions · first linked 2008-05-23
- Chord Keyboards [pdf]5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-08-06
- /MMUserLearn.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-03-18
- Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-11-21
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-03-23
- /inputTimeline.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-07
What Hacker News says?
Another major problem with "research visions" like this is that they portray a thoroughly "bourgeois" future. We know already that in order for every human on this planet to have basic needs taken care of, highly consumptive 1st world lifestyles like the one portrayed in the video will need to be replaced. If you've ever built anything, you'll know that it takes an immense amount of resources to obtain that kind of…
Comment linking /papers.html
on “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design”Submitted Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known (1982) as a story · 115 points
HN discussionCheck out Bill Buxton's work, he wrote a lot about this: https://www.billbuxton.com/
Comment linking /
on “UI elements with a hand-drawn, sketchy look”Submitted Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved as a story · 17 points
HN discussionYeah, so what? If you read HCI papers from the 90s (it's what I do for a job-- I'm a PhD student in HCI), you'll see that a lot of very respected researchers claimed that speech technology is not useful (their claim is well-founded: it is slow, environmental noise is unavoidable, what to say is often not obvious, and there's the Midas problem). But, here we are, with people praising Siri. It's how technology works--…
Comment linking /Pen+TouchUIST.pdf
on “Microsoft Introduces New "Surface" Tablet”Submitted Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved (2007) as a story · 12 points
HN discussionAgreed, I'd love to see that too! One criticism I have of HyperCard is that it wasn't "HyperCard All The Way Down", in that not all the rest of its dialogs and user interfaces and menus were made out of HyperCard stacks. It wasn't "metacircular", defined in terms of itself. That's totally forgivable given that HyperCard was the first original iteration, and "merely" getting it finished in time to ship on every Mac d…
Comment linking /natural.html
on “No more icons in every menu by default”Submitted Multi-touch UI -- 25 years before iPhone as a story · 6 points
HN discussionYou know of many people coming up with ideas like pinch-to-zoom and just throwing them away? As a matter of fact, I do. Let me present to you a very popular example, pinch to zoom: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html I'm sure you are confused, because Apple has a patent on this because they invented it, right? Not quite. Apple has a very narrow patent on it for using it in conjunction with a particular…
Comment linking /multitouchOverview.html
on “Apple using patents to undermine open standards again”Submitted Social planning and communities: the information highway (1994) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMultitouch has been around long before 1999. http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
Comment linking /multitouchOverview.html
on “When patents attack Android”Submitted Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSome of the reading list in the UI/UX course at Brown: http://cs.brown.edu/courses/csci1300/ Particularly (free links with pdfs), Don Norman - Design of Everyday Things https://archive.org/details/DesignOfEverydayThings Bill Buxton - Input Manuscript http://www.billbuxton.com/inputManuscript.html Alan Cooper - About Face http://feiramoderna.net/download/pos-positivo/COOPER-Alan/Ab... Vignelli - The Vignelli Canon ht…
Comment linking /inputManuscript.html
on “Ask HN: Good books or articles on UI design?”Submitted Human Input to Computer Systems: Theories, Techniques and Technology (2011 WIP) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere are two interesting factors to the Office Ribbon and its clones. 1) You can absolutely botch it. A good example of that is Sibelius: Their Ribbon does not make any sense at all (and is in multiple instances literally a waste of space). Personally, I find the ribbon design on MS Office to be much better, though; MS has clearly put much thought and experimentation (i.e. many studies) into the concept. 2) What I…
Comment linking /TGtaxonomy.html
on “UI redesigns are mostly a waste of time”Submitted Chord Keyboards [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWell the Palm Pilot isn't multitouch so ofcourse you can't do a pinch there. But double click just works out of the box on almost all devices when an existing OS is used. I think you should give this a read: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html and notice these words: "What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum."
Comment linking /multitouchOverview.html
on “The Tim Cook memo: line by line”Submitted Haptic Input Case Study: CHORD KEYBOARDS [pdf] as a story · 2 points
HN discussionBill Buxton tangent: http://billbuxton.com/inputManuscript.html is full of great stuff.
Comment linking /inputManuscript.html
on “Quirky computing books”Submitted Multi-touch technologies have a long history as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMarking Menus [1], Pie Menus, Radial Menus and friends have been around for a while. There is good body of research on them, with some recent research done on their use in multi-touch environments. [2] While working at DreamWorks, I would often watch artists navigate complex marking menu hierarchies and invoke a command before the menu items themselves could actually be read by a non-trained user. In our custom ligh…
Comment linking /MMUserLearn.html
on “Show HN: Munal OS: a graphical experimental OS with WASM sandboxing”Submitted Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe HCI researcher Bill Buxton has a quite comprehensive run-down titled "Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved ": http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
Comment linking /multitouchOverview.html
on “US patent office rejects claims of Apple 'pinch to zoom' patent”Submitted Human Input to Computer Systems: Theories, Techniques and Technology (2011 WIP) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt sounds a lot like “auditory icons” as used in Emacspeak [0] and some other environments to improve accessibility for people with vision impairments. Bill Buxton [1] seems to have a good treatment of the subject but i don’t know what’s autoritative [0] https://tvraman.github.io/emacspeak/manual/Auditory-Icons.ht... [1] https://www.billbuxton.com/AudioUI06icons.pdf
Comment linking /AudioUI06icons.pdf
on “Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?”Submitted Getting the Right Design and the Design Right (2006) [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe pinch gesture can be traced back to 1983: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
Comment linking /multitouchOverview.html
on “Apple's New Pinch-To-Zoom Monopoly is Bad News”Submitted The Opposite of Skill:The Psychology of Cross Country by Bill Buxton as a story · 1 points
HN discussionEngelbart’s keyboard is discussed in this chapter on chorded keyboard boards: http://www.billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf
Comment linking /input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf
on “The 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo”Submitted Human Input to Computer Systems: Theories, Techniques and Technology (2011 WIP) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
