But "grabbing" is a less-efficient solution. Just as moving the mouse around may be less efficient than typing on that keyboard; grabbing stuff to interact with them can be a waste of time. More intuitive != more productive; and the current problem (IMHO) with mobile devices is that they have such low efficiency rates that their productivity _despite_ the advantage of being always on and always with you still suffers (as a result of size, awkwardness, and time-consuming adaptations we need to use).
I totally disagree. Building a handheld application requires getting into the mindset of the UI that it requires. I say this having worked on handhelds for, um, 15 years now.
And you're badly undervaluing delight.
Let me give a concrete example from my own work.
A buddy an I wrote a text-adventure parser so you could play stuff like Zork and HHGTTG on the Newton. It worked really well and was reasonably popular at least partly based on the interface.
Understand that you always have access to a keyboard on the Newton -- there was even an external one.
But what we did was to have a word automatically entered on the input box when you tapped on that word above in the description.
That was scads faster than tapping something out. And made users wicked happy.
Sure. I ended up with a Newton from school when Apple was dumping the MP100s. A buddy and I started writing stuff for them -- some games and a VT100 emulator.
When the Newton disappeared on 1997-02-27, we got call from the guys at Palm (mostly ex-Newton folks) to lure us to code for the PalmOS rather than WinCE. We only wrote one neat bit: http://www.powermedia.com/pilot/index.shtml
About a year after that I helped cofound PatientKeeper, http://www.patientkeeper.com, where I wrote the first 7ish versions of the handheld app before we hired some really talented engineers to hand it off to. I spent the next several years writing the server side of that system while watching them take ideas I'd had to new, amazing places.
Thanks for sharing your experience in this field. But (and forgive me if I'm mistaken) your application was a special exception where the option of using the touchscreen UI made more sense, just as the Nintendo DS has a usability edge with its touchscreen. But for the more-general "productivity" applications - from email clients to word processors to graphics design software (where the "word bias" isn't an issue), I don't see touchscreens being the more efficient way to go.
In my opinion, delight is great, but not when it comes at the expense of productivity. For games and leisure, productivity is a non-issue and - you're absolutely right - delight and simplicity should be the developer's number one focus. But for productivity tools, making things easier and quicker to get done is the most important thing. There's nothing more frustrating than banging out an email on a touch-screen keyboard; for productivity tools, increased productivity is the delight.
There's a boatload of research in CHI and Human Factors about input mechanisms. Much of it is crappy. Some of the best was done in the last 60's and revolved around the "McRuer Crossover Model".
There's a neat bit of work looking at what kind of models a user has to create in order to control a noisy system efficiently. It turns out that you can cleanly calculate when the task gets too hard. This has since been corroborated with the flight testing of (among other things) fighter aircraft.
The bottom line is that it says that the less (mental) work you have to do to, the better you'll do.
With a mouse, you have to think "I have to move it for this amount of time to get to where I want". You integrate its motion to get the final position.
Joysticks & pointing nubbins are one step worse: "I have to hold it in this deflection to cause it to move the cursor for this amount of time."
Touch typing on a keyboard fall outside this space because there is no pointing/tracking task at all.
And, for reference, reversing a two-stage tractor trailer is 5 levels of integration. Getting an oil tanker into harbor is 6!
It's about size. And the mouse is not less efficient than the keyboard for certain tasks. For others (especially, I'd imagine, the hacker news crowd) it can be less efficient, but I don't think that's so much of a general rule.
I love the keyboard on my full-sized computers. But lately, I tried to ssh to a server to fix an issue from my iPhone and typing was a bitch. Despite gestures and shortcuts and my aliases, I couldn't really get anything done and gave it up to do later.
I don't know what your idea of productivity is but some things are very amenable to being grabbed and manipulated. It's just so much simpler and faster. For example, I use irssi on my phone when colloq stops working to get on irc, and I wish I could flick back and forth between windows...or I wish I could manipulate and split windows with only my fingers zooming in and out and dragging things. No, I have to type it out and it is a very annoying pain in the ass. I know irssi isn't a mobile app, but it sure does make a good example.
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