Back when the Ask Tog piece came out, I wrote a Slashdot comment along the same lines as this article.
I had one additional point. Keeping in mind that this uses a WYSIWIG editor, use a very slightly different benchmark task: instead of replacing every ‘e’ with ‘|’, replace every ‘l’ with ‘|’ — and by the way, your text is in 6 point Helvetica. And you'd better not miss any, or replace any ‘I’s.
The key (badum tish) is that characters on a keyboard are semantically connected to characters in a document, in a direct and obvious way. By contrast, there is no such direct link between mouse (or touch) and the document, only a transient link via the document's current presentation. With a keyboard, you can operate on text; with a mouse, you can only operate on pictures of text.
> By contrast, there is no such direct link between mouse (or touch) and the document, only a transient link via the document's current presentation.
It need not be this way. It's simply an utter lack of imagination on part of modern peripheral makers. I had a touchstream keyboard and after a bit of work I had emacs integration that was absolutely fantastic and involved semantic gestures.
There is nothing fundamentally flawed about suggesting that gestures could be semantically meaningful.
I had one additional point. Keeping in mind that this uses a WYSIWIG editor, use a very slightly different benchmark task: instead of replacing every ‘e’ with ‘|’, replace every ‘l’ with ‘|’ — and by the way, your text is in 6 point Helvetica. And you'd better not miss any, or replace any ‘I’s.
The key (badum tish) is that characters on a keyboard are semantically connected to characters in a document, in a direct and obvious way. By contrast, there is no such direct link between mouse (or touch) and the document, only a transient link via the document's current presentation. With a keyboard, you can operate on text; with a mouse, you can only operate on pictures of text.