#touchscreens

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"Applizard" is a portmanteau of application and lizard.

Skeletons have a 'touchscreen spell' that is like a special barrier. It both protects the screen from scratches and senses a skeletons touch. It is powered by the magic in the phone. Their batteries drain a little faster but it's barely noticeable. The spell is very handy!

And most insultingly, button functionality generally gets kicked down the line to a button somewhere else! Miss the play/pause/prev/next features? Why, here’s a little plastic doohickey on these earbuds that does ALL of them. Just master the one-click, two-click triple-click  click-and-hold ninja jutsu and maybe one day you’ll be able to skip to the next track without pausing and then replaying the one you just listened to without having to look at your screen! From this perspective, it comes across that touchscreens have impaired designers abilities to use their brains. Yes, a touchscreen is great if you don’t want to force people to use a scroll wheel or d-pad to type stuff. But are they going to be typing stuff or are they going to be listening to music? And if they need to, why not just support hardware like a modern Bluetooth Keyboard if it matters so much? You could afford to have someone else add the doohickey to the earbuds for merely playing/pausing without touching the screen, what’s a missing keyboard going to harm? The listening experience?

Read more in my CNET article here.

Daily #1,700! I made a boo-boo.