If there’s one group of people who were deserving of a whole lot of sympathy back in the day, it was the graphic artists who were using trackball mice to draw the four color bitmap characters for Nintendo games.
Lord oh lord have touchpads and tablets made life a heck of a lot easier.
If you read the header for this article, you know where we’re going with this. A touchpad makes graphic design a whole, whole lot easier. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that touchpads were invented with graphic designers in mind.
Graphic Design
If you don’t want to break out the tablet every single time you want to touch up a photo, a touchpad will get the job done when it comes to fine detail work. It’s kind of funny, the first time you use a touchpad, it feels kind of awkward. We’ve been using a mousepad for so long, we’ve almost forgotten that the mouse was only invented because we couldn’t use our fingers yet, and now that we CAN use our fingers, we’ve grown accustomed to the substitute!
It’s like when the Nintendo Wii came out. The gamers said “We have to fling our arms around instead of using a controller!?” but when you think about it, we were using controllers so we could get the guy in the game to fling his arms around. Actually performing the motion in real life to do it in the game becomes much more than second nature, it becomes FIRST nature.
Within a few minutes, drawing with a touchpad feels as natural, and as fun, as fingerpainting.
Here’s something you can do with a touchpad just for fun:
TerminatorX.org
Remember when you were a kid and you heard your first rap song? The way they scratch the records… You might’ve gotten yelled at when you tried it with your dad’s Led Zeppelin albums, but the TerminatorX program allows you to take any MP3 or Wav file and use the mouse to virtually “scratch” the record.
You see what I’m getting at here. Doing it with a touchpad is a lot more fun. It actually feels much more like you’re really scratching records like some kind of old school hip hop DJ. Ask the party people how they’re feeling now and then, ask everybody to throw their hands in the air like they just don’t care, and make sure the door is locked so nobody walks in on you pretending to be Jam Master Jay.
This is what touchpads really have to offer us: A more intuitive interface. In the future, maybe we’ll have computers we can operate by pointing at a hologram screen projected in front of us. For now, tablets, touchpads and touchscreens are a nice start.
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