[GTALUG] Why Everyone Wants to Kill the Mouse and Keyboard

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Scott Sullivan <scott at ss.org>

| It used to be that you would learn the keyboard shortcuts. But as menus became
| bigger, unless your work with a particular application all day, you mostly go
| by mouse.

(Of course I don't see this, I only see what I do, and I still use
decades-old tools like X, xterm, jove, C, ...)

One change I imagine is that a lot of the consumption applications
have moved to totally different systems: phones and tablets.

Desktops get used for real work and things that do require keyboarding.  
Perhaps that is actually a narrow set of applications.  So I would expect 
keyboarding would actually become more important on desktops.

The "app" world of the phone and tablet and the website world of
browsers allow for a diversity of applications that the Windows and
OSX world likely hasn't.  In the desktop world there was some kind of
tidal force that caused much functionality to end up in MS Office and
a few other big hit applications.  So the world with keyboards has
less diversity than the touch world.

The quantity of apps and websites is probably unsustainable.  People 
cannot deal with that amount of choice, so we'll probably end up with an 
even more hit-driven marketplace.  A counterexample: there still a heck of 
a lot of distinct books half a millenium after printing was invented (you 
can get a bunch cheap <http://stmikes.utoronto.ca/booksale/> today and 
tomorrow).