GUI shame: Touchpanels

I’m currently doing a lot of design-work for high-end touchpanels. One should expect that a touchpanel in the price range of around 3’000$ to 5’000$ each should be able to render truetype fonts smoothly. Bad luck: AMX doesn’t even support OpenType fonts to date and looks as bas as Crestron-rendered fonts. This is really disappointing. Especially since they are all heavily based on Windows OS implementation mostly, it shouldn’t be that hard to implement something like ClearType or anything. Those results make the whole design process utterly frustrating sometimes.

<cynicism> That explains why most of the preloaded GUIs look like the panels used in beta “hacker”-movies from 1992. Or, wait, maybe it’s because coders do the first-level design on graphical user interfaces: “Cool, we can generate beveled buttons!” – Unfortunately, nobody uses it because it just looks like Windows 3.1 … argh. Where’s the perfectionism, ladies and gentlemen? :) </cynicism>

But that’s not everything by far. Most “high-end” panels I’m doing design for (especially the Crestron ones) only run on 16bit color, which means that you’re gonna have to deal with banding at some point sooner or later if you’re into smooth design. Now try to simulate banding if you don’t have access to the real hardware :P (well, it works with Photoshop’s “Save for Web”, to an extent, but it’s not a 100% predictable).

The touchpanel-concept is pretty cool and I like creating interfaces, but hey, this is sooo 1998 compared to an iPhone which costs roughly a fifth (without a contract) of a “regular” touch panel and has a compass built-in. I mean, come on. The hardware is out there. What’s the matter? If they don’t catch up technology wise, they are doomed. Really. There’s already competition coming up with really sweet hardware.