The folly of the touch screen remote

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So on the Twitters today I read a tweet from Partick Haney about a mockup of a touch enabled remote for a next gen Apple TV:

As I responded to Patrick on Twitter, it certainly looks cool. Touch-screens are certainly powerful and helpful. So much of our life is now wrapped up in this minimal, infinitely morphable interfaces that it becomes easy to think they are a solution for everything.

I am not stating that Patrick believes this. On the contrary from what I have read/know about him I would say he does not. But having seen that image on Macrumors early in the week, I have had time to reflect on it, and this reflection coupled with my own experience has led me to todays article.

Dead Apple Remote

Not too long ago I had the opportunity to test out how effective and rage inducing it would be having a completely multi-touch remote for my media center would be. My setup consists of the following:

  1. 55 inch Samsung LED TV
  2. Panasonic Soundbar + Subwoofer combination
  3. Mac Mini
  4. Plex Media Center Software

I usually control this setup with an Apple Remote (for the mac mini), and a Logitech Harmony 300 (for everything else). Last week the battery in my Apple Remote died, and for reasons I won't get into I wasn't going to be able to get to the store for a new one for a few days.

The Solution?

Luckily an app for iOS that I use for controlling the mac when it's not in media center mode also has a remote setting. Problem solved, or so I thought. That evening the pain and rage began. The app itself worked flawlessly. Click on something and it instantly happened in Plex. The problems I encountered were the following:

  1. The "remote" went to sleep
  2. To work the "remote" I had to take my eyes off the screen.

A remote is a hit it and forget it appliance. You don't want to have to think, or wait for it to do something. You want to mash a button and go. There have been full touchscreen remotes before and they have all failed. Some for design reasons, some for price reasons, all of them have had the same fundamental flaw though. You have to interact with the remote to do what you want. This is a nonstarter.

I don't want to wake up my remote to pause a film, or to skip ahead in a tv show. I want to just do it.

Likewise, I don't want to have to take my eyes off the screen to pause or skip. Without the availability of physical buttons to leverage our tactile touch memory, you can't say, pause a movie at the exact moment someone makes a stupid face (what you don't do this?), since you have to grab the remote, look at it, wake it up, and then find the pause button.

If you try and solve the sleep/wake issue by either having the remote always on with a dimmed screen, or have it respond to movement with a gyroscope, you introduce another issue. Batter life. No one wants a remote that has to be recharged every other day.

And all of this doesn't even touch on the fact that a remote like this would require a version of either the iPod OS or iOS, which introduces a whole host of other issues, software bugs and crashes being just the least of your worries.

My solution?

Luckily for me the volume controls died on my old Logitech Harmony 300, so went out and picked up a Logitech Harmony 650 which among other awesome things allows you to masquerade as an Apple Remote. I could never get my 300 to do this.

So now I have one remote to rule them all, and since it has basically the same layout as the 300 my muscle memory is just fine. I realize Apple has patents covering things like touch surfaces that are physically configurable via servos inside the housing, which would allow the remote to provide tactile, physical button layouts that are customizable, but that just seems fraught with danger and fragility.

At this point I don't see how anyone could craft a multitouch only remote device that would actually perform better than a basic physically constructed alternative.