Today, I announce the founding of the Society for the Protection of Buttons. We at the SPB, which currently consists of precisely one slightly crotchety member, will work to fight the continual encroachment of touch screens on our daily lives. We will object to being unable to actually press a real, physical button in order to control the things in our lives, we will protest the removal of knobs from our stereos and kitchen appliances, and we will fight the good fight to eliminate the minor frustrations inherent in dealing with touch screens that don't work quite right.
We have a difficult task ahead of us, mostly because touch screens are the trendy device when it comes to pretty much anything new and electronic. In some cases, it makes a degree of sense. A phone, for example, has only so much area that you can use, and making it bigger makes it too big for a pocket. We won't object too strongly to an entirely touch screen phone, though we certainly would never buy one. It's everything else that is shedding buttons that draws our ire.
Take, for instance, the debit machines used to buy many goods and services. For years, they worked simply, by having little buttons to indicate the account you want, and other similar functions. They worked reliably and efficiently, and you could always be confident that the machine would recognize the button pressed. Now, the vile touch screen army has invaded our stores. The new devices, while trendy, are not nearly as reliable as a good old fashioned button. Sometimes they outright don't recognize an input, sometimes they are calibrated poorly and think you pressed something else, sometimes the area to press is vague. Always, they are inferior to the old system, where it was clear which button needed to be pressed and it always did exactly what the label said.
It seems like it should be obvious that buttons are the superior system, but it is clear that buttons are facing challenges. If one goes shopping for a car, they will find a downright depressing array of touch screens for stereos and other minor controls, all of which one has to actually look at if they want to control anything in their car. Buttons are the best for cars, since you can use them while driving, distinctly shaped buttons can be used without taking your eyes off the road and while wearing gloves, something which is difficult to impossible with most touch screens and button-free capacitive surfaces. But, in an effort to follow fashion, we see steadily fewer buttons in our vehicles, to our dismay.
But there have been victories. Ford recently announced that they will bring knobs and buttons back to cars equipped with the MyFord Touch system, in addition to the touch interface. In spite of the SPB not actually existing when this announcement was made, we shall take credit anyway, because we might have mentioned our preference to a car dealer somewhere, at some point. It is our hope that more manufacturers see the error of their entirely touch-screen ways, adding more button controls to allow us to actually control things, without dealing with a technology has never offered the accuracy and satisfaction of a well designed button interface. In the past, we needed buttons, but now, buttons need us.
