Hover input on touch screens is cool tech but I’ve yet to see an implementation of it where it really added usability. More hidden UI just seems like more difficulty for average users.
More hidden UI in a car seems like the absolute worst place to use such a hardware feature. Drivers should have their eyes on the road, not staring at the screen while they try to get their finger just the right distance to make some UI element pop up.
Edit: the linked Microsoft demo is pretty cool, and could improve mobile devices, but is exactly what I was thinking should not be in a car control surface.
Hover is not necessarily more hidden UI, but could actually go to making bits of phone UI that currently exists more discoverable. A personal gripe of mine is that press-and-hold on a button is a terrible way of discovering something new, you’re never sure if the button is just going to perform its default action (which is something you may not want to do, and without a readily-available “undo” key is kinda dangerous). Hover could go a long way to improving this.
I have no written source to back this up, but based on a conversation I had with an Apple engineer, the first version of the iPhone way back in 2007 could’ve supported hover. Steve Jobs personally nixed the idea as he felt it wasn’t intuitive and thus we are where we are today.
More hidden UI in a car seems like the absolute worst place to use such a hardware feature. Drivers should have their eyes on the road, not staring at the screen while they try to get their finger just the right distance to make some UI element pop up.
Edit: the linked Microsoft demo is pretty cool, and could improve mobile devices, but is exactly what I was thinking should not be in a car control surface.