I bet Apple’s “force touch” stuff could be leveraged in much the same way — light touch replicates a mouseover, heavy touch replicates a click. That’s probably not something a webmaster can implement though. Sounds like a feature of the browser instead.
I don’t think that Apple, Samsung, Et Al find hover desirable. Touch devices such as tablets and phones are intended to be easy to use. Features like “right click” and “hover” are more difficult concepts. (The existence of a ‘cursor’ beyond what is being jabbed at the screen is also more difficult than it’s absence, I suspect.)
While both iOS and Android have been regressing for 2+ years in the UI-simplicity department I do not think that any major player wants to add such inscrutable/ambiguous functionality as “hover”. Furthermore it wouldn’t be useful for any application developed for existing touch-UIs and it would probably encourage all sorts of bad behavior from developers.
On a traditional PC some hover features such as tooltips/infoboxes can be very useful. Hover image swaps are much more questionable IMO. The same effect can easily be achieved with a button which achieves the toggle - if we consider this it quickly becomes clear that a button allows for more flexibility than hover. Consider an example of side-by-side images with mouseovers - how do we compare the “underlying” images? We cannot, with mouseovers. With a click-to-toggle system we could compare the underlying (level 2, whatever) images easily. Clicking/tapping is just as fast as mouseover, maybe faster.
@wight: Yep, I pretty much hate tactile devices anyway, especially due to the mobile OS limitations. I’ll take my laptop with a “real” OS any day over a shackled mobile device.
I also prefer a “real” OS. With that said, I think that there is much room for improvement in the all-touch-OS department. I also think that touch interfaces do have their place.
For all of the things which I refer to as “professional work” a real (traditional) system is still more efficient with a trained operator. That applies from CAD to word processing. The pace at which mobile platforms and apps have advanced has been surprisingly slow (after all, we already know what can be done since we have traditional operating systems and applications!).
Tactile is a fairly broad term btw… - Tactile sensor - Wikipedia
I don’t disagree with you but Apple’s force touch is already a thing. What used to be a simple concept (tapping a screen) has now been extended to include more and less forceful touching motions. That’s already happened. Most people I’ve seen sort of equate it with a right-click motion more than hovering, but the fact remains that it already exists. So they’ve already shown their desire to add more complicated interactions to these simple devices. Whether that concept catches on remains to be seen. I’m not an Apple user so I’ve never force-touched anything in my life.
October 2011. Galaxy Note phone. It has a Wacom tablet screen which does exactly that.
Ah really? With a finger or with a stylus?
Err, no it doesn’t. The Wacom tablet screen reacts to a Wacom stylus hovering over the screen. sb56637 referred to a sensor which reacts to a finger hoving over the screen…
I blame all the commercial interests which keep reinventing wheels instead of just making the existing tech work on a phone. For example, we had a full Linux desktop working just fine on PDAs in 2001 with Familiar Linux. It could run everything a desktop could run, assuming the screen and storage were big enough. Those were exciting times… until a company called Trolltech stepped in and convinced manufacturers to use their platform instead, a brand new Qt-based thing which had no legacy support. The real applications were dropped and replaced with whatever cheesy “apps” people could pull quickly out of an orifice.
Later, Google got involved and made Android, yet another reinvented wheel with no backward compatibility. It has been much more successful, but to this day it still has only “apps” instead of real, serious programs. And the base platform has been messed with so much it’s not really capable of much compatibility anyway.
More recently there’s big news about the Ubuntu phone finally being able to run desktop apps, because they’re adding an X11 compatibility layer on top of the reinvented wheels. But it basically has to run all those in jails, like virtual machines, instead of working like a traditional desktop. So it still falls short of what the community had built for itself 15 years ago. But at least the screens and hard drives are bigger now.
And in the end, what is the real difference between a notebook/desktop and a phone/tablet? They both have a processing/storage core of some sort, but the desktop has a full screen and keyboard while the tablet does not. The desktop has a full-featured OS with full-featured software, while the tablet is heavily stripped down. And whenever you want to get real work done, it’s important to have real input / output devices and real software… instead of a poor imitation. Maybe phones have been moving slowly because the ceiling is too low. There’s only so much you can do without turning it into a notebook.
Sorry for the long off-topic rant. Just a little frustrated about how much progress we could have made in the past 15 years… but didn’t.
Ah, sorry. I missed the finger. Regardless, it’s a phone with hover functionality. You just have to pull out the included stylus to use that feature.
The synaptic touchpads used on notebooks can sense hovering too, though the drivers are usually tuned to ignore hover input most of the time. If you turn up the sensitivity, though…
For that matter, the Wacom pad at one of my old labs could sense the stylus half a meter above its surface. It was pretty impressive. I was tempted to write something to monitor it to see if I could detect low-flying planes.
I agree Toykeeper. What has happened to the world though is so few of us are “power users” that we get left out. For example, ask any iPhone user if they can download a file. They will say “uh, probably”. I even asked at a cell phone store. They said yes. Then I said show me. They could not. With the exception of an image, that core functionality is not in iPhone. And nobody has noticed. But for a “power user” downloading a config file or script file off your server and tweaking it, then uploading it is critical.
Apple is a special case. It’s not a technology company. It’s a fashion company. And although I don’t like Apple, they’re doing their thing well.
As for the rest of the mobile sector, it seems like a simple story of prioritizing short-term profit over long-term progress.
Back to BLF’s software, I think it’s progressing nicely. The upgrade was surprisingly smooth for a major Drupal update, and the remaining tasks are fairly small in a big picture sense.
Oh, um, I just noticed another little weirdness on this new version. No signatures show up in poll threads. The HTML isn’t even there.
In that case all hope is futile.
G'Day SB, 
I have noticed that when someone quotes my post generated with the Advanced Post Editor, extra blank lines are inserted.
For an example Please see Posts #577 & #581 in:
30Q button top - OPEN to public
https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/37578?page=11
Best Regards,
George
Edit:
Also Posts #582 & #583 in the same thread. ;)
Here is a demo, I quoted my post above with the Simple Post Editor. 
And there is no problem if I quote it with the Advanced Post Editor. ;)
It’s fairly simple to understand what happened if you look at the post’s source in the simple editor and keep in mind that every newline gets converted to a break (newline) tag when it renders. The source declares paragraphs (which do their own formatting and newlines), but it also includes actual newlines (which then adds even more space).
It has no way of knowing which language you started with, or whether to attempt to translate. Plus, it has no built-in translator between the two anyway. So, if content goes back and forth between the two, it will have changes in formatting. BLF has always worked this way, and there isn’t a simple automatic solution.
Going the other direction, it has historically been common for all newlines to get eaten when a simple-authored post gets quoted in the advanced editor. It’s a harder problem than it might seem.
On a related note, this is part of why Wikipedia hasn’t had a WYSIWYG-style editor for most of its lifetime. (What You See Is What You Get) That feature is only available as of October 2015, and the organization running the site said it “considered it the most challenging technical project to date”.
TK, AFAIK this did not happen in the previous BLF incarnation. ;)
Best Regards,
George
Clicking “mark read” occasionally will mark every thread with ### NEW posts despite having viewed them before. I.e. I clicked mark read, came back a few hours later and every single thread had tons of new posts marked.
Longer threads showed something like 170 new posts, newer threads just showed all posts as new. It seemed to work correctly after clicking mark read again.
Wasn’t a big deal, I just went into each thread I normally read and went to the last page and read backwards until I hit an old post. Just thought I’d mention it.