The Multi-Touch Gimmick?
31 05 2007Commenting on my post about Microsoft’s botched marketing initiative for Surface, my friend Angel checks in from Florida and directs me to this post suggesting that multi-touch will be Steve Jobs’ “one more thing” when he does the official introduction of Leopard.
The comments of that post are where the real action is… plenty of back and forth about the promise and/or folly of multi-touch as a viable day-to-day interface for working with the Macintosh. When it comes to how I work on the computer - mostly designing in Adobe Applications, I can’t imagine multi-touch having enough resolution to work well. A mouse seems way more precise when it comes to selecting control points, or even adjusting parameters in filter menus than my finger. I’m not even comfortable using a laptop’s touch pad.
Certainly there are applications where this wouldn’t be the case - specifically, the post talks about Apple’s Pro applications like Logic, and presumably Final Cut at some point. I can definitely see the advantage of working on a multi-touch interface that emulates a mixing board - but that’s pretty niche for a major announcement. It reminded me of a patent application Apple filed a while back for interfaces that combine “mechanical overlay” devices with touch screens. In the patent drawings they sketch out what looks like a mixing board with a row of sliders on top of a touch screen. The apparent advantage would be having the familiar feel of feedback that you get from analog controls like sliders and knobs. In the sketch below, #14 represents the touch screen that the mechanics would overlay. Seems very cool, but also very niche.
Mac NN did a major post on the patent back in November which is worth reading if you missed it. There are plenty more drawings that explore the possibilities of the overlay as interface.
Obviously years from now and with significant redesign at the most base level of how we interact with computers multi-touch could be amazing, but I’m more interested in now.
My friend Tunc is probably the most technology hungry Mac fanatic early adopter I know, so what do you think Tunc? Are you on board with the mutli-touch revolution or is it just a niche gimmick better left to big table tops in hotel lobbies?
Late Update: Tunc is completely on board.
I guess I’m being called out! Technologically hungry, yet this is the first time I’m responding to a blog.
Multi-touch is amazingly cool, life is getting more and more psychedelic. I was always bummed to miss out on the artistic time of the sixties, but I always knew that what they had in imagination, my generation, because of that start, would have in reality.
Why choose a mouse over multi-touch. I can see working in Adobe using both, and I believe it will be so. Maybe you would use your hand to stretch an image then go back to your mouse or tablet. Who knows how much you may want to directly work with it. Laptops could be 2 surfaces of screens, one where the keyboard resides will hold a virtual keyboard that can change configuration with the application used. Much like the image above for music software, having virtual sliders. You never know, you may, in the end, get a virtual mouse instead.
But for now, yeah, I see walls being made of the multi-touch screen, the new chalk board for schools, the new projector for corporate and military.
And for lifestyle uses, as flat screens get thinner, bigger and cheaper, it will dominate eventually. You will have a wall(s) in your home that can pretend to be an ordinary wall with a painting on it, then turning into a full wall TV, to being a photo album, then screensaving into a giant lava lamp! We are living in the dreams come true era!
Wow that’s really insightful. Spoken like a true dreamer.