Can’t Touch This
Touch seems to be the latest craze in software, but astonishingly, it’s nothing new. Most applications out there will work perfectly well in a single touch emulated environment. Basically, a hardware device turns your finger touch into a mouse action. Yet, even though those interfaces and devices have been around for years, it really wasn’t until the iPhone, that people got reacquainted with touch. Here’s the reason why.
Touch vs. Multi-Touch
Touch in and of itself is pretty basic. Take a finger or a stylus, and use it to drive the mouse subsystem. While this type of touch is better than no touch at all, it didn’t do anything special enough to get a user to go from using a mouse, to using their finger. Then multi-touch came around. Suddenly, you could do things that would have been difficult or impossible with a classic mouse device.
Zooming with two fingers is now a classic example, and sadly one of the only examples out there. The reason for the lack of multi-touch interfaces is actually quite simple. Multi-touch isn’t easy to do, and more importantly, coming up with scenarios where multi-touch is beneficial in an application is a challenging task that requires more of a designer’s brain, than a developers brain.
And here’s where it always gets disappointing. Lack of applications that use the hardware mean the hardware isn’t in demand, which means the price of the hardware will remain high, which then curbs the demand for applications that use multi-touch. And the cycle continues. But the numbers are growing, and we’re getting closer to critical mass. Businesses are starting to understand the value of an extremely usable, fluid interface with multi-touch. As businesses start to invest in these technologies, hardware prices will drop, and everything else will hopefully fall in line.
In the meantime, developers need to start getting used to the idea of building a touch interface. If you’re a Silverlight developer, and want to get a quick start – take a look at Tim Heuer’s blog http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/07/30/silverlight-3-multi-touch-introduction-fundamentals-basics.aspx
Start playing around with the idea of using Touch events, and adding an extra layer of functionality to your application. I’m tired of not having touch capabilities on my computer, and I’m ready to do something about it! I’m not sure if Windows 7 will be the catalyst that ignites the multi-touch fire, but I sure hope it is.