Interesting!
Nice to see someone else agrees with what I've said all along about those touch-screen PCs. Yeah, it's "neat" when you use one for about two minutes in Staples or Best Buy. Try doing that crap all day and see how "neat" it is. If your arms are still attached...
While I wasn't bonkers about that OS and layout, the underlying thinking - of using your natural hand and finger movements - sounds intriguing. To have just a single large "pad" in front of you (taking the place of your keyboard and mouse) and "driving" your computer from there really interests me. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago...about how when you're typing or in an app that requires typing, you get a virtual keyboard (one that you can customize for languages and characters easily). But if you're in GarageBand or some other music app, the typing keyboard goes away and, instead, you get a musical keyboard or drum heads or whatever makes sense (guitar strings?
). When you're in iMovie, you get a timeline or frame views, and you just reach over with your fingers and drop effects/transitions onto clips. You see it happening on screen, in front you, in real time, instantly.
I caught grief for saying so, but it's funny that the keyboard - with the same, in-place buttons - hasn't moved beyond what it is. But now, with Multi-Touch and so many other things available, a "Multi-Board" that can do, and become, anything you need is really fun to think about, and imagine.
And using things like Photoshop and Illustrator in this way? Painting/airbrushing some photorealistic clouds with my right index finger, while my left index finger - via pressure or an up/down movement? - adjusts the flow and opacity or spray nozzle size, in real time? Or acts as an eraser, used in tandem with your paint strokes being applied by the other finger?
Fingerpainting minus the mess (and erasing and undo capabilities). It would take a lot of companies getting on board to make it happen (Apple, then Adobe and others), but I think it would even be more fun and intuitive than using a pen tablet (which is already an improvement over the mouse). But once you remove all these plastic, battery-eating gizmos, you distill it down to what you'd do in kindergarten...the hands and fingers you'vef used since day one, only now you're using them in a very grown-up way, on your computer.
Factor in gestures and "chording", and imagine all the things you can do, and control, in such a way.
It just seems increasingly weird to me to hold a mouse and use a keyboard. I wanna grab, slide and push things...
You can thank my phone for that, I guess.
