Who wants multi-touch? I think I just might.

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Gestures work fine with current single touch devices

My HTC Touch Diamond supports tons of gestures and it is only single touch. It is also incredibly telling that the only multi-touch gestures that the iPhone supports are for zooming and rotating pictures, both of which require 2 hands. The funny thing is that the iPhone users I've spoken with immediately show me the zoom feature. I then tell them that I typically double tap to zoom in on my HTC Touch Diamond because 99.9% of the time, it zooms in the right amount. You know what their answer is? Yeah, I double tap to zoom most of the time too. But isn't it neato that you can pinch to zoom?

As far as multiple finger sweeps on the MacBooks, I suppose we'll have to see what they come up with. So far, the only example people can give is that you can use 2 fingers to scroll the page. This is incredibly unintuitive and all non Apple laptops have a far more intuitive approach: single touch gestures on the bottom and right side of the trackpad let you scroll the page. This is far more intuitive because you are using the locations of the trackpad (bottom and right side) that represent the location of the scroll bars on the screen. The Apple way is: 1 finger moves cursor, 2 fingers scrolls screen. Yeah, when I see a scroll bar, I immediately think that I should use 2 fingers to use it!

I'm sure more ideas will come as developers get acquainted with the technology.

Oh, I'm 100% sure you are right. Developers will always use technology to add another bullet point on their feature list. The question is: how useful is that feature? One only need to look at multi-touch on the iPhone to realize that just because a feature can be implemented, doesn't mean that it is actually useful.

Posted by: NonZealot   Posted on: 11/05/08  (Edited: 11/05/2008 @ 01:05) You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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