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

TalkBack 33 of 35:: Next »; « Previous

Thread View
Flat View

Multi touch yet to come...: The question as it was asked seemed to imply that because multi touch currently appears to have very minimal practical use, and its difficult to imagine how it could replace what a keyboard and mouse interface can accomplish, that pursuing multi touch use in an OS is not worth while.

If that were in fact the case then many other things would also have to be true.

1. There is little to no likelihood that clever programmers will try and take advantage of multi touch technology and create useful innovative programs to use the tech in the near future if it was included.

2. There is no real likelihood that at any time in the future that multi touch will have some very common uses, so that including it in an OS now would not help begin to acclimatize users to the tech so that by time its more prevalent in many years time most users will already have a proficiency in its use.

3. Multi touch is such a well developed and understood technology from both the development side as well as the practical application side that there is nothing significant that can be learned about ways to improve upon it, or how to use it, or how new programs might be developed for it if it was included in a major OS release.

4. If by some odd chance programs do start popping up that work marvelously with multi touch several years from now, its of no assistance to the development of multi touch technology or future users of multi touch technology to have it introduced to society now by way of an OS, because it can be introduced at that future time and both the users and the programs will work fine together seamlessly and naturally without any real exposure to the technology for the general public in the past.

The issue is this; multi touch, right now has many of the earmarks of inventions of the past that appeared to have minimal use for several years before people discovered it could be used in new and clever, important ways. Its always been the way. Look at the money the patent trolls have made by buying up seemingly rather unimportant patents and then 10 years later they are suing someone for $600 million dollars because its suddenly important technology and others want it.

While this phenomenon can be seen right throughout the world of invention it seems to be predictably significant in the area of IT. In the past many predictions have been made about the future needs for certain kinds of hardware for example and most of those weak predictions have been long outstripped by the hardware that has been developed and the programs that used up the hardwares capacity quickly followed with ever improving hardware following that.

It seems to me that quite some time ago most intelligent people in IT stopped saying things like "we just don't need a CPU/GPU/HD/RAM of type X specification" because they know it can be produced and then once it has been produced there are countless thousands out there figuring out clever ways to put it to good use.

Multi touch is likely to be no different given history so far.; Posted by: Cayble Posted on: 11/06/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use