You may have seen a young man named Michael Arrington bemoaning the current state of touch technology on these very pages. While I tend to agree on the aggregate, I saw HP’s new touch line last week and came away impressed, at least in the quality of the interface HP built around the TouchSmart 300 and 600, 20 and 23-inch all-in-ones with touchscreens. Sony also dumped out some touchscreen Vaios in an event so-over-the-top that Mischa Barton was there (seriously!). OEMs are going touch-crazy.
But why now? Why touch?
This push for touch points to two things. First, we have the Windows 7 launch with some touch capability built-in. Like a proud parent, Microsoft wants to show off what its little baby can do and, as a result, rumor has it that it has forced OEMs to add touch to almost everything in their line. By pushing touch into the pipeline, Microsoft essentially ensures that it won’t face a repeat of the 2001 tablet PC debacle.
This push also comes from fear. If the Apple Tablet hits the streets this year, Windows 7 wants to be in the forefront of touch technology. By adding touch now, they can say they did it first and all of those laptop hunters can add one more bullet point to their arbitrary laptop wishlist (”I want good graphics, ummm, a keyboard, and ummm… lots of room for photos and a touchscreen.”)
Microsoft lost the mobile touchscreen war. They don’t want to lose the coming “desktop” war. While I have my own opinions on that, I will hand it to HP and Sony: their interfaces are gorgeous. The HP interface I saw last week has a number of simple tools – a recipe box, for example, that can take recipes from the web and import them into a private database – as well as the standard stretch’n'drag photo and note-taking applications that make touch actually compelling. Will you ever double-tap on “My Documents” with your finger? Probably not, but perhaps it’s nice to know you have that ability.
In the end, multi-touch will probably rule the day. Future-proofing is fine and more power to Microsoft for being pre-emptive this time. However, the fanboy in me says that Apple will redefine the space shortly and leave these experiments in the dust.
It’s safe to say that the paradigm we’re used to is on its way out – or at least, on its way to become one of many.
It might have been possible to predict this by the extreme interest in the Optimus Maximus screenshots back in 2005: a keyboard that could – gasp! – change the design and function of its keys using little embedded LEDs. The era of fixed-interface computing was clearly coming to an end.
That’s what’s exciting about touch. It’s not the tactile interaction with the computer – what’s more tactile than hammering your fingers down into it, as you do with a standard keyboard? – but the dynamic nature of the interface and the possibilities for both users and designers.
iPhone showed it could be done well (and it’s very possible Apple will do it again); Nintendo showed it could work with a laptop form factor, albeit in a tiny mass-market handheld gaming device; a bunch of companies followed suit with poorly thought-out exercises in marketing box-checking. I think next year will probably be the turning point, but it’ll be a while before this is a proper part of our computing experience rather than a gimmick.
Big icons are easier to click, even if you use mouse. Mouse feels so archaic. How can we fix it?
laptop trackpads are not as easy as mouse, especially right click. Software(or webpages) can fix this problem using big buttons like in iphone – and touchpad/trackpad in laptops will be as good as mouse.
Lets start with TC website, change css .a link parameter padding to 10 pixel.
I completely agree with you, this will all come down to usability and creating applications that create not only a flexible interface but something that users can quickly adopt. Some of the downfalls is the attempt to replace our traditional interface with these overly simplified, big button, inflexible menu systems. The iphone interface can’t just be duplicated onto the desktop experience, something new has to be considered that compliments the needs of desktop/laptop users.
Secondly it can’t just add touch features to our archaic interfaces as well, one can’t be expected to use today’s applications such as Microsoft Outlook with touch features if it remains the same as it is today. This was one of the major problems that faced the tablet computing boom with Widows tablet edition which did little more than add touch features to applications that couldn’t really utilize it.
“However, the fanboy in me says that Apple will redefine the space shortly and leave these experiments in the dust.”
Oh yes, so true. Just look at the large finger friendly icons that appear when you use the Stacks feature in OS X.
How about this for a crazy scenario:
Apple pull of the Trojan Horse software upgrade of the century (iPod Touch V2 Bluetooth activation paling in comparison) and release an upgrade to Snow Leopard that means all CURRENT non iDevice Apple products with a black bordered glass screen suddenly become touch sensitive?
Think about that one. Your MacBook Pro, iMac or LED Cinema Display suddenly becomes touch sensitive. All because Apple built a capacitive touch screen into these models but didn’t finish the software on time.
A fantasy of course, but it would be rather cool and a touching holiday gift…
(Although we all know, in reality, we’ll need to give Apple a gift and buy new touch based systems in the not too distant future.)
wow TC is really rampant with blind apple freaks. give apple a gift? its a business you douche. its making products to make money. not make you happy. or are you happy that every year there are tiny incremental improvements – or changes – and like a dumbass 5 year old you think wow… thats groundbreaking. i bet you masturbate to the ipod ads of the shadowed out individual dancing around with the white earbuds.
Sorry ill get to the point – youre a dick
Guess that makes you a degenerate…
How does that make him a degenerate? Its pretty true, there are too many apple fanboys on TC lapping up the cool-aid
Touch is a fad. Sorry, but it is. Once it becomes widespread, people will realize how it introduces inefficiencies into what was an otherwise efficient workflow. Sure, it may have some useful applications here and there, but for the most part, it will server no benefit. Even the role of touch in mobile devices is severely limited and gimmicky at best. A large majority of touch products will fail, and I’d be willing to wager that NO touch desktop/laptop computer achieves lasting success.
Yes, I cannot see how touch will become more pervasive in everyday computing than the humble point-and-click mouse.
Rumours about an Apple ‘touch mouse’ may lead to a product announcement shortly, combining the benefits of a desktop pointer with more dynamic navigation via touch technology.
However, the idea of moving my hands up to touch a screen when I have a mouse just seems redundant.
Touch is new, different and compelling because it makes us feel closer to the software, which in turn feels more responsive to us, more ‘alive’.
Great, perhaps, for thumbing through some images, or occasionally dragging recipes to a virtual folder, but I don’t have enough imagination to see how I would use a touchscreen for the majority of my computing time.
That’s basically what I have been thinking with regards to all these touch screens. As long as they are standing up on a desk in front of you, it’s less convenient to access than just grabbing the mouse that is on your desktop next to you. If I had a touchscreen built into my desk below my keyboard area … then there might be something to that.
Touch screens run into the same problem that things like the Wacom Cintiq tablet display do. As an artist, musician, or just someone that can touch-type, your goal is basically to be able to move your fingers and hands without having to stare at what you’re doing. The Cintiq took a great concept, having a tablet you can draw on while looking up at a screen, and put you back in the realm of having to look at what your hand is doing, while making you obscure parts of the screen at the same time.
Touch screens fall into this same area, while also forcing you to build interfaces around the concept. You need larger buttons to account for the imprecision of your fingertip. You need greater spacing to minimize the impact of missed touches. The keyboards have to use error checking because you wind up hitting buttons you didn’t intend to, without being able to feel the shape of keys.
Where I see touch being useful is as a separate display for dynamic application controls. Situations where you don’t want to move your mouse and your keyboard isn’t an ideal input device. Photoshop tool and layer palettes, Record and Reason’s virtual rack devices, and that’s about as much as I can think of. Things a typical user does like browse the web, write email, or change tracks in their audio player, don’t really benefit from touch controls, even if you can make it more convenient than reaching for your keyboard/mouse.
I’m surprised you say the wacom Cintiq has a ‘problem’. It’s fashionable now to talk of touchscreens as having the problem of your hands obscuring the screen. But the Cintiq ia designed to replicate the experience of drawing on paper- and that is exactly what it does. If obscuring the paper wasn’t a problem for hardcopy artists, why would it be one for artists using a digital drawing pad (which is all Cintiq is?)
We don’t worry about obscuring the paper when we are writing with pen and paper. Kids don’t worry when they;re using their coloring books. As long as touchscreen devises can replicate this intuitive slate-like experience, they will suceed.
This suggests that the tablet form factor is best for touchscreens. I agree that touchscreens on a vertical screen are pointless (unles you can rotate and flatten the screen as in tablet PCs). With a tablet, the screen is below shoulder level, so there’s no arm strain, and looking at the screen is no different from looking down at an exercise book while writing. Touche
When you’re drawing on paper, you don’t have a choice. You don’t need to see where your hand is, you need to see where your implement is. Technology provided the disconnect that you actually want. If you’re drawing or painting portraits or still lifes, or whatever, you can’t just stare at your hand. So why do it (and pay a premium) when you don’t have to?
As for writing, I don’t think it works quite the same. Assuming you’re right-handed, you’re only obscuring your blank space. When you’re drawing or painting, you can potentially obscure more of your work area that you need to see.
I will admit it’s sort of beside the point in most touch applications. But it does make for a design consideration. Look at application windows… most of your menus that you click will drop down. If you were doing it as a touch interface, you just dropped all your menu options underneath your hand. It could also crop up as a function of your screen size. If you take an iPhone, you can pretty much operate it with your thumbs. But if you made it slightly larger, the controls become out of reach for your thumbs requiring you to use your fingers. And then you run into the problem of obscuring half the screen with your hand.
So it’s less of an issue at the extremes, iPhone size and jumbo 20+ inch displays. But these rumored things in the 10 or so inch category is where it could start to matter more.
Oh, come on, debbie downers. The iphone burst the cherry. But the real lesson from the iphone can be found by looking at the apps. Happy fun human interfaces, not pulldowns and little buttons. Revolution right under your noses. Think weather.com vs weather app. Much more human happy.
yea.. we can use another few million fart apps.
I really prefer Palm’s execution of the menus, hardware and software buttons, and Graffiti in its old PDAs… it provided the best of both worlds– touch screen, touch writing as well as stylus. Palm also had a software screen keyboard, too!
Overall, Palm’s interface provided more stuff, more accessible, and faster to use than the iPhone, IPT devices. Menus are a smart, wonderful way of categorizing multiple commands– much less hunting through screen after screen, making a selection, and then having to back out.
And, yes I’m an IPT owner and love it! But Palm really did things right (don’t get me started on Apple’s weak PIM apps and implementation!)
75k+ apps for iPhone. I imagine those will also work at some point on an apple “touchbook”.
If a touchbook gets apps from the app store, which it should, imagine the explosion of large-screen apps that will be created.
Impossible to predict if something like this would take significant non-enterprise market share from MSFT.
But finally Apple has a very large base of developers and users to make a very serious attempt.
Where is the CrunchPad?
Probably will never see the light of day. Even if it does, it will violate over a dozen critical multi-touch patents.
the whole touch thing right now is purely marketing trying to ride the ipod/iphone wave.
the best use for touch screen on a desktop is as an auxiliary screen interactive option. For such a set up, you need at least 2 monitors. Primary screen interaction is driven by keyboard/mouse for main focus presentation and quick response. Side screen, placed opposite the mouse hand, is for manipulating context sensitive but infrequently used options associated with context sensitive information (like clipboard manipulation etc.) that way, you don’t have screen obscuring issues, doesn’t overload either task hand, and still preserve maximum speed, accuracy and comfort.
trying to push multi-touch touchscreen for a main display and replace the mouse/keyboard is just lame.
“young man named Michael Arrington” is a whining sissy bitch.
You’d say so if he didn’t sign your paycheck.
What is also great about the HP touch line is that any one can develop applications for this line of product just download the api and there you go.
I think Lex’s comments are essentially correct.
The solution is to replace the keyboard with a touch screen, not (just) to make the main display touch-sensitive.