How To Do Touch Right And Wrong

An example of Right, from Quantum of Solace:

And then there’s Wrong.

There’s a video at this link: Multi-Touch Interface Concept Blows Away Touchscreens

I think so little of it, I won’t sully this blog by embedding it, so go there to look and come back.

All done?

Did the person who dreamed that up ever do real work on a PC?!

That’s an utter kludge!

My hands are supposed to reach over a fat-ass touchpad?! Really? I can’t deal with all the space before the keyboard on a big-ass MacBook Pro — and he wants to graft that into the OS?!

That’s FAIL number one.

Then we have to remember how many fingers to use for what? Look at fifty seconds in, with the manipulation of four sliders. Try to recreate that movement with four fingers of one hand on a flat surface. It can’t be done. Fingers are different lengths and that’s unergonomic as hell.

That’s FAIL number two.

Calling up what’s essentially a big-ass dialog box (grrrr) blocks an entire application window? On what planet? Not any one I want to live on.

That’s FAIL number three.

The final FAIL is the lateral clutter. Yes, clutter. How is that any better than current overlapping clutter? It’s not. The windows still overlap, still block one another.

I can’t see myself getting any work done on that at all.

Also missing is some way to minimize everything to momentarily concentrate on one thing.

And I can also see my ideal of dragging and dropping pictures from one window into a blog entry screen wouldn’t work with that at all.

I suppose they’ll find that video interesting at Microsoft.

At Apple, they’re most likely sneering.