Mary Jo Foley asks: “…can anyone else out there make a case as to why I might want a multi-touch laptop? What kinds of applications — beyond specialty ones like certain medical-imaging apps and CAD/CAM ones — will make good use of multi-touch?…Maybe multi-touch makes more sense if you are using a small-screen netbook or ultra-mobile PC (if that class of machines still exists out there), but on a regular, full-size laptop/desktop? I just don’t see it.”
First, my ability to look into the future is no better than anyone elses, but let me take a shot at this.
First, I think Mary’s premise misses a key point: That it’s not just about the notebook anymore, just like it’s not just about the desktop anymore. We’re going to see more devices that will make sense to work with Windows proper. Just take the smart board market. To date there’s been lots of custom drivers and custom apps for these devices, but that’s created a lot of variety across electronic whiteboards. With touch and Tablet technologies being added across Windows we now have an opportunity to leverage the standardization that it offers. That’s a good thing for users and those managing the devices. Who knows, because of this we might also see more of these devices around.
I think we’re also carrying too much legacy thinking here with our computers. We keep thinking in terms of one computer, one user. That’s made sense up to this point in most cases because most of us use a mouse and keyboard to interact with our computers and those pretty much limit usage to one person at a time. With multi-touch that changes and so will the software. This is particularly true if you lay the screen flat like a Surface computer. Right away you’ll see how natural it is for more than one person to want to interact with the screen at a time. This also is the case for very large displays.
Of course, Mary makes the point herself that there are other form factors where touch and multi-touch make sense, such as small devices. So no more needs to be said here.
Now back to Mary’s question about notebooks. In a way, I get her point. Do I really want to touch the screen over using the keyboard? Well, it’s going to depend. I’ve used touch-sensitive Windows machines before and at least for me, yes, sometimes it is easier to touch the screen to close a window or scroll its contents. But is this compelling enough to justify multi-touch? I’d say as long as it doesn’t get in the way.
I’d also say, that Mary’s list of apps where multi-touch makes sense is way too short. Besides CAD and medical applications, what about games or virtual instruments or onscreen keyboards that allow more than hunt and peck typing.
In fact, I think all these photo scaling and rotating demos have skewed the way people think about multi-touch. Like the potential of any hotkey combination I predict we’re going to see some rather interesting and compelling uses of multi-touch down the road. To give a hint here: Think in terms of not just controlling one variable but a combination of them with let’s say two fingers. Imagine what this could do with sliders trying to optimize possibly a search or slice data in a database or similar. Up-down arrow keys just don’t give much power.