Cnet has a decent article about the prospect of a touch-screen Mac. This seems like a no-brainer following the multi-touch innovations of the iPhone, and also some aspects of the Leopard OS (Cover flow in the Finder, Quick Look) that seem particularly suited for multitouch on the Mac.

However I’ll put a stake in the sand and say I’m not particularly enthused at the prospect of having a touch enabled computer monitor:

• Touching a computer screen repeatedly would be an ergonomic nightmare in comparison with the keyboard and mouse. I do a lot of Photoshop work and reaching to the monitor would involve having my arms raised up off the desktop and hanging in the air. But barring that, imagine typing on a screen that is positioned at 90 degrees to your current keyboard.
• The screen would be covered with fingerprints and smudges. Imagine the smudgy nature of the iPhone screen spread across an entire monitor. I’d have to clean off the screen every day or be at risk of obscuring whatever images appear on the screen under fingerprints.
• Lacking tactile feedback. Keyboard buttons have a satisfying feel of intent behind them.

All this said, Apple is certainly thinking about all of this and judging from the patents alone, any multitouch interface would be extremely feature-rich in hopes of at least equaling what we can do with a keyboard and mouse. They have done work on “tactile feedback” to make a touch screen feel more like a traditional keyboard. Particularly intriguing are “gestures” which would involve two or more fingers to replace common keyboard combos, or “gestures” like certain patterns that could represent functions.

But what I’d really like to see is something that meets the touch screen thing half-way. How about a touch pad peripheral, like a Wacom tablet, meant to sit next to the keyboard on a desk (or a lap) that had all the multitouch features, and could be used as an alternate controller for your Mac. This pad could even have a small screen that “mirrored” the small portion on the main monitor immediately around cursor.

Or perhaps this small touch pad could be the iPhone istelf, running a screen sharing type app? Hmmm.

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Categories: Apple, General, Technology :: ::

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