I have a pretty decent lineup of devices with touch.

The interactions aren't the same on the iPhone as they are on a Galaxy SII phone, not are the same on iPads or on a Nexus7. Magic mouses are also special things. Also my Samsung Windows 8 laptop has a 10 points touch screen.

With Windows8.1, I find myself using swipes and touches for a lot of things. And it improves my productivity.

Once equipped with a thing like Classic Shell and boot into the desktop right away, Metro apps are really nice little things running in the background and can come fast with a little swipe (cool ones: Skype, Music, PDF reader of a documentation, like a chapter of a Pharo book: swipe: PDF, swipe: Pharo, swiper: PDF... and mouse pointer not moving around).

When using my MacBook Pro, I am reaching for the screen and being disappointed to realize it is not touch (Apple, give us touch screens on laptops).

Form factors affect the usage patterns as well. But touch is not going displace touchpads or mouses for fine grained control.

On the contrary, I tested a Leap motion controller and it felt like crap.

Phil

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 12:54 PM, J.F. Rick <self@je77.com> wrote:

Hi Sergi,

Based on my experience developing touch interfaces since 2007, I believe in touch. I believe it will be the future of interfaces and I believe it can be better than mouse-keyboard interfaces. That said, it is not there yet. Now is the time to innovate and get it there so that touch interfaces won't be poor replicas of their desktop forebears. Currently, text entry is a real problem for touch exclusive devices, but there is progress being made on that front. We don't have the answer yet but I think it will be a significantly different landscape in five years. In regards to touch vs physical pointers, this is not as large of a problem as people make it out to be. It is just that our widgets tend to be created for mouse-based interfaces and therefore don't transition well to touch. Interfaces designed with touch in mind can be just as smooth (if not smoother) as mouse-based interfaces. You just have to take advantage of what touch does well (faster, more precise routes; multi-touch gestures; bimanual interaction) and stay clear of things it does poorly (precise touch down, covering the target with the finger).

Cheers,

Jeff

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Sergi Reyner <sergi.reyner@gmail.com> wrote:

2014-03-11 10:37 GMT+00:00 J.F. Rick <self@je77.com>:

As we move from mouse-keyboard devices to touch-based ones

I certainly hope that "we" refers to a small group of people, unless we get onscreen keyboards as good as physical ones, feedback included. The same goes for touch versus physical pointer :)

Cheers,
Sergi

--
Jochen "Jeff" Rick, Ph.D.
http://www.je77.com/
Skype ID: jochenrick