Touch Usability

Jitouch gestures for macbook and magic mouse

Jitouch is an impressive looking suite of gestures to add to your MacBook or Apple Magic Mouse. I haven't tested it out, but I'm impressed with the attention to detail evident from the web site, particularly in how they've documented the gestures.

Link: Jitouch. (Via ignore the code.)

Philips Mouse with Touch Sensor

Philips has released a wireless mouse with "360° touch control™." Apparently the sensor on top lets you do circular scrolling, and you call also hold the mouse in your hand and use the touch sensor for pointing.

Link: Philips bluetooth notebook mouse.

(via Engadget)

Halfbakery: Rubber Brain Interface

Via Google Alerts comes this odd interface idea posted by someone at halfbakery.com: Rubber Brain as user interface: "right near your mouse there is a rubber brain It is a touch interface touch the frontal lobes to view smartier version or audio cortex to hear music."

Yes, dear users, in the future you will have to understand brain physiology to manipulate things on your computer. What could be easier? Talk about indirect manipulation...

Of course a touchable object on your desk with multimedia controls might make some sense, perhaps even an object that is a squishable stress ball shaped like a brain. My problem is with the location of controls being defined by brain mapping.

What this reminded me of is work at UVA in the 1990s by Ken Hinckley that used 3D props to manipulate the display of brain scans on a screen: Props-based Interface for 3D Neurosurgical Visualization (the picture below is from this page). The doll's head and glass prop have six-degree-of-freedom trackers embedded in them. As the user moves them, the display changes to show the MRI slice that matches the relative positioning of the props. The halfbakery poster mentions something he saw in Microsoft material that inspired him -- maybe this was it, in which case he got the concept a bit confused.

Multi-touch Mighty Mouse?

The Apple rumor site MacBlogz is getting a lot of play from some mockups they created of a mighty mouse augmented with a touch surface on top for scrolling and gestures: One More Thing: Apple's New Multi-Touch Mighty Mouse.

Apparently this is based on some Apple patent applications (which I haven't looked at) and not just speculation.

This wouldn't be the first mouse sold with touch sensors for scrolling. The Logitech V500 mouse (pictured below) has touch scrolling and it works quite well. 

So scrolling makes sense, but could you really do other multitouch gestures on top of a mouse? I can imagine two-finger tapping or two-finger scrolling mapping to different functions, but the main multitouch gestures Apple has given us so far -- pinch, flick, and rotate --  seem like they'd be too awkward to perform.

So I doubt Apple would do this. More likely, in my humble opinion, would be a new keyboard with integrated multitouch trackpad. After all, why do you still need the mouse if the trackpad is good enough? Lenovo sells a thinkpad-style keyboard with pointing stick and touchpad (see Design Matters). I could see Apple doing something similar.

Also more likely from Apple, in my opinion, would be a large gesture surface or keyboard similar to the old Fingerworks products.

No, the mouse isn't going away

There's a silly BBC article making the rounds that proclaims the imminent extinction of the computer mouse. It begins:

It's nearly 40 years old but one leading research company says the days of the computer mouse are numbered.

A Gartner analyst predicts the demise of the computer mouse in the next three to five years.

Taking over will be so called gestural computer mechanisms like touch screens and facial recognition devices.

"The mouse works fine in the desktop environment but for home entertainment or working on a notebook it's over," declared analyst Steve Prentice.

Link: Say goodbye to the computer mouse.

The article goes on to quote an opposing view from Logitech but in a rather dismissive way ("Naturally enough those in the business of making mice are not wholly in agreement that the end is nigh.").

I think touch and gestures are great, and their use will continue to grow for appropriate applications, but there are some very good reasons that mice won't be going away any time soon.

The mouse is still the most efficient pointing device as measured by the standard test using the Fitts' Law paradigm (and it really is the standard test now as defined by the ISO). Mice generally perform a bit faster and more accurately than touchpads. Of course there is a lot of variability among devices and the technology is improving, but it's quite possible that the difference is due primarily to the fact that we use different muscles to move a mouse compared to moving a finger on a touchpad.

Touchpads are also difficult for some people to use because they require precise finger motion, and some people just plain don't like them. Portable mice for notebook computers are still very popular.

Touchscreens might beat mice in a Fitts' test comparison (I don't know offhand, though I'm sure somebody has done this test), but your arm will likely get tired using one for any length of time and you'll also take more time to move your hands from the keyboard to the screen and back.

Some applications really are well suited to a touch tablet or surface or even to gestures that are performed in front of a camera or other sensor. In general, though, for the everyday things we do on computers (especially so-called productivity applications), the basic interface style isn't likely to change for quite a while. WIMP interfaces (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) are probably here to stay, and the key letter there is the P for pointer. As long as a pointer is required, the mouse will still be around.

Of course I may be proven wrong, and this is just my own partially educated take on things. No doubt great things are still to come from touch interfaces and gestures, but mice will still be an important alternative.