Visualize History

Fundamentally, Visualize History should be a multi touch application from the ground up.  It should naturally suggest to users that they should interact with the app naturally.  Whether that means dragging the map, dragging the slider, zooming, panning, or any number of other gestures that come to mind, it is clear that at its core, the project should be multi touch.

Yet I am not going to implement it that way, nor will I make any decisions that take into consideration multi touch. 

The hardware doesn’t exist.  That’s really the crux of the matter.  There are, by my count, 1.5 consumer products on the market today that support multi touch.  HP has advertised their TouchSmart heavily, and I admit it looks cool.  but I have yet to encounter someone who actually owns one.  There is a Dell laptop, I hear, but I don’t think that is even out yet.  Laptop makers have been shy to adopt the technology, and some industry experts don’t understand the appeal at all.

The hardware may start to be more prevalent in the future.  The next version of Windows includes multi touch, and Windows has a lot of customers.  Win7 multi-touch apps will eventually run on Surface, which is even cooler to think about. 

But that is all way in the future.  I have enough that for now, I want to think of multi-touch as research: cool, but irrelevant to the actual development of software.