I keep hearing about multi-touch as if it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It started with the great and famous talk at TED from Jeff Han, and has been “acquired” by Apple ever since. They keep heralding it’s differentiation as a multi-touch vendor, and many have followed in their footsteps: the Palm pre and pixel feature it, and so does the Motorola Droid. Microsoft has surface, and there is even an Asus Eee with it. Every time it is talked up as if it is the most important feature, but every time it is done with the same examples.
So far the only useful multi-touch gestures have been pinch-to-zoom and rotate.Pinch-to-zoom is nice, especially as a demo, but it is not very usable. You can only pinch a very short distance and there is no momentum - so you have to keep pinching if you want to zoom right in. You could combine hold a left finger and zooming with a right finger, but I would be surprised if anybody does that regularly (do try it in iPhone photo: it does not work).
Rotate with two fingers is also a great demo feature, but on a small screen it is a pain because rotating means covering most of the picture with your fingers so you cannot see what you’re doing. And anyway, rotating the actual device is much easier. Rotate is therefore not even supported on the iPhone (not in photo nor in map application).
So is there anything else? Not much. Video games sometimes require multi-touch, but usually that can also be easily handled with single touch. Other actions like making two-fingered drag different than one-fingered drag are implemented on MacBooks, but all are ways to scroll, zoom and rotate in different ways. This is similar to all those control, alt and shift combinations; in programs that I have used for more than 10 years I still have to try and see which one it was that did what I want to do.
Is multi-touch a technology push? A solution looking for a problem? What is the point of multi-touch?
