Gesture Dial

One of the coolest iPhone applications, in terms of multitouch, is Gesture Dial. The concept is simple and the engineering is excellent. Instead of looking up your "fab 5" assign your favorite contacts gestures on your phone. All you do is click on Gesture Dial, enter the right gesture and voila! Gesture Dial calls that person. As an alternative it can open up text messaging or email for a specific contact.

I had my doubts about the accuracy but its actually really good and the administration of gestures is really easy. I used gestures that looked like letters: "h" for home "Z" for my friend Zack and "M" from my friend Mike.

There is another gesture dialing software for iPhone that supports 16 pre-defined gestures, GDial, which might be better for people who don't want try to invent their own gestures. I prefer Gesture Dial because its easier to learn and use.

One of the biggest hurdles of multitouch, in my opinion, is learning new gestures. Applications that allow us to assign our own gestures to functionality - be it dialing a phone or something more complex - are an excellent option.

Eventually, de facto standards for gestures and their meaning will become common place (e.g. Pinch), but its going to be a while before we have enough de facto standards that people can easily move from one productivity application to another. Discoverable gestures are critical for one-off or sometimes-used applications, but productivity applications will require discoverable gestures as well as an arsenal of learned gestures.