Last week I was accepted into the Palm Pre developer program - its been closed to the general public and requires an application. I'm looking forward to learning how to develop applications for this device which will help to expand my skill set and understanding of multitouch design.What is interesting is that the multitouch platform, by which I mean the hardware, operating system and SDK, has a huge impact on multitouch design.
Developing multitouch applications specific to a platform is really the best experience. A single device and OS provides you with a known set of capabilities and idiosyncrasies that make development (once you understand the capabilities and idiosyncrasies) much easier than a platform independent solution.
While I'm an advocate of promoting platform independent multitouch APIs (I've even posted about developing one for the Java Programming Language) I know from years of Java experience that developing platform independent applications has some serious pitfalls - the biggest being different behavior on different platforms. This was a really serious issue with Java desktop development back in the mid to late 90's but is less of a concern today. That said, accounting for different capabilities and behaivors on different platforms remains a major hurdle for developers of Java mobile applications.
What will be interesting is when Windows 7 is released and implemented across so many different computational devices and input screens. I suspect that there will be some major head-aches ahead for all of us on that front. Still I'm excited about how Windows 7 is going to grow the user base of mutlitouch.
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