Apple's and Microsoft's New Twists on the Old Trackpad is Unimpressive

Over the past few days there has been a lot of coverage of two "potential" products which are essentially the same thing. First came the story about a new Apple patent for a 10-finger multi-touch surface from Apple Insider. The other story was from CrunchGear about some multi-touch mice that Microsoft research is working on.

As much as I would love to get excited about these technologies, the idea that they will somehow revolutionary our interactions with traditional computers is just plain strange to me. After all, what is the 10-finger multi-touch surface from Apple and the multi-touch mice from Microsoft, but new twists on the trackpad?

Apple has taken the trackpad about as far as possible in my opinion, with one,two,three, and even four fingers swipes, taps, and pinches - anything beyond that is a waste of energy and here's why:

Touch and multi-touch have very limited application without some kind of afforance to let the user know they've properly interacted with the computer. When you use the Apple trackpad with its multi-finger swiping, it works great because you can see the swipes occur on the screen. The page scrolls up or down if you swipe your fingers up and down. The same is true for using the trackpad as a mouse pointer - but really there are limits.

In the case of the swiping you've already set your focus on an object and so the swipes are contextual - they occur to what ever has the focus. With the mouse you can see the pointer move around in conjunction with your finger. What you can't do, without using a pointer, is select an object on a screen at a random position. In fact, without the pointer the multi-touch capabilities of trackpads are kind of useless.

The bottom line is that in order to really leverage multi-touch you have to have combine the video output and touch input into one screen. If you don't, than you need a pointer. Without a pointer your effectively blindfolded.

So what happens when you use a pointer? You get a trackpad. We have trackpads already and to be honest they work just fine. Combining the trackpad into the mouse has no benefit as far as I can see as the mouse is far easier to use than a trackpad when your attention is on the screen and not the device.

Another thing to remember is that typing on a featureless (no button edges) multi-touch surface without looking is so difficult as to be untenable. Henpecking on a multi-touch surface works if you can see images of buttons. Henpecking without visual afforances is impossible.

So having a surface that is multi-touch but outside of your field of vision and without any visual afforances on the surface itself is of very limited utility. The idea that a big trackpad in the shape of a keyboard will replace the keyboard is silly.