Now I Can Manipulate Pictures in 3D

So I'm told there's this new interface that resembles the thing from Minority Report. For those too terribly sheltered to have seen Minority Report:




That part isn't particularly good, but I can't find the clip I like. You get the idea anyway. I don't expect the example for the real interface to be Tom Cruise solving future crimes, but I really hoped it would be something, anything, besides this:



Why?! Why is it always the freaking picture twiddling? It was the same thing with the damn giant table, is that all multitouch interfaces are good for?

It's just like a real table!

I've seen dozens of videos now on Microsoft Surface. First, I think Surface could be very cool, I love multitouch interfaces. Second, I think right now Surface looks useless. As far as I can tell, a personal Surface table can do exactly four things:

1. Show really big maps. This is pretty neat; personally, I would get tired of manually dragging a map around instead of just entering an address and going there, but I can see the use for it


2. Transfer files (well, really just pictures and music in the clips I've seen) between devices. This is useless for me, but cool for other people, so this one is good


3. Take the nice, organized photos stored on a device and explode them into a mass of disorganized thumbnails that you can spin and resize for no reason


4. Make little bubbles shoot out from a glass when you set one on the table

Now, the one that really annoys me is apparently Surface's big feature: allowing you to, and I quote from more than one video, "organize your photos". For some reason, Surface's definition of "organize your photos" is to take all the photos on your device, ignore any organization they may have like folders named "Vacation" and "Work", and spread thumbnails of them all over the table haphazardly. Sure enough, I check the Wikipedia article and there it is:

Apparently this is somehow a good thing. If I wanted my photos to be like this, I would take print photographs and spread them all over my much cheaper analog table. Why would you want this?

Terrible:


Sexy:


I made up those picture folders on the spot because I don't take pictures, but still. I really don't understand why you would want to use the method of organizing photos that computers replaced forever ago, that's exactly the wrong way to be going about this. We should be designing new interfaces that are even easier to use than the ones we have now, not ones that very accurately simulate stuff we've already gotten rid of. Somebody should write a Surface app that lets you play music by dragging an LP over to a record player and then dragging the needle onto the record. Not that people ever actually do anything with the photos but spin them around and resize them over and over again; it's actually very much like people who enable the desktop cube in compiz for the first time:

I multitouched your mom

I'm going to find Apple, and I'm going to shoot them in the face. No, seriously. Not because I hate their OS, I've grown to accept that. This is because of what they've done to multitouch. Multitouch is just about the greatest thing ever, and sadly before Apple got involved nobody had heard of it. If you don't know what multitouch is, I'll use the now-canonical example of the iPhone, although ironically the iPhone uses almost none of multitouch's capabilities. If you're in the map view of the iPhone, and you put two fingers on the display and "pinch" them together, the map will zoom in. Oooo. Basically, multitouch is the ability for a touchscreen to recognize multiple fingers and react to their movements.

I first discovered multitouch years and years ago, probably close to a decade now. It was a small company called Fingerworks, and they manufactured the iGesture Pad:


It's a big multitouch pad that accepts any combination of 5 fingers, either spread apart or together. You can move in different directions, rotate your hand in different ways, spread or collapse your fingers, basically tons and tons of different gestures, and each one can do a different thing. Look at that sexy, sexy device. You want one, don't you? Well, you can't have one. Because Fingerworks is out of business. I live in fear of the day my iGesture Pad breaks, because I'll have considerable trouble replacing it. If you clicked that link I had to them earlier, you know that "FingerWorks has ceased operations as a business". Why? That's what we (I believe the accepted term is "fingerfans") all asked. Just one day, probably 5 years ago now, they were gone. Finally, rumors started circulating that Apple had bought them out.

At first, I thought this might be good news. As I mentioned earlier, nobody had really heard of multitouch except its small group of fans, although demonstrations by people like Jeff Han led to it being rediscovered all over again by a much larger audience who think the technology was invented two years ago. Nonetheless, Fingerworks was struggling as a business, and I figured with Apple marketing their products and improving them, multitouch was going to explode. Oh, silly me. For ages, nothing happened. And we fingerfans were confused. Then the iPhone came out, and its Fingerworks roots were obvious. Sure, now it's a display instead of a simple pad, but it's the same technology, only way suckier. Worse, Apple keeps filing for patents for stuff like, for example, the pinch gesture for zooming. Instead of innovating, they've spent years doing nothing but making sure nobody else can innovate either.

What probably annoys me most is most people don't even realize Apple is doing this. People think Apple invented the technology, or damn close. Quotes like "the iPhone is arguably the first mainstream gadget to successfully implement a set of concrete touch gestures and link them to specific functions" from that Wired article drive me crazy. Apple didn't come up with this at all; they basically stole it from Fingerworks, crushed the company, and then did nothing with the technology but let it sit there. If they don't want to do anything with it, that's fine, but they're blocking everyone else from doing anything either. Multitouch should be huge by now, but instead it's remained stuck for the last 5 years, and Apple is at least partly to blame. The Fingerworks people (who work -- "work" -- at Apple now) probably hate themselves.

As an aside, I tried to look up the wikipedia article on Fingerworks, which used to exist. Now it just links to the article on Apple. Not cool.