For the past 15 months I have been arguing that touchscreen computing with multi-touch capability will be along with RAIA (the ability to deliver GUI apps that run on any browser and/or locally on any platform) the two technologies that dominate the personal PC and mobile device direction. Well its nice to see that Scientific American agrees with my first argument.
In their June 2008 issue, Scientific American again peers ahead and decides that multitouch screen technology will be the next new wave on the GUI interface scene. Now the specific technologies that Scientific American looks at are multi-thousand dollar implementations. But we have already seen Apple deliver touch screen to the iPhone (its distinguishing feature) and on the touchpad of its new MacBooks. And HP delivered a very competitive direct touchscreen PC but not yet multitoch enabled. But you can get around that with Java routines or Flash ActionScript libraries that deliver multi-touch in software.
In short, multi-touchscreen may be closer to delivery than might first be expected. Mark Scientific Americans word – touchscreen will become a dominant product characteristic for GUI deliverance in the next few years. Now all GUI vendors have to do is figure out how to deliver RAIA versions of the same. Indeed this will be a test of whether the proprietary and barely browser cross platform Microsoft solution will be rejected for the cross browser, cross OS platform approach taken by Adobe Flash and Java JavaFx.
Will Microsoft be able to sell proprietary once again? Only the Shadow knows.