Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Multi-Touch Surface in the Palm of Your Hand
byYou have probably seen the cool videos for Microsoft Surface, the amazing multi-touch tabletop that promises to revolutionize ordering food, buying cell phones, organizing photos, or playing games. But what if you want a Surface but you don’t have thousands of dollars to buy one or a large software development staff to make the applications for you? And what if you only want to spend $200? Oh, and what if that big, clunky, table-sized unit needs to fit in your pocket?
Is this some amazing new product that might be available in 2012? Not quite. Let me introduce you to Apple’s version of Microsoft Surface: the iPhone.
Using nothing more than the WebKit browser built-in to the iPhone, developer Tom Robinson has created a virtual light table you can hold in the palm of your hand. The multi-touch photo viewer mimics the capabilities of Microsoft’s Surface application—including dragging, rotating, and resizing images in real-time using just your fingertips—but it was built with only 100 lines of JavaScript.
If you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Safari 3.1 installed on your computer, you can try it out for yourself. (For those of us stuck using a mouse rather than a touch screen, click once on a photo then click and drag on the same photo to rotate or resize it.)
Most amazing is that the multi-touch interface is already built into the browser—no special plug-ins or extra software required. Now that is the future of Web applications.
