Multi-touch is great when you want to enable complex features on a fairly intuitive and easy to read interface. But when deployed in a Windows or OSX environment common traditional elements such as screen orientation and workspace compatibility get in the way of development and are often more hassle than they are worth. The greatest thing about Multi-touch is collaboration and Pictionaire, a project by Andy Wilson and Björn Hartmann, really takes advantage of this and is an awesome tool for designers.
Although impractical at the moment due to costs and maintenance and complexity of the system we could well see this make its way on to the consumer based market in the future. This technology will allow designers to work both digitally and physically at the same time bridging an important gap in the design process and in turn reducing developing time through increasing productivity and allowing better access to information and through the digital interface.
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The Apple Tablet, rumoured to be called the iSlate, is rumoured to be announced January 27th. Yes I know I said rumoured twice in that last sentence but let’s face it we all know its coming! But what we don’t know is whether it will run a variation of iPhone OS or full on OSX. Odds our in my opinion it will run iPhone OS as it’s the best money maker thanks to the app store and this device will not be designed as a replacement for your computer. Fortunately for us however, it doesn’t matter whether is iPhone OS or OSX.
Flash Cs5 will publish to the iPhone platform and with a few tweaks here and there I’m sure that adobe will fix it up to do the tablet. If they leave this until the release of CS6 I may just go on an adobe hunting killing spree! On the other hand though, if it’s running full on OSX then we have AIR 2.0 or Flash. Regardless of the OS it will undoubtedly feature multi-touch and accelerometer which we will be able to access through the new AS3 extensions that Flash CS5 will bring us.
How will this be different from both the iPhone and Mac’s then?
This will come from how the user adopts the system, with the intermittent release of Flash CS5 a range of developers and designers will surely be publishing for these platforms, and the great thing is you can publish to all of them at the same time by making your stage object positions and scale dynamic to the resolution of the screen and platform that you are using.
But what about Safari?
I think that Apple will be heavily scrutinised if they don’t feature Flash Player into Safari on the tablet as it will be a powerful device with a reasonably large screen and will no doubt be capable of it. Apple have kind of got away with it with the iPhone due to it being a phone, but with many phone OS’s featuring Flash Player in the browser they can’t hide for long. If apple to feature Flash Player into the tablet and it runs a variation of iPhone OS then I believe it will be inevitable that they will be forced to feature it in iPhone OS 4.0, which may have a announcement and release on the same day!
Also Flash CS5 developing will be great for iPhone developing, but for more complex designs you’re better off going with Objective-C, the reason for this is that although Native Flash Apps for the iPhone will be great, they will lack in performance as proved by the existing apps on the App Store. Undoubtedly the tablet will feature a much higher performance graphics chip and processer than the iPhone therefore quality Flash published games could be a possibility for the tablet.
Regardless of what happens next week it will be important to us all.
[Don't forget to follow Engadget and Gizmodo for the release on January 27th 10AM Pacific!]
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I went to London a few days back and tracked down a few interactive shop fronts, only one is worth showing though. The shop front to Phones4U on Oxford Street features an interactive phone, it wasn’t bad if anything limited in functionality but fun and easy to use and great use of advertising and multi-touch.
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Lee Brimelow has posted up a video on how to all be better people… by creating iPhone apps in Flash CS5. It looks super easy and you don’t even have to touch xcode unlike with Unity. The mobile games development market will undoubtedly boom with the release of Flash CS5. Flash designers are typically very visual creative people whereas Objective-C developers tend to be “more about the code”. I thing a new wave of creative designers will be publishing soon on the greatest mobile platform to date, that makes me excited and anxious to see what you all develop.
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With the upcoming release of 1080p video on YouTube I couldn’t be happier to have a new GPU accelerated Flash Player! Flash Player 10.1 gives some significant improvement upon the previous builds. No mobile release as of yet but you can rock HD on your even on your Nvidia ION. If you kitted out for it you even now have native-multi-touch support! Although the player is in pre-release I would still highly recommend it as I have found it to be nothing but stable. Besides in this day in age of Web 2.0 doesn’t everything have a BETA label on it? Get it here!
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This demos how to make a Multi-Touch pad with no rear projection, perfect for trying it out if your looking into building a table but want to try it out first. Based on my experience it may be worth spending just a little money on getting a IR flood light and place it inside your box facing up at the glass. The software I tend to use for this is ReactiVision which is capable of inputting data to Flash via OSC.
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The f5×5x5 Framework Sculpture is a brilliant interactive instillation ,designed by LAb[au], the installation uses and array of sensors, stepper motors and LED lights. This complex sculpture is themed after architectural problems (like congestion and flows) with spatial sensing technologies. It’s an interesting piece with a unique style.
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Why? Well probably just because they can! This tech demo of a Multi-Touch Sphere is an interesting concept which I believe if applied correctly could have some useful and interesting applications, such as a globe and games. With the rise of Multi-Touch technology it will be interesting to see if this sort of technology will make it into day to day life.
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iBar is a 10 meter glass top bar that interacts with glass’s, cups, mobile phones cell phones*, keys, business cards and of coarse your 10 digits. Created and built by MindStorm. The impressive surface gives this bar the edge. All they need do now is to incorporate this into an Ice bar then they can [...]
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G-Speak is developed by Oblong Industries who are true pioneers in the interaction design field. They have developed a tracking system combined with multi-touch and an array of screens to create these remarkable tech demos of what the technology is capable of. This could be used in the real world for handling a large around [...]
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