I recently came across this article by John Biggs on CrunchGear and it instantly got our creative juices flowing on the future of Flash, Multi Touch and of course the stuff that lends Flash its superiority – interactivity. The conclusion that both myself and Aaron drew from this link was – Will the iSlate be the best and most popular use of Multi Touch hardware? What sparked our imagination was the discovery of this Photo which features a Multi Touch style keyboard with programmable gesture controls on an Apple Powerbook. The conclusion we drew from looking at this was – What about the laptop? And how could Multi Touch help make this popular device even cooler? The obvious choice would be to make a keyboard just as intuitive as an iPhone interface. Simply put, if an iSlate is a big button which can be endlessly configured, then why not make a laptop that has several big buttons that can be endlessly configured?
What I predict is a new line of Laptops that still have their clamshell design but instead of keyboards with moving parts, there will be a touch screen interface representing a keyboard that you can manipulate to perform actions. Eventually changing the concept of ‘quick keys’ and controls for Computer Aided Design (CAD), Video Editing & Website design/development ultimately making common tasks easier to do. This could feature heavily into what Adobe is attempting to release with Flash 10.1 written about in an earlier post here.
There are of course other adaptations of animated Multi Touch interfaces like the £10,000 Microsoft Surface which used to have a website made in Flash that worked just fine back in 2007. Unfortunately, it is now built with Silverlight which failed to install onto 3 Intel based Mac’s which caused an error in the shape of an awful loop between two URL’s – See Video Below.
Flash not the future? You be the judge.
