In spite of it being relatively expensive, I might just get an iPhone, and it's the gesture-based UI that has me interested rather than any of the other gee-whiz stuff, which I view as incremental. (I don't have time or interest to watch video at home, and the last thing I want is to clutter my head with more noise when I have moments of inactivity.)
When I got a fingertip smashed by a faulty window way back when we moved into a new condo in Chicago (fully recovered), Bob gifted me me with a FingerWorks keyboard that he'd been playing with. It was a bit of a white elephant in that it reduced my typing to a crawl and some common IDE key combinations (e.g., CTRL-[SPACE]) were difficult), but the gestures were the first interesting user experience that I've had since I first tried a mouse. Different numbers of fingers were used for clicking, selecting, dragging, scrolling; closing the current window was like screwing the lid on a jar with three fingers, and opening a file was like unscrewing it. Ultimately, the novelty of the gestures didn't outweigh input speed, and the keyboard now sits in my closet. (Not for sale; the only thing I'd do with it would be to reluctantly give it back to Bob if he asked.)
I didn't have the foresight to pick up the standalone gesture pad, and even somewhat broken ones are going for almost $100. (I haven't seen a non-broken one recently.) Hopefully the iPhone will be successful and someone will provide a gesture-based input device for the desktop, and I'll gladly be a customer — build a better mouse, and I'll beat a path to your website.
Comment from @ 2007-06-13T14:56:44Z # permalink