Bill Buxton

You know of many people coming up with ideas like pinch-to-zoom and just throwing them away?

As a matter of fact, I do. Let me present to you a very popular example, pinch to zoom:

http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

I'm sure you are confused, because Apple has a patent on this because they invented it, right? Not quite. Apple has a very narrow patent on it for using it in conjunction with a particular technology. To most people, applying pinch to zoom on a capacitive screen verses some other type of screen is pretty obvious, it works in any situation where you have multiple touch points.

None of this stopped Apple from patenting it. It didn't stop the patent system from granting the patent. And perhaps worst of all, it doesn't stop Apple from using this patent to claim that they did all sorts of work and pioneered multitouch with gestures like pinch to zoom.

The problem many of have with Apple stems from exactly this type of situation. While this is one of the most talked about, I have no doubt that you can find many other examples of Apple enforcing trivial patents granted in a narrow band, or in some caes like the Apple vs Samsung, not so narrow.

You don't typically see people complaining about patents on Latent Semantic Indexing, Page Rank, or other complex algorithms that are truly non-obvious. If our society truly believes that minor tweaks on existing ideas are grand innovations worthy of patent protection, that's a very sad statement on the human…

I thought this article was going to be about mouse cursors. The story there is even worse. We've been stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation for a few decades now.

There isn't a single mainstream OS that supports having multiple mouse cursors that I know of, and even if it did, not a single program expects it either - most would break. The closest we have is on-line editors that can have multiple users like Google Docs, and that's not single screen.

And you may be thinking "yeah but why?" and I wouldn't blame you, but that's just because you're not aware of how how much our current input devices limit us and how they are based on a flawed model of handedness.

Yves Guiard proposed a model in 1988 that argues the dominant/recessive model of handedness is wrong: instead, we constantly perform complicated asymmetrical tasks, with one "coarse" reference-frame hand and a fine-tuned "zoomed-in" hand (the latter being considered the dominant one)[0]. Later research has only backed this up (note that the linked paper has over a thousand citations).

When keeping this asymmetrical model in mind designing our input, things tend to just "feel" right. I guarantee you that the best two-handed input methods you use all follow this principle: even if not applied consciously, any two-handed interfaces converges to it. Simple case-in-point: remember 3D shooters before WASD + mouse? WASD = reference frame hand, mouse = fine-tuned input hand. Gamers just intuitively discovered this on their…

Hardly "modern", but here's a description of the graphical design of The Sims pie menus [1] that I impemented in 1999 and wrote up in 2001:

The classic papers on transparent user interfaces include Toolglass and Magic Lenses: The See-Through Interface (1993) [2], and A Taxonomy of See-Through Tools (1994) [3].
The pie menus in The Sims [4] use a combination of desaturation, darkening, and alpha blending to feather the edges of the menu.

Why transparency and the other effects? I didn't want the pie menus to obscure too much of the scene behind them. You can see through the pie menu as the animation continues on in real time behind it. The head of the currently selected person is drawn in the center of the pie menu, and follows the cursor by looking at the currently selected item.

I found it necessary to somehow separate the head from the rest of the scene, otherwise it looked like a giant head was floating in a room of the house! Drawing a solid opaque menu background would obscure too much of the scene. But even a partially transparent menu background still did not visually separate the head from the background scene enough. It looked muddy and cluttered, instead of crisp and bright.

So instead of simply alpha blending, I actually made it desaturate the background (removes the color so it's gray scale), and darken it (like casting a colorless shadow).

I wanted the colorful head to look sharp and bright up against the dark gray background. So the effect looks at the Z…

I got really excited about chorded keyboards and did some research in the past.

The chorded keyboard is not as efficient as two handed QWERTY. Englebart reported getting 35 words per minute with his right hand and 25 WPM on the left after extensive training[1].

Granted, this is a good speed for having one hand free to use another type of input (pen, mouse, touch screen or whatever).

A chorded keyboard is also a promising idea for mobile computing where a dedicated physical qwerty keyboard is unwieldy.

I wasn't able to see enough of a benefit to try building one or purchasing some of the existing products. At the right price point, I definitely would try it as a novelty.

It seems there is a chicken and egg problem of inputs and software that makes you efficient using them.

[1] http://www.billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf

Some days ago I posted this link: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html These word sum it up for me:

"In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation.""

The link also provides a nice overview of the history of touch.

Not so much, mostly people keep reinventing the wheel over and over again.

Consider, there is vary little that separates handheld Apps from desktop applications. Sure, if you come from the Web side of things it seems new and nifty but they are just stand alone applications. Capacitive sensing touch screens where where new in 1965, but wait it's 2012. http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

People worry about what happens when desktop CPU's have hundreds of cores, but the super computer world is already dealing with hundreds of thousands of cores etc.

PS: I think this relates to the hacker mentality. If you find a problem you look for a solution rater than see how other people solved the same problem 30 years ago.