I had an interesting exchange of mails with Torsten talking about the direction gpuViewer is headed, and realised that there are two topics I should talk about a little: one is the Mac version and the other is multi-touch screens.

With Mac World 2008 just around the corner, it’s time for predictions too, and here goes mine: next week, Steve Jobs will not present multi-touch as a “one more thing”, it will be all over the place. Phone, laptop and desktop. Multi-touch interfaces are a revolution in the making, one of the scale of what the mouse has been. A few years from now, it will feel cumbersome to be confronted with a machine that doesn’t have it, pretty much like like it is the case today when working without a mouse. Why should this happen now? Not only because Apple has a head start, but because aggressively keeping the lead on this technology is the same strategy as the one aggressively pushing mouse-driven software in the old days.

I’m betting we’ll see a multi-touch cinema display, a multi-touch MacBook and maybe even a multi-touch tablet. And to go with this, a large amount of new SDK bits and pieces plus a massive call to action in the direction of developers.

Ok. It might not happen next week… I have no idea. But it will happen, and it will happen from Apple first: they’re the only who can cause massive adoption, as they control both hardware and software…

That’s one of the reasons why I’m not putting too much effort in the mac version now (the other being time…). gpuViewer is squarely aimed at being able to take maximum advantage of multi-touch when it comes. It will be easier to do this right if starting with a clean slate, with known guidelines and requirements from Apple, with hardware to play with…

Fingers crossed, next week, Steve makes my day

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 11:36 am and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.