Editorial
Developing, evaluating and deploying multi-touch systems

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Towards multi-touch systems

Desktop computing—controlling a graphical user interfaces with a keyboard and mouse—was developed in the 1960s and came to prominence in the 1980s. At the time, the low input bandwidth of keyboard and mouse perfectly matched the low processing power of computers. The desktop interface brilliantly took advantage of what that input could provide to build a powerful, extensible graphical user interface. While input technology (e.g., capacitive touch screens) and processing power to interpret more

Towards native interaction techniques

When working with a new technology/medium, the first thing people tend to do is remediate—they appropriate and reinvent techniques from other media (Bolter and Grusin, 1999). For instance, the iOS development environment allows developers to choose to only receive a single touch input, thus reducing a multi-touch interface to the more familiar single input of mouse-based interfaces. One tough challenge for multi-touch technologies to supplant desktop computing is text entry. Whether physical or

Towards user-centred design

As hardware and software foundations mature, increased attention can and should be directed towards designing user interfaces for users to perform authentic tasks. How do designers utilise new multi-touch interfaces to best support users? Ideally, multi-touch interface techniques are intuitive and broadly applicable. Realistically, without an established tradition of interface conventions to rely on, users often cannot readily discern the designer's intentions (Norman, 2010). Derboven et al.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the help of the following individuals who have reviewed one or more papers for this special issue: Iyad Alagha, Firas Alghanim, Gilles Bailly, Mohammed Basheri, David Benyon, Xiaojun Bi, Andrew Clayphan, Anthony Collins, Tim Coughlan, Sheep Dalton, Jan Derboven, Tanja Döring, James Eagan, Taciana Pontual Falcao, Rowanne Fleck, Franca Garzotto, Michael Haller, Tobias Hesselmann, Uta Hinrichs, Mark Hancock, Christian Holtz, Jonathan Hook, Michael Horn, Sergi Jorda, Shaun

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