Title: Spoiler alert: The mouse dies. Touch and gesture take center stage
Context: It’s a post-PC world people. Get busy adapting or get out of the way.
Synopsis: “Alas poor mouse! I knew him well.” It may in fact be a tad too early to paraphrastically butcher a Shakespearian eulogy for our good and faithful friend the computer mouse, but he has served us well in his prime shepherding us from the alphanumeric age of command line interfaces to the current golden age of device free natural user interfaces. The perhaps not so sad reality is that the mouse (and maybe even his partner in crime the keyboard) are well past their prime as devices and interfaces evolve to all but eliminate the distance between a user and his/her data. As navigation structures simplify to the point of transparency, the modes of input can become more forgiving and “human” from a cognitive modeling perspective. This release from the constraints of coordinate based human/computer interaction represents a huge opportunity for our profession and I for one welcome our new finger-based-input overlords.
Best Bit: “…it will bring software developers even closer to graphical interface designers and vice versa. Sometimes the skillsets will blur, and often they will be one and the same.”
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