Some of the topics covered in the book and intro chapter include:
-The history of gestural interfaces, they're not new
-Direct vs indirect interaction
-The components of a gestural interface
-When gestural interfaces are inappropriate, but of course when they are
-When standard usability heuristics like Fitz's Law may not apply
Overall I think it's going to be a great book. As Tony pointed in his form factor post, we have the technological means of creating UIs on more and more UIs, but we need to step back and think long and hard about the design. If you played around with the iPhone you've probably noticed you don't get common destkop and mouse interactions like drag and drop, the poster child of Ajax, even though you have pretty much the same Safari browser you have on the desktop. I've often criticized the iPhone for not having copy and paste in their multi-touch UI, but Dan points out that they may be coming soon. We're going to be developing RIAs for a lot more than just desktops and laptops so we better start understanding how people can best interact with these new UIs. Catch is I'm not sure we have it all figured on the platforms we have:)
If you're at Etech this week Dan's giving a talk on the subject called Tap is the New Click. I wish I was there and really look forward to reading this book.
I don't tap is the new click, but it's definitely a new click.
Since drag-and-drop isn't available on the iPhone/iPod Touch, I came up with an alternative method for moving things around that involves two "taps": one to select the item to move/initiate the action, the other to select the new location for the item. You can read about it/see a demo on my blog.
If Adobe manages to get Flash onto the "iDevices" (now that they've said that's a goal of theirs), I wonder if they'll be able to get Flex's drag-and-drop events to work properly.
]]>Mike from log splitter guide
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