All for Direct Manipulation

In this Forbes article, Dan Woods talks about his difficulties of moving from a touch-screen device to a point-and-click device and back again.  I am in complete agreement with Dan’s statement, “The confusion, however, has made one thing clear: multi-touch is clearly better than point-and-click. My brain wants direct manipulation. I want the virtual world I am looking at on my screen to act more like the physical world I live in most of the time.”

Direct manipulation — love it.  When you want to file a physical piece of paper, you directly manipulate it into a drawer.  On a point-and-click device, you may have the same drawer concept, but on a multi-touch device you have a much closer replication of reality.  Through time, our electronic devices have come closer and closer to mimicking the way we act in our physical worlds.  The multi-touch device is a big step forward.  Now I just have to be patient while the rest of my gadgets catch up to my iPhone.