Our computers are feeling a bit touch deprived. They are now beckoning for us to touch them and not just with one finger like an ATM. Multi-touch interfaces have arrived in the IPhone and Microsoft Surface and as a recent Time article perceptively notes, users are going to get twitchy fingers and want to be touching their interfaces everywhere (no jokes please). Here are some of my initial thoughts and feelings as a user interface engineer:

• I can feel users cry out for this technology to develop as quickly as possible as soon as they get a taste of it. I can sense a huge ground swell of demand that I think is being radically underestimated.
• I want to get my hands on a SDK for this technology asap and start to learn how to meld my existing skills into developing interfaces for multi-touch. I wonder if I am going to be able to leverage my existing OO skills and UI design partterns from Flex or is there going to a whole new way of programming.
• I wonder about how multi-touch will affect my work environment as a software engineer. Will there be multi-touch IDEs? Will I stand up and work with my fingers on a screen? Will I finally be able to get out this static dead horse typing position that is leaving me to inflexible for my other passion, trail running?
• I wonder how much more I should learn about Microsoft technologies like WPF that will undergird Microsoft surface. Will Microsoft be the leader in multi-touch software development? Or will there be lots of independent and open-source communities that spring up? What role will Apple play?
• Will the Flash player which I have come to love will someday be ported to have multi-touch input support? Will Adobe come on board or can they?

These are a few of my initial thoughts about multi-touch technology. I have been so busy with my current project I haven’t had much time to write about alive apps. So much has happenned that it is time to get back involved with the community and start sharing my thoughts again.