Touch Screen Devices and the Web.
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Ralph Tags: post, touch, web
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Among the many thoughts that have floated through my brain this week there was one that was the tinniest bit interesting. How will the web handle touch screen devices?
If you are up on your tech events – after all, who isn’t – you will know that CES was this week. A week where blogs likeEngadget work themselves silly to cover all the new electronic devices we will see over the next year or two. Among the wave of e-Readers and weird looking mice, touch screen devices seem to have been a rather large trend this year.
While you can browse the web perfectly fine in your iPhone or Blackberry its not exactly a great experience. Some websites are better than others and include CSS that is targeted at phones which is ok but you don’t get any of the benefits a touch screen gives you. What I’m talking about is gestures. I think it would be pretty damn cool to flick through a slideshow using a gesture rather than poking at a button on the screen.
Of course the addition of gestures isn’t going to make a massive difference but its the little things that make the experience better. There will be other changes, making click areas bigger and not storing important information in hover states come to mind.
So how will gestures come to the web? The iPhone has a touch API and there have been experiments with Flash and Javascript but nothing that is really mainstream yet.
Ralph.
