Sunday, September 22, 2013

The Mouse is dead - long live something else

My wife came home with a new issue the other day.  Kindergartners will take a pass on computer time rather than learn how to use a mouse.  You might say - they're five, what are you talking about and who cares anyway.

Well the thing is five year olds have, for the past several years, loved their computer time.  So what's different this year?  Tablets.  Well Tablets and the Smart Board which is like a wall sized tablet.  The kids are completely unimpressed with with the abstraction of movement and selection required to use a mouse.

So in the immediate future I think it's going to be touch, the guys at leap like hand waving and that might catch on, or it might have the same problem as the mouse for these kids - not direct enough.

I can see a near future where something like Google Glass is all I need.  I'll tell Putty what window to open and the *nix aware voice recognition will take all the vowels out to make good command lines.