There’s more reason to keep those nails under check. The iPhones and the like are have a capacitive touchscreen which means they need heat from your skin. The message is clear- use your knuckles to punch your way through when your length of your nails is not in compliance with the ‘capacitive standards’.
Welcome to the world of Gestural Interfaces. Every drag, hold, flip, swipe, stomp, tap, press, poke, pinch, point (tried alone or in combination, randomly or in order, with or without success) gives you a euphoric feeling of accomplishment.
I just finished reading a staggeringly provocative piece by Donald A. Norman and Jakob Neilsen at http://www.jnd.org/ I must say I grudgingly agree with most of the issues he discusses, though many of them may seem temporary in nature and can be overcome by a more consistent usability design practice. It is early days for gestural interfaces. With a lot of guinea pigs available, this resource is being capitalized on. No doubt many failures are happening but the experiments will not cease.
Here are some pros and cons of these types of interfaces
Pros:
• Gestures are natural forms of interaction.
• From a cognitive point of view the hand/body becomes the input device (less intermediate transducers).
• The movement capture is terse and precise giving a higher power of expression.
Cons:
• Interaction this way is generally slow and causes fatigue.
• Non-intuitive sometimes.
• If every gesture is captured even non intended movements are interpreted.
• Gestures are continuous; making them discrete is sometimes approximate and artificial.
These interfaces no doubt add colour (metaphorically of course) to otherwise mundane actions but a lot of work is to be done while returning to the basics and tackling the notion of realism.
