Appropriate Gestures

With the demise of Google Reader, I’m doing what everyone else is and exploring options.  Personally, I think the best move for iOS is to leverage iCloud and just have Reeder store your OPML file there, but in the meantime, the Internet’s preferred and chosen solution is Feedly.  Which seems nice enough on the website, but the app is unnecessarily colorful and swipey at the expense of useful.  Double-taps in an article dismiss it, swipe the wrong way and mark everything unread, and the controls are vague and not really that granular…

Which brings us to the swipe problem generally.  Gestures on a phone are more or less standard, at least in iOS world: pinch-to-zoom, the pull-to-refresh innovated by Loren Brichter, and the multi-finger swipe for app-switching on the iPad (or multifinger-pinch to get back to the home screen).  Beyond that, gestures seem to be defined on a per-app basis.  Reeder, for instance, seems content to scroll clean into previous or next article, and lets you specify what left/right swipe on an article will do.  With Feedly, it’s unclear what’s a scroll down, how you get to the next article, what suddenly dumps you back into the list of articles – at least in Reeder, there’s a steady sense of back-and-forth, the way there was in the Twitter app for iPad before they chose to fuck it up instead.

The swipe seems to be the new hotness.  Things like Sparrow and Clear for the iPhone are heavily gesture-based, the new Blackberry OS doesn’t even have a physical button – it’s all swipes. I think a lot of this is people still trying to reproduce Minority Report, but a lot of it also seems to be an attempt to carve out a distinctly different (and presumably patent-able) interface paradigm.  Given Apple’s lack of success at trying to patent the multi-touch UI (which was, at the time, a genuinely unique proposition in phones) my suspicion is that any such patent attempt would be the height of foolishness, but it might be enough for prospective players just to be significantly different.  Blackberry’s Z10 (and they seem to finally have adopted Blackberry as the company name rather than RIM) is pushing its swipe-GUI as its unique selling proposition – probably too little too late, but a sign of the times.  Their device, like the HTC One, is also a largely metal proposition, as is the BLU Life One, a genuinely interesting proposition – contract-free stock-Android unlocked device for $299 and not a Nexus?  Only Samsung is sticking by their plastic – but then, Samsung is bigger than any other Android player at this point and probably deserves its own post later.

In any event, it’ll be interesting to see the evolution of the gesture-based UI, especially in a world where everyone is waiting for the iWatch and/or Google Glass.  How do you control user interaction when there’s no keyboard or mouse and practically no screen at all?  Is the time of voice finally upon us?  Have Siri and Nuance’s Dragon line and Google’s excellent voice search interpreter finally broken the Star Trek barrier?  And how well will these interfaces cope with a gravelly drawl?  These are important issues.

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