The gesture features aren’t yet fully baked in this beta version, but that’s to be expected and is, after all, the definition of a beta. For example, while you can save a custom gesture, there’s no way to assign an action to it. Other features do work, however, in a hierarchical menu system. The main overlay offers four options: Home, Favorites, Gestures and Device. Home does the obvious and returns you to the home screen. In Favorites, there is both a Pinch and Swipe gesture, along with any saved, custom gestures.

Gestures is interesting, as it shows four options: Hands with different numbers of fingers showing (two through five), indicating how many points of touch to use for a gesture. This indicates that multi-touch navigation could move beyond just one or two fingers in iOS. The Device menu offers more controls: Lock Screen, Volume Up and Down, Shake and Rotate Screen. Returning from any of these menus back to the main Assistive Touch menu is a simple pinch action.

Assistive Touch is certainly geared to tackle accessibility issues for those that have them, and the features aren’t yet optimized or polished. So there’s no guarantee that iOS devices will lose some or all of their hardware buttons in the future. After all, some of those buttons have become multi-purpose switches; the mute button on the iPad that eventually doubled as a screen rotation lock lever comes to mind. But the Assistive Touch gestures do show that Apple could opt for no physical buttons, such as the relatively large Home button. That would allow for either a smaller, cheaper iPhone; a handset with a slightly larger display; or perhaps some combination of both.

On a smaller screen, however, multi-touch gestures can get cumbersome. Do you want to see a buttonless iPhone or iPod touch, or do you think this approach is best suited for the 9.7-inch display of an iPad?

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Defense, not hunting license

Don’t think of this as a hunting license for Apple, or permission to launch a broad offensive against its competitors in the smartphone space. While FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller told me the patent is “excessively broad” in his own personal opinion, “it’s nowhere near the scope of a patent on anything multitouch.” UBS analyst Maynard Um said in an email to his clients that the patents held by Apple seem intended mostly “for defensive purposes,” since “collecting royalty is not Apple’s business model.”

In other words, competitors will still have to cross specific boundaries to incur a legal response from Apple, but where those lines are drawn reveal the key to why the patent is so valuable. This patent covers the ability to navigate in apps and web pages with a one-finger flick, and two-finger scrolling for embedded elements within a frame, which are all part of what makes the iOS user experience so good.

Um believes “Google and Microsoft may find work-around solutions in their mobile operating systems to avoid any infringement,” but Mueller points out that “staying outside that claimed territory will always come with some degradation of the user experience.” It’s that UX advantage that Apple wants to maintain with this patent.

More buttons for competitors

Apple’s touch interface on iOS devices has broad appeal because it works intuitively, and it has familiarity because of the broad reach of iOS (over 187 million iOS devices had been sold at last count). If you want to see more content on an iOS device, you push the screen down or pull it up, and the on-screen software responds as one would expect. According to Mueller, staying clear of Apple’s new multitouch patents would likely involve using additional icons or buttons for things like zoom and scrolling, which add a level of complexity to touch interaction. Basically, it would degrade UX on competing platforms. People new to touchscreen computing, and users used to iOS, would have trouble adjusting to these added elements, and they would also make for a cluttered interface. Apple, in other words, is better positioned to achieve a kind of user experience lock-in that would be hard for the competition to overcome.

That’s not to say Apple will be the only handset manufacturer to implement things like two-finger scrolling. Mueller notes that since Apple is already involved in patent litigation with Motorola, Samsung and HTC, it could reach cross-licensing agreements that allow other hardware to use its multi-touch patents as part of a settlement in some of those cases.

Ultimately, this patent is undeniably a win for Apple, and a loss for the competition, but it doesn’t mean we’ll see Apple turn into a litigating monster. It, does, however add some more legal backing to Apple’s existing UX advantage in the smartphone game, which will have long-reaching effects for the future of the market.

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The difference is best understood as a change in the user’s point of view. Instead of pulling the scrollbar down, you push the content up. The change signals a huge shift not just in scroll direction, but in user interface design where gestures are used to manipulate content instead of on-screen interface controls like scrollbars and sliders.

Scrollbar, We Hardly Knew Ye

The venerable scrollbar has been with us for ages. It was probably invented at Xerox PARC in the 70s, well before the graphic user interface (GUI) Macintosh was released in 1984. Back in those days, if you wanted to control something in the GUI, you had to be able to point at a control and click on it. The scrollbar was an obvious visual control to manipulate an application’s viewport, the section of content visible in the current window. It was versatile as well. The scroller not only provided the means to move the viewport, but its position also indicated where you were in the document.

One of the first steps away from direct manipulation of visual controls was the scroll wheel mouse, introduced in 1995 as a different way to move the scrollbar. Apple’s touch-sensitive trackpad and Mighty Mouse later used two-finger gestures for scrolling. However, the controls were still present on the screen to provide visual feedback on the scroller position.

The downside of the GUI was that every control needed to take up some real estate on the screen. Pretty soon we had apps with toolbars that were bigger than the content area.

iOSification

After over 25 years of scrollbars in Mac OS X, Apple was willing to rethink the UI for the touchscreen when the iPhone was introduced. Gestures provide a way around the need for an on-screen control for every GUI interaction and devote more space to the content itself (quite important on a small screen). Scrollbars were no longer controls, and remained only as a visual indicator of where you were. Instead, you moved content in the viewport by direct manipulation – you pushed the content itself up or down by making a gesture with your finger. This direct manipulation of the content itself is so intuitive on a touchscreen that even toddlers quickly grasp its use.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

On the touchscreen we have grown accustomed to using gestures to manipulate content directly. Unfortunately, when applied to the desktop this approach creates some cognitive dissonance for longtime Mac users as we try to use two-finger scrolling or mouse gestures they way we were taught, to move scrollbars indirectly.

What If You Don’t Know About Gestures?

Because the scrollbar fades out of view until moved, the scrollbars are not easily discovered and there is no visual indication of how to move content in the viewport. We rely on our memory of when we used to see scrollbars. In some applications like Safari, it is not clear where we are in the viewport because there is no scroller or thumb to tell us. Not only is it nigh impossible to discover how to scroll the content for someone unfamiliar with gestures, there is no indication (beyond cut off graphics and text) that you *need* to scroll down the page to see anything below the current viewport.

As it stands, the Lion UI is also a bit inconsistent now. Mail, Address Book, iCal, Safari, etc. all sport the new fading scroll indicators. However, iTunes still uses a scrollbar. Of course, gestures work the iOS way, and the scrollbar works the Mac way. Confusing. I have to think that other controls on desktop apps that could be replaced with gestures, like the zoom slider in iPhoto, might also disappear eventually.

Frankly, Apple’s human interface guidelines and enforcement of those guidelines in the App Store become even more important once you widely adopt gestures. They just need to be consistent. If you can’t see a control on-screen, you are going to try standard gestures. Developers must adhere to those expected behaviors if users are to have any chance of figuring out how to scroll. Can you imagine an app with no scrollbar on-screen that requires you to use four-finger swipes to scroll? How would you figure that out? Would you bother before deleting the app in frustration? Could you imagine a future with mandatory 3-minute introductory videos to explain all the non-standard gestures?

It’s Not All Bad

The scrollbar in OS X Lion does have an advantage in that it doesn’t take up as much space and visual weight in the interface. Gestures provide enough flexibility in control schemes that we don’t have to rely on a mouse click on the scrollbar control to move the viewport and a mouse click on the content to move the cursor. We have multiple ways to interact directly with the content. Content is highlighted before UI controls. What remains to be seen is if the change will prove as comfortable in practice as the theory might suggest.

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Shortly after Apple’s latest notebook refresh in October, an experimental build of Firefox was released that allowed Mac users to utilize the functionality of the multi-touch trackpad in the browser. As of the latest Firefox beta (v3.2), these features have been integrated into the official version.

The gestures available are:

• Swipe Left: Go back in history (hold Cmd to open it in a tab)
• Swipe Right: Go forward in history
• Swipe Up: Go to the top of the page
• Swipe Down: Go to the end of the page
• Pinch Together: Zoom out
• Pinch Apart: Zoom in
• Twist Right: Next tab
• Twist Left: Previous tab

It is expected that this new feature will be included in the next major release of Firefox, v3.1, when it becomes publicly available. Other new additions slated for the release include a private browsing mode and improved JavaScript support.

When testing this feature, Gadget Lab reported that it seemed to work with older MacBook Pro versions, not requiring the latest 2008 MacBook hardware.

This is certainly a great development from Firefox, and something I would very much like to see supported by Safari, my browser of choice. It will be interesting to see how quickly Apple moves to adopt the feature when an official release of Firefox is distributed.

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The only problem with that is that they’ve already got it. Doubt me? Check out the page on Apple’s website discussing the various multi-touch gestures. (For everyone’s convenience, I’ve copied that picture here.) There are ten gestures, outlined below.

Scroll: This gesture is simple; place two fingers on the trackpad and slide them around. Easily done on the MBP. (It even does sideways and – in Leopard – diagonal scrolling, provided the appropriate checkbox is ticked in System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse > Trackpad.)

Swipe: This seems like scroll – two fingers and sliding. However, in the demo, it is used to slide quickly between images. This one, I cannot get my MBP to do; it will scroll happily to the right or left of the selected image, then stop.  Further study does make this look like three fingers.

Pinch and Expand: The name is pretty explanatory – pinch to zoom out, and expand to zoom in – and the gestures look just like the iPhone! Sadly, also a no-go on the MBP.

Rotate: Again, obvious.

Screen Zoom: Hold the control key and slide two fingers forward and back on the trackpad. The MBP does this perfectly.

Tap: I don’t know why Apple even bothered listing this as a multi-touch gesture, but okay. Again, the MBP is more than capable of it. (It needs to be selected in System Preferences.)

Click and drag / click, drag, and lock: Two gestures on the Apple demos, one on here, and again, the name is explanatory. The MBP can do both of these, provided the user has checked the appropriate boxes in the Trackpad preference pane.

Secondary click A / secondary click B: As was discussed in another article’s comment thread, all Intel laptops and certain PowerPC ones can support a right click by tapping on the trackpad with two fingers. There also seems to be a correlation between Leopard and this functionality; older iBooks running Leopard have this feature, while newer ones that are still using Tiger do not. (This also requires selecting non-default options from the Trackpad preference pane.)

Now, according to my calculations, the MacBook Pro can do seven of the actions that Apple describes as ‘multi-touch gestures.’  Those seven are scroll, screen zoom, tap, click and drag, click, drag, and lock, secondary click A, and secondary click B. The other three gestures – swipe, pinch and expand, and rotate – do not. Seventy percent of a feature that it doesn’t even supposedly have isn’t bad in my book.

However, only one of the unsupported gestures requires more than two fingers, which the MBP has already shown that it can handle.  As was noted by one commenter on this article – thanks, James! – it can detect the difference between two fingers and three.  This, then, makes me assume that we will see the full palette of multi-touch gestures on the MBP – but not as a hardware update. That, in turn, is further supported by the appearance of some limited multi-touch abilities in older PowerPC machines running Leopard – perhaps Leopard even contains the frameworks for all of the above gestures, just waiting to be unlocked. There are also certain third-party utilities, of which SideTrack may be the most well known, that can add some of these functions.

10.5.2, anyone?

(All of this research was performed on a 2.16Ghz MacBook Pro specimen, birthdate April 2006, running Leopard 10.5.1, with no third-party enhancements that would affect trackpad functionality. I attempted to duplicate the Apple demos as closely as I could. I opened a folder of pictures in Preview and tried the same finger motions. The presence or absence of gestures was secondarily tested on a 867Mhz iBook, also running Leopard 10.5.1, and also without enhancements.)

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