With all this talk of multi-touch gestures, trackpads, and all the touch integration in Apple's latest addition to the OS X convoy, I must wonder if the mouse will soon be nonexistent. A few weeks back, I wrote about the future of computing and how much things could change, slanting towards the tablet industry more than ever before. Apple released a preview of their upcoming operating system Mountain Lion to their Macintosh developers yesterday and showed that they are moving towards an emphasis on touch now more than ever before.
Here's an example: the new Notification Center addition in Mountain Lion. I really love the idea of it, but as a friend of mine pointed out on Twitter today, what happens to those poor iMac users with a Magic Mouse? Two finger swipe to the left? It just doesn't make any sense to do that when Apple could just include Magic Trackpads with new iMacs this summer. Imagine if they didn't give us the Magic Mouse and made a trackpad the new input device for navigation of the cursor. I don't know if this is coming just yet, but I can definitely see it on the horizon.
Back in the day, when I wasn't even alive, Apple made the mouse. Without it, how were we to move a cursor? We weren't, because there wasn't one. And so Apple made the mouse to give us direct communication with the Mac. It was revolutionary. But what if this whole idea disappeared from the computing scene? No, it wouldn't be a catastrophe, but it would definitely be different. Computing would be redefined, just as if it were on a tablet.
Trackpads are the future. Maybe they aren't yet, but they are on that horizon.