Ask HN: Do you want to touch the screen?

A touchscreen doesn't replace a mouse - as you've noted it's not precise enough. It can work with a UI that's designed for it specifically. But you give up a lot of screen real estate to make that work. (I've spent the last 3 years working on a touch-screen kiosk app...)

What's really interesting is the multitouch stuff, especially with very large displays. Once large, very high resolution displays become affordable, I think multitouch will take off in a big way.

All four of the displays for the computers I use often have fingerprints all over them. Also I occasionally have a finger that feels sore from overestimating the distance from my lap with the keyboard to the display.

Stupid iPhone with its multitouch touchscreen display.

I'd rather not touch my screen but I do want multitouch controlling of onscreen objects, e.g. in games or graphics apps, or for sorting through photos, organising research snippets/post it notes (digital ones of course), moving icons around, etc.

My proposed solution is this: a flat digital touch-sensitive keyboard (I know, some people like tactile feedback!) that can switch to a touch 'screen' mode with the flick of a switch - and though contact is required to manipulate objects, it senses hand positions without contact so that cursors are displayed onscreen where each fingertip is about to contact (so you can hover + seek, then click/drag)

--------- alternative idea: multitouch phones used as bluetooth (multi)touchpads for your PC

I've never used one, but every review of the Cintiq I've ever read is roughly "Best device ever! Should have bought it years ago! Worth every penny! From my cold dead hands!". This suggests to me that for at least a significant minority of use cases, more direct manipulation is quite useful.

You admit it's good for phones but bad for "normal computers". But your phone is more powerful than your PC was 10 years ago. Lots of people have already given up desktops for laptops; is it so hard to imagine one day many people will have given up laptops for even smaller devices?

I think it would be great for collaboration. Two people and one screen is OK, but you either have collaboration software (complex) or have to share input devices (awkward). A touchscreen bring back the immediacy of sketching something out on a whiteboard together.

As you point out, the interface will need to change. (When I was typing commands into my terminal, I never thought "Damn if only I could drag a bar of soap around my desk to do this!") The mouse is a local maximum. But it's a chicken-and-egg problem: you can't write software for hardware that nobody has. So if people want to build touchscreens, I'm all for it. Maybe somebody will build an interface for them that doesn't suck.

how about optimus maximus : http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/9836/