10 finger multi-touch UI designed to replace the mouse

They've certainly put lots of thought into the design of this device/software. But the whole time I kept thinking: "what about the keyboard?" (Eventually, at the end, they showed the device in a traditional trackpad position below a keyboard.)

I wish they had considered a way to make the keyboard a part of the device. Perhaps an on-screen keyboard, some haptics? The challenge with that part of the input device is that to touch type, you need that spacial reference a keyboard gives you.

If you imagine the touch pad being wide but not much taller than the one on a laptop, it starts to seem more practical.

While we're rethinking the human interface, could we please stop staggering typing keys and put frequently used keys like carriage return and backspace under strong fingers? [1]

I was disappointed to see at the end of the 10gui video a concept keyboard with staggered keys and with backspace way over in the corner. If we can't move keyboards past the constraints imposed by mechanical typewriters, what hope do we have at changing the mouse paradigm?

[1] Typematrix is the only keyboard maker I know of that currently does this while still building a relatively standard keyboard (and something that could be integrated into a laptop).

Indeed, double Indeed, what about the keyboard?

Funny how much of the video seems act as if the mouse was the ONLY way that users actually input information into computers in the last twenty years. But even the newest user is going to be using the keyboard and the more experienced a user gets, the more they use the keyboard. And even more, as computers become a normal part of human society, interfaces pandering to novices will become less important, not more important. The question will change, is changing now, from "how do I use this thing?" to "How can I be more productive with this thing"?

Conside that MOST of the data that users input is going to be text, which a form of discreet digital data. A mouse or manipulative multitouch interface, no matter how well designed, is useless for this because it inherently produces analog input which is then translated to a digit action - dragging a file to the trash versus just pressing the delete key.

Photo editing or moving windows are exceptional cases but UI designers are constantly developing clever ways to do them specifically because they allow all sorts of kinesthetic analogs. Yet none of this solves the problem that this isn't the interface a user wants to do most their tasks.

I'd like to see it with the pad acting as the keyboard, too. though, that's more software implementation, while the video is talking hardware interface.

Although, the problem with that kind of implementation is that it doesn't have the tactile feel of a keyboard. however, iPhone users seem to have acclimated after first bitching about it.