Jeni's Musings

Yes, I agree that vertical touch-screens are ergonomic nightmares for “real work”. The trouble with horizontal screens, on the other hand, is that they’re hard to read. With paper, we move between vertical (for the majority of our reading) and horizontal (for the majority of our writing), and tablet-style touch screens can be used in the same way. I can see big multi-touch screens being used vertically and horizontally in places where intermittent and collaborative work is important (think school blackboards or those tables they have in military operations rooms).

But for the desktop machine at home, perhaps we’ll be looking at a Nintendo DS-style interface, where you have a horizontal touch screen coupled with a vertical normal screen. That could lead to some novel interfaces…