Lode Hoste. Software engineering abstractions for the multi-touch revolution. In Jeff Kramer, Judith Bishop, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Sebastián Uchitel, editors, Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 2, ICSE 2010, Cape Town, South Africa, 1-8 May 2010. pages 509-510, ACM, 2010. [doi]
Multi-touch interfaces allow users to use multiple fingers to provide input to a graphical user interface. The idea of allowing users to touch and manipulate digital information with their hands has been subject of research for more than 25 years [5, 4]. Recently several of these research artifacts have found their way to industry, with examples like the iPhone and the Microsoft Surface. Mainstream programming languages do not offer support to deal with the complexity of these new devices. Unlike the evolution in the hardware technology, the complexity of these new devices has not yet been addressed by adequate software engineering abstractions.