TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

David Barnard believes touch—the direct manipulation of objects—is the largest shift in computing we’ve seen:

After a few minutes he [David's two-year old son] exited the app and looked up to see the icons of all his favorite apps on the TV. He immediately set down the iPad, walked up to the TV, and tried launching an app by touching the TV screen. My wife and I instinctually told him not to touch the TV, but he looked back at us quite puzzled. The thing is, Luke has never used a mouse-like pointing device. Other than using the TV remote to turn the TV on and off, or turning a light switch on and off, he’s never used one object to remotely manipulate another.

What’s so intriguing to me about children growing up using iOS devices is that they are learning touch-based computers first, and therefore their mental concepts for computers are based on them. For older generations, we think of computers as things you use separate interface elements to interact with content (the mouse, keyboard, user interface buttons, et cetera), and thus that’s how we conceptualize them, even in the new world of touch computing.

Children growing up on iOS devices, though, haven’t been spoiled (in the sense of spoiled fruit) by old-world computing abstractions. The current crop of iOS applications still, in many ways, reflect our old-world computing concepts. What I can’t wait to see is what the young generation comes up with, a generation which grew up using touch-based computers. That’s going to be a giant leap.

That’s also how application developers need to be thinking. Don’t design your application so it makes sense with old-world computing concepts; design it as if touch is a universal language and we never had desktop PCs. The effects of this change are tremendous. Computers are no longer so much computers as real world objects, powered by software.