Dave Wolf

Monday October 05, 2009

Cynergy & Kevin Lynch Demo First Multi-Touch AIR App at MAX 2009

When someone asks me what we do at Cynergy, I will often simply say, "Our passion is changing the way we all experience and interact with software." It’s been a really great way to explain what we do in just a sentence, but it's sometimes been a challenge for people to really absorb, because it really takes seeing how that could be done. That’s why when Adobe approached us looking to have us build an app to show off the new multi-touch features coming up in the Flash Platform we jumped all over the opportunity. This morning in LA during the Adobe MAX Keynote Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s CTO demonstrated an Adobe AIR application designed and built by Cynergy to show off many of the new multi-touch features coming in the next release.

Now, many of us have seen multi-touch, or natural user interface interactions before. Often we see a "scatter view" control containing pictures or documents. The items in the scatter view can be moved, rotated and zoomed using a small cadre of gestures. These sorts of "literal" interactions are really good at explaining a new approach because they so closely mimic a real world interaction, we can all look to them and go, "ah ha!" However, as time goes on, their novelty wanes quickly. How often do we moved pictures around in a circle and then zoom in on them? More so, how many of us want our already cluttered desks to be our cluttered desktops?

So the challenge was, how do we meet our mission of changing the way we all interact with software, and do so in ways few people have ever seen before. We decided what if we could map the burgeoning library of multi-touch gestures (many of which are included in AIR and in Windows7) on to common software metaphors we could show how these new touch interfaces could truly change the face of software. To help make it consumable by as many people as possible, we decided to build an app many of us use every day, a calendar.

Imagine walking up to a flat screen PC running your calendar, swiping two fingers across the screen to launch your calendar, pinching two fingers on the screen to zoom in from month, to week to day, swiping your finger to jump day to day, adding a new appointment, turning a “knob” on the screen just like in the real world, and all in a matter of seconds. That’s changing the face of how we use software, each and every day. Common gestures that mimic common interactions we each do every day, but mapped onto common software metaphors like zooming, filtering, browsing, selecting, multi-selecting, etc.

The application is built in a pre-release version of Adobe AIR by a team of two in just a couple of weeks. Andrew Trice, the Cynergy Principal Architect for Flex and AIR will be posting an in-depth paper on how it was designed on his own blog. You’ll want to check that out.

We are incredible proud to have been asked by Adobe to do what we love to do every day, to be a moving force in changing the way we all experience and interact with software, and to do so in front of thousands of other RIA pros from around the world on the keynote stage at Adobe MAX this morning. To see more multi-touch and RIA examples of how the way we’re all experiencing software is changing every day, come to booth 431 or check out CynergyTV at http://www.cynergytv.com