Latest iPad SDK Hints At New Touch Gestures

Late Tuesday, Apple made a new version of the software developers kit available for iPhone OS 3.2 for the iPad. As per usual, developers have made some interesting discoveries buried in the code, including some support for new finger gestures.Developers discovered the change in a folder labeled "Gestures" buried in the SDK. In that folder are two types of commands: 3Tap.plist and LongPress.plist. Coders believe that the 3Tap.plist gesture represents be the ability to interact with the iPad using not just two, but three fingers at a time. The LongPress.plist gesture would mean pressing and holding the iPad's screen for several seconds to perhaps bring up a secondary menu.

Based on the television commercial and videos of the iPad, it looks as though some new gestures will be included. The commercial goes by pretty fast, but the user in the commercial is performing all sorts of finger-based acrobatics on the display in order to get it to respond and react in interesting ways. How does adding three fingers help? We can only guess. Synaptics has demonstrated multi-touch displays with up to 10 separate points of input. Cool, yes. Practical? Well...

As for the Long Press gesture, that's an easy one. The Android platform, for example, supports long presses to pull up additional action items. Heck, the iPhone itself supports long presses (to re-arrange apps on the home screen). Perhaps the iPad and iPhone will gain the ability to use long presses in areas of the OS outside of the home screen.

The other discovery made by developers is that Apple has removed the language in the SDK referring to video chatting. Does that mean the iPad won't support video chatting features and/or other video-based applications? Considering that the iPad doesn't have a camera, I'd say that's a strong possibility. It also means that the iPad likely won't ship with a camera, as many had hoped.