You can touch, but you better not hover

This post can perhaps also be titled ‘yet another tale of  adapting to devices that can’t yet hover’, or perhaps ‘philosophical applications of CSS, media queries, and developing for mobile devices’…

Turns out responsive design continues to be a skill I’m working on developing.

Constructing alternate layouts based on screen size is mostly progressing well.

The hardest challenge is adapting my mind to changes in UI controls.

Mobile is most challenging for me with respect to touch vs. (click + hover).

By contrast, I relish novel controls, for instance, the use of shaking in the Wake n Shake alarm clock or the Paper or Plastic icebreaker.

For instance, a soon-to-be-released  project looked sweet on machines whose browsers support hover. Clunky desktops. with mice. & notebooks. & most devices that support CSS transitions. That is, mostly iOS anything.

Not so much mobile. Especially Android. & IE. We mostly fixed that.

The redesign shrunk graphics & added text cues for hover-free devices.

Which prompted me thinking about our life having  a hover interface.

Which is one aspect of what augmented reality (AR) should provide us.

Point your camera, phone, eye, or glasses at something. Get context.

Like the HUDs in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Which immediately prompts all sorts of questions.

For instance, will we start designing objects to be friendly to AR devices?

Assuming so, will folks without AR devices have difficulty using those objects?

Could augmented reality be the technology that gets rid of QR codes? Forever?

The striking thought is that the devices providing us a hover-like experience with objects in the real-world, those same devices lack hover controls.

Which prompted me to dream of a mobile device case, that say by reading the position of my fingers, would provide hover controls on mobile platforms.

Which made me wonder if the awesome Canopy case had a hover mode that would tell the OS the equivalent of a mouse is linked to the phone.

Or perhaps mobile  browsers could interpret a short click as a hover.

& interpret a double click, or a long click, is well, just a click.

Kinda like a virtual mouse. on your phone. or tablet.

& mobile browsers could offer that contextual help we’ve missed sans hover.

For now, I’ll work on getting better at developing for touch-only platforms.