Scribbling a Village
I’ve been playing Sim City 4 this evening, using my drawing tablet instead of my mouse. It seems to be a very compelling input metaphor for the game; the whole premise of the game is basically drawing a fictitious city on the screen. It would be neat to try it sometime on a tablet computer, so that I could use the pen directly on the screen.
It also made me reconsider what Steve Jobs said in his iPhone presentation about nobody wanting to use a stylus. While I think there’s something to be said for using a touch-based interface on a pocket telephone—the whole idea is to be able to pull it out and quickly do something simple—I also think that for more general purposes a pen offers an increase of precision so useful as to be indispensable. We’re not writing letters, taking notes, and drawing up blueprints with finger paints (at least when we’re not also five years old). If there is a future for large, usable digital surfaces—and I expect there is—I predict that some kind of pen will be involved.
