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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

In what way? How would you solve the problems?

You can tell from this article that the programmer thinks universally and in so doing, excludes a vast area of potential, especially in the future and more specifically in what he notes as "B) Gestures, finger gymnastics". You can stick your one finger up your nose but with more than one finger, you can do a lot more. I for one am ready for more complex interface functionality. I thought this was more obvious though perhaps it should be clearly stated: Get used to the growth in complex multi-touch gestures. More to come soon.

My guess (just a wild one for not being a thinker of touch interface design), would be to solve the solution by first detecting what kind of flash app it is and how much area it takes up, then anytime the finger scrolls over that particular area, there would be a cursor (the user could turn this off, but this is what would happen by default). As the cursor is led by your one finger which never lets up, meanwhile 1,2, 3 or 4 taps with another finger along with other more complex combinations eventually could perform various flash actions. Contrary to Dilger's primary thesis, I believe it's pretty straight forward that Apple is not as limited in thinking to make it happen if they want to, and that even the general audience is ready to take another small step in the gestures department.

I think my brain just exploded from all that complexity :)

Why should Apple think hard and work hard in order to solve a really hard problem they have no particular interest in solving?

Maybe there is an elegant solution out there to make all or nearly all existing Flash apps work, but it won’t be easy and I don’t see Apple investing much in technology they clearly think is dying. They normally never do.

I agree, Apple is prob not going to do it, but the problem is not "absurd" or "impossible". That's my main point. The author of this article gives up and says it can't be done. I disagree with that. I gave one of many possibilities. I prefaced it by saying it was wild guess, but again, I don't think it's impossible.

Actually, Flash supports both multitouch and gestures which are separate from mouse events, thus it's possible they may work concurrently (i.e. in the same app with common mouse input).

Flash has not supported multitouch until the latest release, meaning no existing flash content was developed with that in mind. Nice logical fallacy though!

You misread my statement which was part of the "how would you solve the problem" thread.

My point was that now that Flash does support multitouch and gestures, it's possible to add those features to existing content (yes, this will happen). Naturally it won't apply to all projects but it's far from the sinking ship that the author suggests and rabid HTML5 supporters are praying for.

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