having a touchscreen that makes things zoom by pinching. Apple doesn't actually have a patent on pinch-to-zoom. But I'll play along anyway... It's trivial, ob

having a touchscreen that makes things zoom by pinching. Apple doesn't actually have a patent on pinch-to-zoom. But I'll play along anyway... It's trivial, obvious, and there actually isn't any other useful way you could do it. Bullshit. You're playing dumb--probably without even realizing it--but I think if you actually had to apply yourself to the problem you could think up dozens of alternative approaches. These are the ones you're pre-filtering with "useful" because you assume that they are all inherently worse, but a huge amount of that is left up to the actual execution. Is this hard? Yes. But that's why it's competition. If it were easy to think of better ideas and create better implementations than the competition, the competition would have already done it! So let's try to think of some other ways to zoom with a touch screen other than pinch-to-zoom. For starters, the easy one: virtual button presses. Tap the plus to zoom in, the minus to zoom out. Ok, that's pretty lame, how about a zoom track along one side of the screen, and you just move your finger up and down it, or perform some action to select and move a marker object along it. Ok, maybe that's too much motion...lets make it a kind of rocker switch where you can just swipe your finger a small distance from a center point to activate the zoom one way, or the opposite to zoom another way. That might be great if meant for thumbs, kind of like a hat switch on a joystick, but let's say we want something better for a larger surface, like a table. How about tap and hold to get a menu with a zoom option. Hmm, menus are lame. Let's make it a dial instead. Ah, but that requires two motions, which might not be good, depending on the rest of our interface. Instead, how about we can just select and drag from an object corner, like any windowing interface, binding the zoom level to the scale of the object in a very natural fashion. That could work for some things, though maybe not a map unless you've got a very large screen. Or maybe rather than treating our interface as simply a flat surface we lend it some depth and treat the scale of the object as distance from the screen. Then we can use any gesture or button we like to suggest getting nearer or farther from the object we're looking it. Say, a two finger swipe downward, to suggest "come here" or "pulling towards" and upwards to suggest "go away" or "pushing away". When the object gets so near that it fills the screen we can keep using that gesture to get "nearer" to the object, effectively zooming in on it without the user consciously even thinking of it as zooming. Or hey, maybe we're overthinking this. What's the simplest thing you can do with a touch screen? Tap it, right? Maybe we could...tap once to zoom in, tap twice to zoom out?