> There will likely come a point where a touch or gesture interface will be able to tell if your hand or finger is quite literally -hovering- over a touch-enabl

> There will likely come a point where a touch or gesture interface will be able to tell if your hand or finger is quite literally -hovering- over a touch-enabled element, and will be able to give you context. A Synaptics touchpad can do that, no problem. Used for, at very least, the `palm detect' functionality. Catches a single finger at a few milimeters' distance, configurable to the boot. But I believe pushing that is a prime example of backwardnes -- a metaphor taken literally overriding ergonomics concerns. It taxes your muscles more to hover your hand in air with no support, than to slide it on screen. Perhaps that doesn't concern a person nearing top physical fitness, but that's a limited segment of market. Also, keeping fingers away precludes tactile feedback of reaching edge of active area, or some sort of active tactile feedback: http://www.macrumors.com/2009/12/24/apples-research-on-tactile-feedback-for-touchscreen-keyboard-revisited/ http://www.macrumors.com/2009/12/24/apples-research-on-tacti... The fingertip is the new cursor ;-)