Fortunately help appears to be at hand, quite literally, as there are new an innovative ways to interact with our computers available and in general use already.  There’s the recently introduced Siri from Apple, which while it might be a version 1 product and in need of some improvement (especially if you’re Scottish) seems to work rather well for voice interaction.

Then there’s the now venerable Kinect, coming soon to Windows to help us to all pretend to be Tom Cruise throwing his windows around Minority Report style.  Touch screens are opening new opportunities too and new types of keyboards.  Sadly a wholesale move to touch technology can only guarantee that the next worldwide health scare is a pandemic of repetitive strain injury and nobody needs any of that.

But slowly and surely we are moving away from using keyboards and mice to control our computers and to communicate with them.  This has led me to wonder exactly how we’ll be doing this in the future?  Clearly the outsider has got to be voice.  With so many languages, dialects and words to learn we’re still many years from the processing power needed to produce reliable results, and do you want to explain to your boss that you had said “brick” in that email but the software misunderstood you?

Then comes touch.  RSI issues aside we can still use them to read natural handwriting.  This technology has now been around and working reliably for a decade, the postal services around the world have invested huge sums in computers that can read the words we write.  Alas this is a slow process and writing out a long email instead of typing it in under half the time just isn’t suitable for the demands of modern life.  This brings us then to the Kinect which is great for throwing things around but pretty useless the first time you actually try and do precise work with it.

This means there there’s a gap, sitting somewhere between what he have and what we don’t and I thought I’d throw this out for you to see what you think will be the control methods of tomorrow?  Will we will use keyboards and mice so much, or will the mouse go in favour of gestures and will basic keyboard controls be taken on by voice control instead?  In short, will be resort to using all of these technologies simultaneously to control our devices?

I bring this up because this has all really taken off just this year.  2011 has been a tremendous year for new ways to control computers with some of the most amazing technologies put into practical and widespread use for the first time.  2012 looks to be even more exciting with swipe gesture control coming to Windows 8.  We may not want this though.  For many a keyboard and mouse are just fine and they’ll want to keep things like that.  What do you think?  Do you think there will be an outright winner and do you even think that ten years form now we’ll have any choice in what we use?  Why not tell us here.

During this time both Android and Windows 7 have been criticised to differing degrees for not being suitable for tablets, and now both Google and Microsoft have come out to say they’re working on specific tablet versions of their operating systems.  Google’s is set to launch in 2011 while we may have to wait until mid 2012 for one from Microsoft.

In all the entire tablet focus has been on the operating systems, and not on the other thing we really should have been focusing on but that has so far got no comment and attention at all.  Now that tablets are out of the door and gaining in popularity, is it time we turned our attention to the Internet itself?

Let me give you a few examples.  As more and more of us shift our lives into the cloud we’re using online services like Hotmail, GMail, Office Live and Facebook.  While software to run these web services exist for most, if not all, platforms, there are a great many people who like to use them in a browser.

Then there are mainstream websites such as the BBC, Amazon and so on.  The problem all of these websites face is that every single one of them was designed for the previous generation of web-enabled devices, desktop and laptop computers, and every one of them is optimised for a mouse control method.

The moment you try and use a website such as Amazon or Ebay with your fingers problems start as links are too close together, too small or otherwise just difficult to hit, buttons are too small and… I’m sure you get the picture.

So far though, nobody has talked about the tablet optimised web.  I personally find this odd given that more and more people are using smartphones to access the Internet.  These devices with their 3 to 4 inch screens put people at an even greater disadvantage in navigating websites.

It doesn’t have to be difficult either.  In many cases the simple addition of an optional touch-friendly style-sheet with larger text links and buttons will solve the problem.  I’m not saying this is a catch-all solution, but it would be an impressive start.

2011 needs to be the year in which the mainstream websites place finger-friendliness at or near the top of their lists.  It needs to be the year when they begin to trial and roll-out touch friendly websites that will work both on smartphones and tablets.  If touch interfaces using our fingers are truly the way forward, why is the web ignoring this important move and standing still with their existing interface designs?

So here at gHacks we’ll be watching the touch-web and reporting back to you on what, if anything, the main websites will do in 2011 to address the needs of mouse-less browsers.

The new 8.10 release is called Intrepid Ibex and has 10 days to go before an official release. Currently you can download the beta to try from the Ubuntu website.

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed with this release. Primarily the difference between this release and Hardy Heron is a lot of bug fixes, some performance improvements, better hardware support, improved ‘connectivity’ features and a fairly horrible new ‘human theme’.

In essence it’s the kind of ‘service pack’ release that Microsoft provides. I was actually hoping for some dramatic interface improvements, however I can only assume these are still being developed. Mark Shuttleworth (the founder of Ubuntu) has made the comment that he doesn’t yet feel Ubuntu is ready for the average end-user at this point.

He strongly believes in open-source software, but until Ubuntu provides the kind of experience Windows or Apple does he would not recommend people to try it for the first time:

“There’s also recognition for the scale of the challenge that faces us. When I laid out the goal of “delivering a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years” at OSCON, I had many questions afterwards about how on earth we could achieve that. “Everyone scratches their own itch, how can you possibly make the UI consistent?” was a common theme. And it’s true – the free software desktop is often patchy and inconsistent. But I see the lack of consistency as both a weakness (GNOME, OpenOffice and Firefox all have different UI toolkits, and it’s very difficult to make them seamless) and as a strength – people are free to innovate, and the results are world-leading. Our challenge is to get the best of both of those worlds.”

“All of this has me tapdancing to work in the mornings, because we’re sketching out really interesting ideas for user interaction in Launchpad and in the desktop. The team has come together very nicely, and I’m thoroughly enjoying the processes, brainstorming and prototyping. I can’t wait to see those ideas landing in production!”

All of this must mean that Ubuntu’s new interface is still coming, perhaps for the next 6 monthly release, I look forward to when it does. Till then Intrepid Ibex provides some good under-the-hood updates, the rapid boot time and lightening fast shut-down are particularly impressive.

Hardware support, Linux’s biggest issue, has for most purposes been solved. Now the focus is on the next biggest problem – the interface and user experience, something I’m confident they will eventually solve equally well.