PreCentral: The webOS Wish List: TouchPad gestures, darnit

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If there's one thing that webOS and the Palm Pre ushered into maturity it was the gesture-based user interface. While gestures had been a part of modern mobile operating systems like Android and iOS, they'd only been present in places like the app launcher or widgets panels. webOS kicked that all up a launch, using gestures to go back, to go into multitasking mode, to switch between apps, close apps, delete items, open menus, and much more. It was a genius use of gestures and it gets so engrained in your use of webOS that your author often finds himself trying to swipe up into card view on non-webOS devices.

The TouchPad ditched a lot of that when webOS 3.0 could have taken things up a notch (or ten). The multitasking gestures are still there, and for hardware and usability reasons the back gesture went away, but as I noted back in August, there's no reason that webOS couldn't have adopted plenty of new gestures. Be it swiping in from the sides to switch apps (a feature now in use in BlackBerry's PlayBook OS and Microsoft Windows 8), two finger swipes to go forward and back in the browser, and so much more. None of these would be necessary for anybody's use of webOS, unlike the Playbook which is almost dependent upon knowing gestures, but for users that do know the gestures will make webOS even faster and more fluid to use. So, HP, you're working on Open webOS 1.0. Give the gestures are bit of love, will ya?

Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments are below. Surely you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for what has proven to be an awesome discussion.

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