| At Redpoint we’re doing a lot of mobile work with touch-based interface devices including iOS (iPad & iPhone) as well as the Android. Earlier this summer we wanted to showcase a mobile application demo in a video. Our first cut of the video captured the mobile application running on an iPhone on an emulator. The video quality looked great and the script and voice over were great. As you would expect, with the application running in an emulator running on a mac, we were using a mouse pointer to make selections on the touch interface for the video.
The problem was that the mouse pointer on a touch interface doesn’t feel right…so after some searching we discovered an open source application, Phone Finger from Wonder Warp Software, that transforms your mac mouse pointer into a realistic human finger. In the still shot to the right (from our video) the finger looks very realistic. However, while watching the video, because the hand and finger are so rigid, it would not be mistaken for a live human finger. But it looks so much better than a mouse pointer and the final video that uses Phone Finger was dramatically improved. |
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| The other benefit from the phone finger cursor is around testing. By using a larger cursor (finger rather than mouse pointer) in the emulator, you can discover scenarios where the finger makes usability difficult. I’m not 100% certain, but it seems that the touch is triggered from the center of the fingertip, so Phone Finger allows you to get a sense for how easily or difficult it is to use a particular touch-based application from your mac’s emulator. | |
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