“Steve Jobs’ iPhone demo at Macworld January 9 rocked the house, stopped the presses and upset the smart-phone status quo. Yes, Jobs changed the world. Again,” Mike Elgan blogs for Digit.
“Jobs’ iPhone demo was so powerful that he actually made people believe that Apple invented a whole new user interface. In fact, Apple did something more important than that. The company took some of the best — hitherto obscure — UI research and put it into a product that you will be able to buy. It did the same thing with the original Apple computer, the Mac, and with the iPod,” Elgan writes.
Elgan writes, “This is how Apple changes the world. It takes awesome research out of other people’s labs, polishes and perfects it, and then ship it as warm-and-fuzzy consumer products everyone can buy.”
“Succeed or fail, the iPhone will be remembered as the first major step toward the third-generation PC user interface,” Elgan writes. “Tomorrow’s third-generation PC UI has already been invented. All the research is done. In fact, some elements have been independently developed by dozens of geniuses at multiple research centers, each taking a slightly different approach, but all embracing more than one of the major five elements of tomorrow’s UI. Here are those elements:”
1. Multi-touch
2. Gestures
3. Physics
4. 3D
5. Minimization of icons
“Does all this sound familiar? These are the five core elements of the iPhone user interface. And they do not exist together in any other major product,” Elgan writes. “The iPhone’s relevance lies not in its convergence of phone and iPod or even the mobilization of OS X, but that it’s the first-ever, mass-market computer with a third-generation UI.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “MacDoc” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Note: We first covered Jeff Han’s multi-touch interface last February with a direct link to video of Han’s UI and a link to Wired’s “Cult of Mac” coverage. At the time, we wrote, “This could change everything. Again.”
In recent days, Han has updated his website with the cryptic blurb, “Yes, we saw the keynote too! We have some very, very exciting updates coming soon- stay tuned!”
Jeff Han’s “Multi-Touch Interaction Research” Web site: http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
Related articles:
Researchers have bigger plans for ‘multi-touch’ beyond Apple’s iPhone – January 19, 2007
Video of how Apple’s rumored touch-screen Tablet Mac could work – February 13, 2006