Why the iPhone will transfer the (PC) world

Imagine an iPhone the size of a big-screen TV. That's the Personal computer of the future.

Conducive Columnist, Computerworld |

Steve Jobs' iPhone demo at Macworld Jan. 9 rocked the house, stopped the presses and upset the smart-phone condition quo. Yes, Jobs varied the world. Again.

His keynote was sol insanely great that five weeks afterwards, we almost forget one critical fact: The iPhone doesn't exist -- at least as a shipping product.

Neither you nor I have ever so much as touched an iPhone. Almost everything we know about the iPhone came from unmatched elephantine sales pitch. The iPhone could be the superior device ever manufactured. OR it could be a horrible flop like the Newton. Either is possible.

Jobs' iPhone demo was then all-powerful that he really made mass consider that Apple unreal a completely new user interface. In fact, Apple did something more important than that. The society took some of the best -- hitherto obscure -- UI research and put information technology into a product that you bequeath represent able to buy in. Information technology did the same thing with three other products, the original Apple calculator, the Mac and the iPod.

This is how Apple changes the world. It takes awe-inspiring research retired of other people's labs, polishes and perfects it, and then ship it as warm-and-blurry consumer products everyone can buy.

Succeed Oregon give out, the iPhone will make up remembered as the first major pace toward the third-generation PC substance abuser interface.

Antediluvian and busted

The first-generation UI was the dominate line. Malus pumila didn't contrive it, but used the concept for archaic Apple computers.

The 2d-generation UI is the icon-supported, leaflet-driven, resizable overlapping windows interface that we use today. Again, Apple didn't invent information technology -- Xerox machine did. Only Orchard apple tree was the first starring company to build it into a consumer product, the original Macintosh computer, which came prohibited in 1984.

Microsoft shipped its Windows Scene operating system of rules last month, and Malus pumila's next update to OS X is expected by late spring. Although these platforms contain elements of the next-generation UI, they're supported the same old folders, icons and windows paradigm from the 1980s.

I don't sleep with about you, but I think 23 age is a long time to wait. I'm fed up and prompt for the adjacent radical leap forward in UI engineering. You will be, too, once you've seen the picture I relate at the end of this column.

The new hotness

Tomorrow's third-generation PC UI has already been invented. All the research is done. In fact, close to elements have been severally developed by dozens of geniuses at multiple research centers, each taking a slightly different approach, but all embracing to a higher degree one of the John Major five elements of tomorrow's UI. Hera are those elements:

1. Multitouch

A lot of people now think Malus pumila invented multitouch -- the idea that a touch screen door toilet respond to two Beaver State Sir Thomas More points of command like a sho. In point of fact, researchers hold been developing multitouch technologies for more than a decade.

Multitouch on a PC exploiter user interface is as powerful as "multitouch" in real world. Imagine if you had to give way through animation interacting with the humans using fair-and-square one fingertip. Dialing the phone would be OK, but picking up the pass receiver would be a problem. Multitouch lets you "lift up" on-screen objects, twist them more or less, resize them and do other useful things. Hera's what multitouch looks like.

2. Gestures

Current-generation touch-CRT screen devices already have rudimentary gestures. In point of fact, true the Apple Isaac Newton, unmatched of the first personal digital assistants, underslung gestures. If you circled text while writing on the Newton, the circled Holy Scripture would so be "selected." That's a gesture. Interestingly, multi-touch amplifies the mogul of gestures by an magnitude. E.g., you can put two fingers on the leftfield and right side of a pic, and so apply the gesture of moving your fingers apart to instantly enlarge the picture.

3. Physics

Second-generation UIs ingest folders, trash cans and documents that represent physical objects. But they assume't act like forceful objects. They don't go on like they have weight, mass and momentum. When you sloping trough a folder across your Windows desktop, it doesn't slack down gradually, but Newmarket the instant you release the mouse button. When you crash an image against other desktop objects, they don't disperse like bowling pins. If they did, your mind would more readily accept them atomic number 3 real objects. Here's an example of gestures conjunct with natural philosophy.

4. 3-D

Some UI objects in both Vista and OS X have 3-D properties. For example, you power be able to turn a document close to and see what's on the back or face at cascaded documents from the side, which helps you select and organize them. For the most part, however, current-generation UIs are profoundly 2-D.

5. Minimization of icons

Icons are the central element of now's in operation systems and exemplify folders, documents and applications in their closed state. When you click on them to open, the icon is still there, but clicking opens the item and loads it into memory. Next-coevals operating systems will make items in their open state -- not their obstructed state represented by icons -- the central ingredient. You'll cost capable to recoil or grow around any object almost infinitely in either direction, but sizing will be fluid, instead than binary star -- items will cost shown in degrees of largeness, rather than either open or closed. Here's what a UI without icons looks like.

The combination of these elements means that the UI practically disappears. So does the learning bend for basic use. A child testament be able to walking up to a fractional-generation PC and start playing around with it.

Does all this safe familiar? These are the five core elements of the iPhone substance abuser interface. And they do not exist put together in whatsoever some other starring cartesian product.

The iPhone's relevance lies non in its overlap of phone and iPod or even the mobilization of OS X, but that it's the first-ever mass-commercialize computer with a tertiary-generation UI.

Here's a link to a UI technology show that combines everything: multi-touch, gestures, physics, 3-D and icon minimization. Fasten your seat belts, if you harbor't seen IT. This exhibit makes Jobs' keynote look as boring atomic number 3, well, a Eyeshade Gates keynote: Perceptive Pixel founder Jeff Han demonstrates tomorrow's UI at the Ted Group discussion in February 2006.

In addition to the five UI elements, this exhibit also shows the hardware elements required to use it comfortably: a "drafting table" screen that's low and at a comfortable angle; a full-size touch screen; very powerful 3-D graphics ironware; superior file retrieval; and massive, raw processing world power.

Breathtaking, isn't it? The best news is that you'll soon constitute able to buy a tiny same from Cingular.

Only will the desktop version of this third-generation UI get along from Apple, Oregon Microsoft?

My prediction: both, and perhaps Google leave offer a variant as well. Time volition tell. The momentous thing is that the direction of the UI is clear. And IT's unfeignedly -- some might enjoin insanely -- great.

Mike Elgan is a engineering writer and former editor of Windows Magazine. He bottom glucinium reached at mike.elgan@elgan.com operating theater his web log: http://therawfeed.com.

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Microphone Elgan is a engineering-obsessed journalist, author, blogger, podcaster and digital nomad. Instruct more at his website: elgan.com.

Right of first publication © 2007 IDG Communications, Inc.