iPhone

This was an old post I never pushed...

Wow! As a guy that's owned every smart device since the Newton all I can say is Wow!

From the moment I got my iPhone, 18.5 hours from launch:), I've been blown away. The major reason for that is the flexibility of the software to get ALL of the features out of the way and show me my 2-4 choices I need right now. As mobile devices have become more powerful they've gotten more buttons. The problem is that the ability to access any given function is in inverse relationship to the number of buttons. So the iPhones power is in the fact that it has a single button-home.

All that said, the real idea was that the world is no longer keyboard centric. Every computational device in the last 25 years has had a keyboard at the center of the user experience. This was a great development from the punch cards that preceded it, and it wasn't until the mouse that real enhancements were made. But since 1984 we've had the holy KVM trinity at the center of our UI universe. Attempts were made with the tablet PC's, but they didn't really reconsider the whole environment adequately to make it compelling. Then came the iPhone.

The iPhone UI brings the dream of the interface in the Minority Report from 2002 to life where Tom Cruise pointed, pushed and dragged information around a massive screen. An environment has been created that allows you to flick, pinch and drag your way through massive amount of information. The way this resonates to me is that it's fundamentally more human in nature. For me to annotate my thoughts there is no better tool that a pencil and a pad, and no I'm not a Luddite. The advantage of the pencil over a computer is that I don't need to pre-consider WHAT I'm going to draw/write, or IF I'm going to draw or write. Computer's have different tools for any given thing, but in the creative act I have no idea what I'll do to catalog or document a thought until microseconds before doing it. The pencil allows me to hold a single apparatus and simply think. Suffice it to say, the iPhones interface has gotten so many layers of interface paradigm out of the way and simply allow you to touch your information, which is fantastic.