perfidy

Of all the commentary on the iPhone that I've read over the last couple months, this is probably one of the better ones. A sample:

In the same way, it seems to me that designers are always adding additional direct ways of doing things in a hope of making the device easier to use. The first IBM PC had “function keys” across the top of the keyboard … they are still there today! The belief is that extra specific keys is a way for people to be more efficient.

But in most human based interactions we find a finite set of learned primitives and then we combine them to achieve what we want – language, gestures, alphabets. By adding more and more keys and having combinations of keys cntl + shift + F3 for example, we end up having to memorize something that is only relevant here and from which we cannot springboard to a wider arena.

The use of gestures is the opposite. For example, on the Macintosh today you can do “2 finger dragging” to scroll a window up and down. If you are reading some text, like this essay, and what you are reading is at the bottom of the page on your laptop screen, you place 2 fingers instead of one down on the pad and slide them down and the window scrolls up. What do you think you do to get it to move left or right or up? See?

The second radical aspect of the iPhone is the introduction of a new set of gestures that the user makes with her fingers on the screen to accomplish most of the intended functions of the device. There are gestures (that we know from the iPhone demo) to magnify, fast scroll. My guess is there will be others. The approach that Apple is taking is no buttons, rather a flexible touch screen with high graphical resolution. Ultimately flexible and open to a variety of gestures.

That's pretty much what struck me about the iPhone. It's not merely that it has all these functions, or a touchpad - all of which have appeared one place or another before. It's the integration, and the simplification of the interface - making something that despite its complexity is elegant in its use. My cellphone has internet, email, text messaging and other features. However, they are painful enough to use that I don't typically, ever use them. I only use the camera to take the occasional picture of my kids, so I can show them to people. Emailing those photos is a pain in the ass. The UI on my phone doesn't make me ever want to use anything except the most simple and basic feature - calling. The iPhone will make using the complete features of the phone reasonable. Once I started using google, and then google maps on the computer, I never looked back. I imagine that looking things up on google maps on the phone will be no different, and in fact even more compelling, seeing as I have often complained to my long suffering wife that not being able to consult google maps en route is a serious crimp in my lifestyle. In a couple months, it won't be any longer.