Why the iPhone will change the (PC) world

Conceive of an iPhone the size up of a big-screen TV. That's the PC of the future.

Contributing Columnist, Computerworld |

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

His tonic was so insanely great that five weeks later, we almost forget one important fact: The iPhone doesn't exist -- at to the lowest degree as a merchant marine mathematical product.

Neither you nor I receive ever much equally touched an iPhone. Almost everything we know about the iPhone came from unrivalled big sales talk. The iPhone could be the greatest device ever manufactured. Or it could be a horrible flop like the Newton. Either is possible.

Jobs' iPhone demo was thusly almighty that He actually ready-made people believe that Apple fabricated a whole new user interface. In fact, Apple did something Sir Thomas More important than that. The troupe took some of the best -- thus far obscure -- UI enquiry and put it into a product that you will exist able to buy. It did the same thing with trey other products, the master copy Apple reckoner, the Mac and the iPod.

This is how Apple changes the public. It takes impressive research out of other people's labs, polishes and perfects IT, then ship it as lively-and-muzzy consumer products everyone can buy.

Come through or fail, the iPhone testament be remembered A the first major step toward the third-generation Personal computer user interface.

Senior and busted

The first-generation UI was the command line. Apple didn't invent it, but misused the concept for early Apple computers.

The second-propagation UI is the icon-based, folder-unvoluntary, resizable overlapping windows port that we use today. Again, Malus pumila didn't invent it -- Xerox did. Simply Apple was the outset major company to build it into a consumer product, the original Macintosh computer, which came out in 1984.

Microsoft shipped its Windows Panorama operating system subterminal month, and Apple's incoming update to OS X is potential away late spring. Although these platforms contain elements of the next-generation UI, they're supported the same senile folders, icons and Windows paradigm from the 1980s.

I don't know about you, but I think 23 years is a long time to wait. I'm FRS ahead and ready for the next radical leap forward in UI technology. You will beryllium, too, once you've seen the TV I link at the end of this column.

The newfound pepperiness

Tomorrow's third-multiplication PC UI has already been fictional. Whol the research is done. In fact, some elements induce been independently industrial by dozens of geniuses at multiple research centers, each winning a slightly different approach, but all embracing more than one of the major five elements of tomorrow's UI. Present are those elements:

1. Multitouch

Very much of people directly think Apple invented multitouch -- the theme that a touchscreen can reply to two or more points of manipulate at once. In fact, researchers have been developing multitouch technologies for more than than a decennium.

Multitouch on a PC interface is as powerful as "multitouch" in real life. Imagine if you had to endure through life sentence interacting with the world using just one fingertip. Dialing the phone would glucinium OK, but picking up the receiver would be a trouble. Multitouch lets you "pick up" connected-blind objects, turn them round, resize them and practice other useful things. Here's what multitouch looks like.

2. Gestures

Current-generation touch-blind devices already have vestigial gestures. In fact, even the Orchard apple tree Newton, indefinite of the first individualised extremity assistants, supported gestures. If you circled text edition while writing along the Newton, the circled word would then be "selected." That's a gesture. Interestingly, multi-meet amplifies the power of gestures by an order of magnitude. For example, you can put two fingers on the left and right-handed side of a photo, then use the gesture of moving your fingers apart to instantly enlarge the picture.

3. Physics

Second-generation UIs have folders, trash cans and documents that represent somatogenic objects. But they don't act like forceful objects. They don't move like they make weighting, mass and impulse. When you glide a folder crossways your Windows background, it doesn't slow down gradually, just stops the instant you release the mouse button. When you crash an icon against other desktop objects, they don't scatter like bowling pins. If they did, your mind would more readily take over them as real objects. Hither's an illustration of gestures combined with physical science.

4. 3-D

Few UI objects in some Vista and Bone X have 3-D properties. For lesson, you might be able to good turn a document around and view what's on the game or consider cascaded documents from the slope, which helps you quality and get up them. For the most part, however, current-generation UIs are profoundly 2-D.

5. Minimization of icons

Icons are the central component of nowadays's operative systems and symbolise folders, documents and applications in their closed state. When you click on them to open, the icon is still at that place, but clicking opens the item and dozens it into memory. Succeeding-generation operating systems will shuffle items in their open state -- non their unsympathetic Department of State represented by icons -- the inner element. You'll glucinium healthy to shrink Beaver State acquire just now about any physical object almost infinitely in either direction, just size will constitute fluid, rather than binary -- items will be shown in degrees of largeness, preferably than either open or closed. Here's what a UI without icons looks like.

The combining of these elements means that the UI practically disappears. And then does the acquisition curve for elemental function. A child will beryllium able to paseo raised to a 3rd-generation PC and start playacting around with it.

Does altogether this sound off familiar? These are the five core elements of the iPhone user interface. And they do not exist together in any other major product.

The iPhone's relevance lies not in its convergence of phone and iPod Oregon eventide the mobilization of Bone X, but that it's the first-ever mass-market computer with a third-generation UI.

Hera's a link to a UI engineering science demonstrate that combines everything: multi-touch, gestures, physics, 3-D and icon minimisation. Secure your seat belts, if you haven't seen it. This demo makes Jobs' keynote look as boring as, well, a Bill Gates keynote: Perceptive Pixel founder Jeff Han demonstrates tomorrow's UI at the Ted Conference in February 2006.

In summation to the five UI elements, this demonstrate as wel shows the hardware elements required to use it comfortably: a "drafting table" screen that's low and at a comfortable angle; a large touchscreen; very omnipotent 3-D graphics computer hardware; high-performance file retrieval; and massive, raw processing power.

Breathtaking, International Relations and Security Network't it? The outflank word is that you'll soon be able to buy a diminutive one from Cingular.

But will the desktop version of this third-generation UI come from Apple, or Microsoft?

My prediction: some, and maybe Google will offer a variant as well. Time will tell. The remarkable thing is that the direction of the UI is clear. And it's sincerely -- several mightiness say crazily -- great.

Microphone Elgan is a technology writer and sometime editor of Windows Magazine. He nates be reached at mike.elgan@elgan.com operating room his blog: http://therawfeed.com.

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Mike Elgan is a technology-taken up diarist, author, blogger, podcaster and digital nomad. Learn more at his site: elgan.com.

Copyright © 2007 IDG Communications, Inc.