tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11278247.post4853096312546231795..comments2012-05-08T16:18:56.876+10:00Comments on A Man and his Rant: iPhone, and "The Device Formerly Known As iTV"Justin Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14995847102962013980noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11278247.post-65473342044185036702007-01-10T14:14:00.000+11:002007-01-10T14:14:00.000+11:00I haven't seen the keynote - I assume it's mostly ...I haven't seen the keynote - I assume it's mostly full of things that won't impact my life at all so I'm not all that interested. However the one thing that does interest me is the iPhone. I've seen the animated UI demonstrations on apple.com and quite frankly it looks like a brilliant piece of UI design - this is the major selling point for me. I don't care too much about what OS it's running and all that, but I love that there are big colourful buttons that appear under your finger at times when you would want to press them, allowing you to easily go and look at the eiffel tower via a website or something. And the fact that it's all finger driven rather than needing a stylus. My initial impressions are that this is a fresh UI for a phone, similar to the fresh UI of the nintendo Wii - I love it when cool products like this come out! For instance, to zoom into a picture you put two fingers on the iPhone screen and drag them apart. Simple, elegant and intuitive. (Of course I'll have to try it out to be sure).<br /><br />It's a funny coincidence - just yesterday afternoon I was having a long discussion about user interfaces with my brother, partly analysing the limitations of the mouse/screen combination, the way that the mouse pointer is an extension of your finger on the screen, and what benefits and disadvantages this had over using your finger directly. (Actually it was a really interesting conversation). And the very next day there's apple coming out with just the kind of interface we were contemplating.<br /><br />As an aside - I don't think there'll be any performance worries about having a "desktop" OS (MacOSX) on this embedded device - you can bet your budgie that they've cut it down and tweaked it to be perfect for the performance requirements - especially since they are also designing the hardware. It's no different to having embedded linux on small devices. A good metric might be how modular the OS is, to allow it to be customised like that (I suspect MacOSX *cough UNIX* would be more modular than Windows). But a better metric is how fast and reliably fast it runs, of course.<br /><br />I'm not a mac zealot, but I'm tempted by this device simply because it looks like a pleasure to use - non-frustrating interface that can do lots of stuff that I want. If some other company brings out a similar device that has a better UI, or that can do the same stuff better, I'll buy that instead. But Apple's stayed ahead of the competition with the ipod, and I wouldn't be surprised if the competitors have trouble matching the iPhone now.<br /><br />I agree with your opinions on the DRM content of iTV. I'm not going to be buying any of this DRM content any time soon, because then what I have bought is at the mercy of Apple Inc. I don't really own the stuff, I only own it within the context of Apple's private world. Nuff said.<br /><br />Now the next thing I want to see on the iPhone are games. There's lots of nintendo DS style games that would port well to the finger touch screen format - this would be a big plus for me. Or maybe I should just buy a DS. Hmm, there's so much "pretty cool" stuff out there that I don't need and can live happily without... I feel the consumerism drawing me...Monkeytreehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05731428503863624868noreply@blogger.com