Born in 1968 like me? Then 1984 was the year of your 16th. Sweet? Sweet as an Apple. 1984 was the year that birthed the Apple Mac and in the midst of the weekends’ Apple iPad frenzy, time for a little rewind and a bit of moving forward.
I used to covet those first Mac machines. In the 80’s there was no such thing as a PC store, the local bookstore had them set up on display. The Macs were something else, and that mouse thing pointing device. Wow. It was big deal stuff.
The Apple IIe’s I used at high school were not particularly attractive, Apple did a good beige and the most visually appealing thing about them were the glossy rainbow Apple badges; the keyboard was wide and deep; like typing on the front end of a wave board.
The Apples at school shared a room with a few Sinclair ZX81. The Sinclair's were my first encounter with touch-like computing with there very small touch sensitive keyboard. The individual keys so torturously small that typing a 10 line BASIC program could take up a whole 50 minute class. The reward for your efforts was designing a program that would add 2 and 2 together or fill the screen with the same word. At least the Sinclair's had a printer; a dirty little thermal printer that made a high pitched squeal and filled the air with a burnt carbon smell.
The crudest and earliest touch screens involved two pieces of hardware, the screen and an overlay that contained the touch sensitive diodes and components. While that idea was developed over time it’s basic engineering involved two pieces, requiring additional power and difficult to repair and replace components.
Apple revolutionized the touch experience by embedding the touch circuitry into the screen itself, engineering a single piece touch screen. Recent patent applications show that Apple are developing technology where the touch is interfaced through the actually pixels of the screen, no need for that embedded circuitry anymore.
The early multi-pinned mouse was a pain to reach around bulky hardware and plug into a port that was out of sight and we all perfected the mouse cable “desk top lift and flick” for many years. The wireless mouse untethered us but you still can’t help but sometimes lose your pointer and have to look for it and get it to where you need it.
The refreshes of many websites recently have included layouts that could be described as touch friendly. The most successful in my opinion is Vanityfair.com. Whilst I haven’t viewed the VF site using a touch screen you only have to look at it and see it’s potential for a touch browsing experience.
iPad. The final nail for old media? The saviour of old media? The death of newspapers? The birth of a new journalistic democracy? That discussion is a little tired, and the clichés now associated with it leave me little sleepy. What the iPad will do is remove the mouse from our lives. Touch screens are not new but the technology that drives that touch experience is now top shelf.Those early Macs and there “…hello…” was the welcome mat for the mouse, but the iPad will finally pinch and flick the mouse out of the house. Imagine a world with no click in the CLICK HERE.
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