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June 28, 2007

iphone

Tog on the iPhone, future of multi-touch

Posted Jun. 28, ’07, 8:13 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | iPhone

tognazzini.jpgBruce “Tog” Tognazzini is part of the legendary pantheon of Apple heroes. Hired as Apple employee number 66, Tog went on to become an integral part of Apple’s interface design, as well as the founder of Apple’s Human Interface Group. BusinessWeek caught up with Tog and asked him about the iPhone:

It looks like the iPhone will be a hit out of the box. Both Steve Jobs and Apple now have 30 years experience bringing entirely new products to market. They know now to wait until the silicon technology is available that will allow them to produce a full-featured, mature product on Day One…The design is right—brilliant, really—and I will be quite surprised if the execution is not equally perfect.
Some of Tog’s most interesting comments, however, are about whether or not the technology in the iPhone’s multi-touch screen will find its way into the rest of Apple’s product lines.
Do you expect to see the technology migrate to other Apple products?

It’s really about time for gesture to take hold so users are not just one-trick ponies with one click available to them. [The technology] could certainly be brought down into video iPods—and it could scale up to notebook computers, though you don’t want to have people raising their hands to a vertical screen.

Why not?

The arm of a 200-pound man weighs around 15 pounds. That’s a lot of weight to hold in a roughly horizontal position several hours a day while interacting with a vertically oriented touchscreen. Bring the screen down to the desktop, however, and the hand can glide over the surface with the weightiest portion of the arm hanging straight down from the shoulder. That’s what the mouse allowed. Similarly, the iPhone will be held in front of the user at around belly-button height, with the upper arms hanging straight down.

It’s an excellent point, and one that I’m sure Apple will think about if they decide to bring multi-touch to the Mac. Tog’s also got some fascinating insights on Steve Jobs’s role in Apple, and where the iPhone’s interface doesn’t go far enough. Well worth a read.


3 Comments

Daniel L. Author Profile Page said:

Correct me if I'm wrong (and I know you will), but isn't he describing something very similar to the Microsoft Surface, just on a smaller scale?

June 28, 2007 11:28 AM
Bob said:

Tog should know about issues with humans using gestural interfaces, especially with vertical screens. He produced/directed the "Starfire" movie made when he was at Sun, which featured a workstation which used a gestural interaction model. (http://www.asktog.com/starfire/index.html) The scuttlebut at the time was that the actor tired very quickly of making the gestures over and over during the filming.

June 28, 2007 12:06 PM
John L said:

The Multi Touch screen was developed by Jeff Han. It is superior, by far, of any existing touch screens. There is a demo video of Jeff working on what looks like a 24"x36" screen and doing some Photoshop stuff including the desktop full of photos and zooming in on one, rotating it and doing some adjustments to it. We will see a lot of this in the future. I believe that Apple will release a 30" multi touch screen that is the entire computer. No mouse or keyboard just the screen.

July 2, 2007 9:41 AM

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