This week at Apple’s
Worldwide Developers Conference, the company will release the tenth
major version of iOS. Which, thanks to humanity’s slavish devotion to
base-10, means it’s high time for a retrospective, a hard look back at
the most seminal features. At least, that was the plan.
Some days back, I made a Google Doc: The N Ways iOS Changed User
Interfaces Forever. (Listicles, we have them!) I shared it with some
folks around the office. We added to it, and we took things away. We
tracked down versions of every iPhone ever made, turned them on,
squinted at their tiny, pixelated screens, and laughed at their lack of
push notifications. Things got nostalgic.
And then we realized: Yes, iOS, like the hardware on which it runs,
has changed a lot. But far more interesting is what hasn’t changed. The
most impressive thing about iOS is how much Apple got right on its very
first try.
In 2007, smartphones had reached a breaking point. They could do so
many things—email, calendars, phone calls, text messages, net
surfin’—but the old ways of doing them weren’t cutting it. The
BlackBerry scroll wheel and trackball worked beautifully for scrolling
through emails and BBMs, but left-left-left-down-downing your way to
on-screen buttons felt like the past. A stylus helped, kind of, but even
if you managed not to lose it you still had to figure out where to put
it when you wanted to use the keypad. Smartphones’ abilities had quietly
begun to outstrip their interfaces.
The last keyboarded phone I ever owned was a gray Motorola Q9. It had
email, Solitaire, and a D-pad just below the screen. I bought it on
eBay (2007!). A few weeks later, my friend bought an iPhone. It didn’t
have 3G or GPS like my Q, couldn’t send picture messages like my Q,
couldn’t even shoot a video like my Q. In every way we’d ever measured
phones, the iPhone was inferior. But the first time I swiped my finger
to unlock its screen, it was clear the iPhone was the future.
Wait wait wait! Don’t go. This is not a love letter to the
touchscreen. Sure, it’s tempting, today, to say it was the touchscreen
that revolutionized smartphones—just as it was tempting in 2007 to say
it was what made the iPhone different. Here’s Mark Rolston, a very smart
designer, describing the iPhone to USA Today shortly after it launched:
“Touch introduces all sorts of compromises,” he said, “but you can
directly interact with the screen.” That’s all true! But it doesn’t tell
the whole story.
The real magic of the iPhone was that you didn’t actually interact
with the screen at all. You interacted with a world on the other
side—and you believed that you were interacting with something real.
Apple imagined the iPhone’s operating system (first called OS X, then
iPhone OS, then finally iOS—but we’ll just call it iOS) as a set of
real objects, each with weight and size and a place in a world. What’s
more—and this is crucial—iOS had low latency and laws of motion. It
really sold the illusion that collections of illuminated pixels were
objects that you could directly manipulate.
That illusion was the death knell for devices like the BlackBerry
Curve 8300 (the raddest non-iPhone phone of 2007), for which a task like
zooming-in on a map was so complicated, my editor made me delete my
description of the process. The first iOS, by comparison, had
pinch-to-zoom. Need a bigger map? Just put your fingers on the map and
spread them apart. The “map” (there was no map) got “bigger” (the
picture changed). That paradigm still sets the iPhone apart. For years
after the iPhone came out, swiping or scrolling on anything else was an
awkward, stutter-y mess. Lots of smartphones had touchscreens. The
iPhone had physics.
It is true that this illusion had its dangers. Apple would, on
occasion, wrongthink that green felt was an appropriate background for
an app like Game Center, or that the Notepad app really needed to look
like it was wrapped in the exact same ugly leather that Scott Forstall
had in his car. But mostly, it made the iPhone dynamic and usable—a
UX/UI leap no less significant than the jump from text-based,
command-line computing to the graphical user interface.
With that leap, iOS initiated a revolution in design—of graphics and
interfaces, sure, but also experiences. The gesture-driven touchscreen
changed work, entertainment, transportation, socializing, everything.
Our lives are so interwoven with its influence that explaining it is a
little like trying to explain the mystical powers of your car’s steering
wheel.
You could argue that Apple has not innovated much since, or that it
stole a lot of ideas from competitors. But it comes down to this:
Smartphones changed forever that day in January 2007, when Steve Jobs
introduced us to the first iPhone. Not because the device itself was so
incredible; Apple understood reinventing the phone was about more than
hardware. It was about the way people understood what was inside. The
way they saw it, interacted with it, and felt it under their fingertips.
Nearly ten years later, our devices are again beginning to test the
limits of our interfaces. Once again, our phones can do so much more
than our screens and fingers know how to handle. Apple’s working out
what comes next. It’s working to make your iPhone feel more like a
single device than a gallery of disparate applications, and working to
make Siri into the digital assistant everyone wants it to be. It’s
trying to find ways to make things faster, simpler, and more powerful.
It’s working out how to make software as understandable as iOS for a
television, or a watch, or a light bulb. These are problems no one has
solved. It’s like we’re back in 2007, waiting for Steve Jobs to swipe
and unlock an iPhone so he can show the world how they’ll use their next
computer. Except this time, multitouch won’t cut it. From where we
stand today, the future looks less like pinch and zoom, and more like say and do.
(source:
http://www.wired.com)
7:56 PM
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