Here’s how Apple’s tablet will work and why it’ll be a paradigm shift. Using your fingers as an input device is extremely intuitive, and it’ll make the mouse and keyboard seem as antiquated as punch cards.
On the following pages is a gallery of concept designs created by Jon Doe, an anonymous grad student from Georgia who has done a LOT of thinking about how Apple’s tablet will work.
Doe has done a remarkable job of figuring it out. Over the course of a year, Doe has imagined how the device might work, what gestures it might support, and how Apple could adapt its popular iLife software to work in a multitouch environment. He’s created a blog to showcase his ideas and a series of YouTube videos. There’s so much to see, I’m publishing several posts over the next few days.
“The problem is that the current PC interface (PC as in Macs, Windows, and Linux boxes) is outdated,” says Doe. “We’re reaching the limit of what we can do with a mouse and keyboard.”
Check out the video and gallery after the jump to see why Apple’s tablet will be such an exciting device.
Here’s a mockup TV ad that gives a taste of how Apple’s tablet might work. The experience is one part Minority Report, one part Jeff Han. It’s clear a device like this will be a lot of fun to play with.
Doe’s imaginary Apple tablet is called the Mac Slate. “I like to think of this as a post-PC device, equal to a Mac in capability, but more like an iPhone in convenience,” he writes. “Highly portable, but still large enough to do real work.”
It has the following specs:
* 13.3 inch multitouch display
* 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
* 2 GB DDR3 RAM
* 120 GB SSD
* NVIDEA GeForce 9400M with 512MB VRAM
* 2 USB 3.0
* 1 FireWire 3200
* 1 Mini Display Port
* Analog and Digital Audio in and out
* iSight Camera embedded behind the display
* No optical drive (it’s time to move on)
These specs strike me as plausible, though some of the rumors say Apple’s upcoming will have a 10-inch screen, not 13.3″. Whatever Apple releases at first, subsequent devices will get bigger screens as prices come down. It’s possible to imagine a 60-inch tablet for schools and workplaces that sits flat like a table, like Microsoft’s Surface table, but then flips up vertically to act as a screen.
Doe started dreaming about the tablet because he was dissatisfied with using his MacBook in class to take notes. A multitouch tablet that he could write on and use with his fingers would be much easier, he figured. But the more he thought about it, the harder it seemed. “The main problem is that Multi-Touch can be applied in many different ways,” writes Doe on his blog. He explains:
There are three broad categories for applying Multi-Touch:
* First, Multi-Touch can be added on top of our PCs as they currently exist. This idea is stupid. Multi-Touch becomes practically useless because it’s on top of an interface that is designed for keyboards and mice. It’s nothing more than a novelty here. A cool novelty, but a novelty nonetheless.
* Second, the physical keyboard and mouse can be put aside and their current controls redesign for Multi-Touch. This would be accomplished by recreating things like keyboard shortcuts and “right-click” as Multi-Touch gestures. This is also stupid. Most of these gestures become just as obscure and indirect as the keyboard and mouse. They would be impractical and hard to learn. And, these gestures would not be as good as the actual keyboard and mouse controls they emulate. Right-Click on a Multi-Touch computer is absurd.
* Finally, you can completely abandon everything we know and understand about the PC interface, and start fresh with a new Interface Paradigm and controls focused on Multi-Touch. This is the path to take.
Doe’s tablet concept makes a lot use of Cover Flow, a graphical 3D interface for flipping through thumbnails of files, photos or album covers. In fact, it was first used to browse songs in iTunes.
Apple is adding Cover Flow to many of its apps and much of the operating system in Snow Leopard. If selected, Cover Flow can act as the primary interface for browsing folders in the Finder, or your surfing history in Safari. in Snow Leopard in anticipation of releasing a multitouch device.
Cover Flow in the Finder isn’t very useful for flipping through files using a mouse, but is perfectly suited for multitouch. What could be easier than flipping through your files with your finger using Cover Flow in the Finder?
Quick Look is a feature in the Finder that allows you to see a files contents without having to open the file first. Doe thinks that Quick Look is so useful in multitouch, it should also used to open files and make them available for work. “In my concept a Quick Looked file stays visible,” he writes. “It acts like a lose piece of paper on your desk. You can have several floating around. The great thing about them is that you can adjust their size, rotation, and position so that they are easily visible.”
The most important thing is not the hardware, but the software. This is a device designed to be used in your lap or sitting flat on a desktop. “Every square millimeter of a Multi-Touch display (is) a source of input to the computer,” writes Doe. “This allows for a great deal of simultaneous activity (allowing for advanced controls, simultaneous work, and simultaneous users).”
Take the virtual keyboard, which automatically pops up when you start a new email message. The keyboard is near full size, and can be used like a physical keyboard.
Doe also imagines that a smaller, one-finger keyboard pops up when you hit UI elements like the Spotlight search icon in the menu bar, making it easy to enter search terms.
For quick and dirty typing tasks, a smaller keyboard pops up that is attached to the document’s window.
Doe likes the Dashboard Widgets in OS X, but dislikes having to enter the Dashboard environment to use them. He feels they should be available all the time, like Widgets are in Windows. In his concept design, Widgets can stay on the Desktop or float on top of other apps. This is interesting, becuase others have speculated that Apple’s tablet may not use OS X, but a hybrid operating system based on the iPhone OS. The hybrid system would run iPhone apps, leveraging the huge success of the App Store, but could run more than one at a time — kinda like Dashboard.
To make buttons and sliders easier to manipulate with your fingers, Doe has beefed them up with thicker borders and bigger icons. “With a Multi-Touch GUI you need a little more bulk to the window wrapper,” he writes.
Doe thinks menus are a thing of the past – mostly. Instead of having menus stuck at the top of the screen, in the Menu bar, menus are attached to application windows or icons in the Dock and Finder: much like contextual menus that you right-click to activate. In the screen above, the Finder’s icon in the Dock brings up a version of the “File” menu that is normally found in the upper Menu bar. Likewise, a menu attached to the Command Bar brings up options for Expose. “Because it allows for multiple users on larger displays, it didn’t make sense to leave the menus in the Menu Bar at the top of the screen,” Doe explains.
Here are the basic controls for the tablet: double-tap a file to open it or launch and application. Pinch a file to shrink it, or spread your fingers to make it larger. Many of these gesture controls are already familiar from the iPhone, and are clearly suited for many everyday computing tasks. Doe has sketched out ideas for several more gesture controls: more basic gestures; text gestures.
The tablet isn’t designed primarily as a work machine, but when you need to do some typing, a full-size keyboard pops on screen. It supports full-speed touch typing. “All keyboards are software based and can thus be changed to the user’s preferences,” Doe writes.
Aimed at education, Doe’s tablet supports handwriting recognition, like the veritable Newton before it. You’d imagine the pen would have to be a third-party accessory. Steve Jobs is not going to ship a tablet with a pen.
To make its apps easier to use with multitouch, Apple could incorporate simple changes like adding tabs to Pages, its word processing app, making it easier to work with multiple documents. “This would also work great for note taking; each class would be in its own section tab,” writes Doe.
