iPhone
Light As Air
Season 6, Episode 24
Original air date: 03/22/2008
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On this episode Steve takes us on an Apple adventure. First he introduces us to the slender Mac Book Air, a laptop so thin it fits in a manila envelope. The new notebook features a full-size keyboard and a backlit LED 13.3-inch display. It also ships with a built-in iSight camera, a solid-state drive, and a new larger track pad which supports multi-touch gestures. This means that just like the iPhone, you'll be able to pan around your photos, pinch to zoom in or out, and rotate with only two fingers!
New interfaces are tough to come by. I spent several days recently with Apple’s iPod Touch. It has an entirely new interface, which it shares with its more press-worthy sibling, the iPhone, which we are still waiting for in Canada.
For both the Touch and iPhone, Apple has developed an interface they are calling Multi-Touch. It is a touch screen that also understands gestures. For example sliding your finger will cause a different action than merely tapping. This opens up entirely new concepts of navigation and control.
One of the frustrations I have with the whole computing scene is the fact we are for the most part interfacing with our computers exactly the same way we did back in the late ‘80s.
Think about it, Apple (through Xerox) released the Macintosh (after the failed Lisa) and the graphical user interface was delivered to the mainstream. We were introduced to the mouse, to the desktop, to “point and click”, and ease of use became the buzzword.
