I am sure many of you know the origin of the quote. It’s from the introduction of Apple’s iPhone last week. Early into the introduction, Mr. Jobs said about the other smart phones on the market:
They all have these control buttons that are fixed in plastic and the same for every application. [5’28”, iPhone introduction]
I was thinking about this yesterday while squinting at my iPod Nano while on a bike ride.
No more iPods until they get rid of those control buttons fixed in plastic.
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Jobs specifically said that the problem with smartphones is that different program would be a lot better if they weren’t all required to use the same interface, and that QWERTY keyboard leaves lots to be desired as the one-interface-fits-all.
iPods have a very minimal set of apps, and all of them are served reasonably well by the clickwheel (at least in my opinion).
I’d agree with PhilipJ.
One app, one UI, one control system (that is near-perfectly designed for it). Mobiles have (at least the possibility) to run many apps, all of which could do better if they each had their own dedicated control system.
Enter iPhone.
Yeah, but compare the top row with the bottom. The iPod took minimalism to one level, and the iPhone takes it to the next.
@PhilipJ: But there are many apps on the iPod. Ever try to play Bejeweled on an iPod? Games don’t really work. Movies are another app. Another UI. And Calendar. And Contacts. And Photos. And Video. Stopwatch. Solitaire is painful. Many apps. More than I use on my Blackberry. Even controlling a song is subpar…compared to what would be possible with a touchscreen. That’s the point.
“No more iPods until they get rid of those control buttons fixed in plastic.”
I’m sure the Apple design team is saying the same thing. Remember too, the touch screen used in the iPhone wasn’t available to existing versions of the iPod.
And really, as far as control buttons fixed in plastic go, the click wheel is one of my favorite. It focuses on what 90% of people want to do with their iPod 90% of the time, and does that really well.
I’m looking at my 1st Gen iPod, and it’s got the old physical scroll wheel, and wondering what Apple’s got against tactile reinforcement. I watched the keynote, and there wasn’t even a click sound when you hit a key that I could tell.
Joyent, can you guys provide a better system than Media Temple’s (MT) Grid System?
I ask because I know in an old ps grep episode you discussed it.
In a recent blog post, media temple describe how the internals of their new system works.
http://www.mediatemple.net/weblog/2007/01/19/anatomy-of-mysql-on-the-grid/
Sounds good to me.
It isn’t terribly encouraging for Media Temple that I get a database error when I follow your link, Ken.
MT is currently being digg’d, slashdotted and reddit.
My understanding is that MT own blog is not on the Grid.
Joyent, I would love to be running on one of those newly announced Intel SUN boxes.
@ Ken1, yes I’ll put something in writing this week.
@ Ken2, We’ve been on digg, slashdot, reddit, and have even had rubyonrails.org and other sites on the infrastructure on those at the same exact time. No errors on our own sites.
I’m sure we’ll have the intel sun boxes in house pretty early on.
Don’t be so smug Jason.
Their blog is down. Your blog isn’t down. Big deal. Want to have a real life pissing match with them next?
The fact is that your servers go down too.
@OpenWookie, there’s a big difference between isolated per-client or per-server issues and the system-wide issues we’ve seen with others.
Sorry, but we’ve never had a system-wide issue to apologize for or be transparent about. Knock on wood.
hrmph, I thought we were talking about the UI design of the new iPhone vs traditional UI design of cell phone devices?
I wish someone told me we’d be measuring our penis’s, I’d have brought my measuring tape
FWIW, there are some interesting comments lately on the previous post.
http://joyeur.com/2007/01/11/joyent-core-live
About the fixed buttons; I wonder what this means for notebooks. Imagine running Garaband and getting an actual keyboard to play on. And Apple has already filed patents for this kind of stuff.
http://www.macrumors.com/2006/11/16/patent-for-configurable-input-system-emerges/
When you look at that in the context of the iPhone, things get very interesting.
Without spoiling the fun chat….
Dave and Jason: Where is the next episode of ps|grep? And have you stopped the comic?
@ Douglas. We’re back on ps pipe grep tomorrow (Tuesday). We had the holidays + busy + the real reason (technical sound quality issues with the last two recordings that we’ve fixed).
@Jason Hoffman
Where’s ps pipe grep?
I could make a comment about how this is in typical Joyent fashion, but I won’t.
Com’n guys – the community loves you guys so much and want the best for you but when you give a release date, stick to it. At least give an update on what’s going on.
Dare I ask about: TextPanel, Jill’s Team, Solaris on Shared Hosting, etc…
@Kent: new ps pipe grep coming this morning.
According to this image, they are already planning to remove the fixed plastic buttons. http://guides.macrumors.com/images/7/74/Gesture11.png