My first post about the iPhone was on why I thought app developers should forget about “apps” for the iPhone and develop Games exclusively. It’s a touch interface and as such inferior to tactile feedback interfaces. I’m hearing rumours that the touch keyboard on the iPad actually works quite well for full-speed typing, but that’s another story.

Putting Digg in the topic title is a trick to get you to read the post. My point is that there is a logic to designing software for a certain interface and, as far as news-interfaces go, Digg is pretty good. Now that I think about it, there is a different interface that perhaps works better, and that is browsing news via pictures (more on that later).

On my PC/Mac, I use Netvibes pretty exclusively for browsing the news. I tried Google Reader and other RSS readers for a while, but linear readers don’t make sense for a waterfall of news. Twitter is perhaps a counter-example to it, but I generally don’t read more than the top-5 posts / or the last 5 posts for close friends on Twitter.

Where Netvibes has the advantage is in presenting you multiple widgets at the same time and your eyes can easily glance from one feed to the next, cherry picking the best of the crop. Do the same in Google Reader and I get the same feeling as in Twitter, only the top 5 items or so matter.

The iPhone with its 5 x 8cm screen is very different and it’s best noticed when doing something that requires a lot of screen-real estate, like working in Excel or looking at a window with a lot of info. Netvibes wouldn’t work at all in it, which is why they also developed their reader interface, which in turn is inferior to Google Reader.

But my point about iPhones and Gaming remains unchanged. The reason that gaming reigns on this platform (more so than is healthy for anyone) is because it is not a text-input device. It is a media-consumption device that has less screen-real estate than a PC (or an iPad for that matter).

Therefore, reading things in a list format makes much more sense. And, because inputting text kind of sucks (well, apart from short brain dumps), Digg is actually the best news-interface that I’ve come across. You couldn’t put a gun to my head to get me to use it on the PC, but it feels natural to “shovel” through it (via the app called “Shovel“) on this small screen. Not only because it’s a list-based interface, but because the user’s interaction with the information is limited to “digging,” while the content is pushed up by everyone.

Minimal interaction required is why Digg works on the iPhone.

Now, a second interface to consider for news is certainly to browse via pictures, which works on the AP Mobile app and the World News app (an interface for BBC news). But for text-junkies, it certainly is slower as you have to slide from item to item.

With the iPad, we are entering new territory, and I unfortunately haven’t tested it to find out how it works exactly. But what is certain is that due to the larger screen-real estate available to display information and to the relative improvement of the touch keyboard, the dynamic very much changes. This is the kind of interface where widget-news makes sense again.

And that also leads me to reiterate a point I made last time writing about the iPad. The best way to display certain apps again is the often-forgotten Dashboard interface on the Mac. Widget apps like calculator or weather already exist in Dashboard as do many other clones of iPhone apps.

I’m very curious what will be announced tomorrow at Apple’s iPhone OS 4.0 event as there are many questionmarks regarding multitasking and building interfaces that use the hardware keyboard (without a mouse?). But that’s the fun of Apple and the right way to run a company: keep your audience engaged and/or enraged, day in and day out!

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Checking out the HP Touchmark PC demo on YouTube. Watch it and then let’s discuss it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Scs7DZhQ72E&hl=en&fs=1]

The question on everybody’s lips is, why didn’t Apple do this? Your first hint: look at the way the guy is standing. Few people use their PCs in that position.

I tried emulating the feeling a little, by making stupid gestures in front of my laptop. I’m pretty fit, but it did get annoying after a while. Having a touch-screen at 90 degrees, half a meter in front of you, is inelegant.

The reason the keyboard + mouse combo work so well is because it’s actually within perfect and comfortable reach by the human body. You sit, your arms bend, and you use. Like the picture below, which is the ideal typing position, as taken from Yale’s Ergonomics website. Vs. the Touchscreen, where you would sit, extend your arms and use.

The perfect touch-screen would actually be similar to an architect’s table, like on the picture below. Note that Jeff Han, godly inventor of all things multi-touch-screens, also has a similar set-up.

Why doesn’t Apple do something like this? My guess is three-fold.

1. The market is still pretty small (designers, etc.?).
2. It’s not really that amazing an innovation—as an average user, can you really do that much more with a touch-screen, vs. a keyboard + mouse?
3. And where are the manufacturing economies of scope? I made this point before, when I noted how many overlaps there on the component level for different Apple-products: a big e.g. the 13″ screen, which is now used by 3 product-lines. If Apple did this for one product-line, it would probably want to translate it to the other ones as well… but how would that work?

What do you think? Will we be seeing an Apple touch-PC (note: I say PC, not iPhone XL, which is more probable), and, if so, in what format? Also state if you’re thinking as a consumer or as a prosumer!

Vincent

P.S. don’t forget to answer our poll !!!

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