Obligatory iPhone Post

Or why I really, really need one…

You may have heard that Apple are doing a mobile/cell phone? The iPhone? From a glance at Apple’s home page today you may even be forgiven for thinking that Apple don’t do anything other than the iPhone — the main story, the four smaller stories, and most of the Hot News Headlines are all iPhone-related. Fortunately there is still a ‘Mac’ button up there in the navigation bar to prove that they may have taken the ‘Computer’ out of their company name, but not out of their soul. So is this a good thing, and what does it have to do with gambling in Las Vegas?

iPhone’s big day is tomorrow, June 29 (at 6pm, in case you weren’t paying attention to every other website and blog), so the current concentration of iPhone-related announcements, videos, specifications, and everything else on Apple’s home page is justified. Leopard’s big day will come in October, so it can afford to wait. But I believe that the iPhone announcements are, in some strange way, also Mac announcements, and Mac OS X announcements too.

On the hardware side, I believe the iPhone is a good indicator of future Mac design directions — remember how the current iMacs were launched with the line “from the makers of iPod”? Will the ‘halo effect’ of the iPhone have a similar impact on the appearance of future Macs?

On the software side, I believe that the iPhone will be a great source of inspiration for user-interface designers, particularly those designing and developing applications for Mac OS X. The visual design of the interface is very clean and elegant, and the use of color is especially interesting to note: compare, for example, the colorfulness of the Home screen with the more restrained use of color on the Call screen; the way the six monochromatic call functions are handled compared to the ‘End Call’ function.

Perhaps even more important is that the iPhone interface demonstrates a use of animation that is subtle, meaningful, fluid, and elegant: far more so than any other recent product I can think of. If this is what Core Animation can deliver, then the iPhone is an excellent indication of how that technology can be used to good effect.

So — for the benefit of those who can remember back to the first paragraph — what does this have to do with gambling in Las Vegas? Well, the first time we went to Las Vegas we thought that we should at least try this gambling thing that everyone had been talking about and so decided to part with the huge sum of $10 as a gambling experiment. Deciding not to risk being discovered as gambling-virgins at any of the gambling tables with actual real people we instead turned to the rows of slot machines, whereupon we spied a slightly more hi-tech looking machine. It was a touchscreen gambling machine, featuring a portrait-oriented CRT, and which could play a multitude of different games. Feeling more at home with this sort of device we eagerly fed it our $10 and picked a game. Thirty minutes later we were somehow still playing, although our total was now a measly 25c. Were we paying any attention to the game? No. We were analyzing the interface, watching how the drop-shadows behind the cards changed as you tapped on them; watching the animation as the cards were dealt on screen; watching the way the pace of the interface altered so you were less inclined to walk away and more inclined to keep playing. So when I get my hands on an iPhone, don’t expect me to be calling people straight away — I’m far more likely to be studying the interface instead.