Quote:
Originally Posted by Locke
Well, if you ask me, the iPhone introduced one key feature into the mainstream market that is actually worth something: multi-touch. I'm fairly certain they weren't the first to do it, but I know that it was not a prevalent feature until the iPhone came out. Now, everyone's gotta have the multi-touch; in fact, the new Windows OS is going to support multi-touch on a wide scale. So, that's one thing that I can honestly say is good about the iPhone: it instituted industry-wide change that will actually have benefits, in that respect. Though, it really didn't do too much else that seems overly revolutionary to me. It basically took existing technology and made it Mac-ified, save the multi-touch thing. It's the third-party developers that are actually coming up with some ingenious uses of the hardware. I saw one app that used the accelerometer to recreate some pretty realistic dice rolling physics(shake the iPhone to bounce the dice around in a virtual box). It's little things like that that make me smile.
|
The physics behind multi-touch were actually intended to be included in a absic form in the early alpha's of windows vista - it was one of the things that went out of the window when the avalon and winFS architecture got scrapped though, which is a shame really.