During his keynote speech at MacWorld today, Steve Jobs showed off the multi-touch capabilities of the new iPhone. That means you can use more than one finger at a time on the touch screen to manipulate the interface.
The Apple site claims that it’s “an entirely new interface”, but couldn’t you do practically the same thing in StarFox Command for the DS?
UPDATE: Apparently not. I guess I was thinking of this article when I posted. Yes, Fuzz, Clint, et al … I’m a bad blogger.
[Strike-through appears in this post with kind permission from Jack]
*swoops in to protect Steve*He meant the phone's interface as a whole. Including Safari, Widgets, Mail, Photos, iPod, etc.
No, its not the same thing. The new iPhone can detect more than one point of contact at the same time, so you can use 2 fingers to move stuff around. The DS, like ALL other commercial touch screens can only detect one location at a time. So yes, the iPhone is the first COMERCIAL device, although there is a university that has done something similar last year.
I second what Fuzz said.Bad blogger. Do your research.
Yeah, what are you talking about? If you touch two points on the DS touch screen, it averages them.Moron.
As I'm just now playing Starfox, I was super excited by your post… alas, I'm not missing some special capability :-)Like your blog, btw…
I know I'm the only one, but I don't see the iPhone being that revolutionary. I think it's actually kind of unneccessary. It's just another smartphone to me. I know it's OSX and blah blah blah, but if they wanted to impress me, they would do something NEW rather than something that's not yet been done right. But whatever, it's Apple. They'll sell a million of them.
Has Apple really done much new? I mean they didn't make the first portable mp3 player, but they've come the closest to perfecting it. They are really more about streamlined interfaces and sleek design than being a first to something. Now don't get me wrong, their interfaces are definately innovation. I'm just saying they've never been about making brand new devices, they've been about perfecting existing devices. I'm no Apple fanboy, but I have yet to see an easier way to manage your music, with easy to use automation, than iTunes.
Apple invented hi-speed data transfer (Firewire) and basically the internet music market. Oh, and the GUI (totally not stolen from Alto).
If Apple had never existed, I'm sure we can all agree that the Wii would've looked something like a freakish combination of DOS and a tupperware bucket. Instead, it looks refined, simple, and beautiful. Apple is as much a company that makes beautiful products as it is an inspiration to the rest of the world to do the same.And yes, that was a ridiculous example.
Apple's biggest achievement: sleek simplicity. And I'm extremely happy someone brought that to the world of computing, which was often only fit for the elite thick-frame-glasses-wearing programmer types. And they make DAMN good products. I just got done listening to my iPod and now I'm syncing up some podcasts through iTunes' podcast aggregation, but my issue is that Apple has become (at least where I am) a status symbol, showing that you are "in the know" and have the money to afford to look that way. So my beef isn't really with Apple, it's with the general populous. As for the iPhone, I know it will be a while before I'll want a phone with anything more than perhaps a camera in it. That's just me, though.
No it's not new! I've seen multi-touch screens before.When someone did it before, but not on a commercial lever, it's still not new. New means new, not sort-of-new-cause-someone-did-it-before-us.-Fank
you just wanted to show that sweet iphone on the site! 🙂