Of Miles Rausch

The Floating Interface

TweetI’m a Mac­head. I’ll admit it. I grew up on PCs, which might be WHY I became a Mac­head. Since my first “stick of gum” iPod shuf­fle to our house­hold iMac, my wife and I have come to embrace and rel­ish the iLove.

That’s why I spent half my day refresh­ing the Apple home­page. I had heard, just in time, that Apple was announc­ing iPhone 3.0 soft­ware. When I real­ized the video of the keynote wouldn’t be out until after­noon, I sad mac’d the browser win­dow and went about my day.

Lit­tle did I know…

The new iPhone soft­ware boasts a lot of improve­ments: over 1000 APIs, push noti­fi­ca­tion, new pric­ing mod­els, etc. All of these seem to be inter­est­ing and use­ful to iPhone and (hope­fully) iPod touch users. One fea­ture in par­tic­u­lar caught my atten­tion. It was intro­duced with a speaker. The kind that music comes out of, not the kind that Pow­er­Points come out of. What made the speaker inter­est­ing was that it could com­mu­ni­cate with a cus­tom app on the iPhone. In that case, it was a set of equal­iz­ers. Essen­tially, the phone can adjust the accessory.

This con­cept isn’t new for the iPhone. Apple released an iTunes remote con­trol app that let you access your iTunes from the iPhone like a remote con­trol (hence the name). That said, the speaker exam­ple didn’t really impress me. The blood pres­sure cuff did. In that exam­ple, a blood pres­sure cuff had an iPhone con­nec­tor and no guage. The cuff out­putted to a cus­tom app on the iPhone. That same out­put could be saved and sent to a doc­tor straight from the app.

No one’s going to gush over how great iCuff is, but it does make an astound­ing point: the iPhone is now the interface.

Imag­ine that when you hook your iPhone to your car you not only get the ben­e­fit of play­ing your music instead of the radio, but you also get diag­nos­tic info uploaded to a spe­cial app. When you take it to the mechanic, you can email the raw data straight from the car itself.

But it’s not just that con­ve­nience. There is also the gain that these apps have to go through Apple (and Apple’s devel­op­ment soft­ware), a com­pany famous for user inter­face and expe­ri­ence. These apps also get the ben­e­fit of a but­ton­less, infi­nitely cus­tomiz­able device. No more cram­ming but­tons onto a steer­ing wheel or wast­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing dol­lars on hard-to-read guages.

Who wouldn’t want to wake up to a cof­fee pot singing The Bea­t­les’ “Good Morn­ing Good Morn­ing”? (Insert pun about tap­ping along with the music imply­ing that a singing cof­fee pot will cure the world’s ills.)

Writ­ten on my iPod touch.