Word: screens
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...Emma Roberts Age: 16 Spiritual Mother: Julia Roberts Screen Cred: The niece of Julia and daughter of Eric is the star of Nickelodeon's tween comedy hit, Unfabulous; her first gig was a bit darker, as coke dealer Johnny Depp's daughter in Blow. New project: Young Roberts is more Burberry than bare midriff as the smart would-be Sherlock in the Nancy Drew movie opening Friday, June 15. Good girl factoid: This summer, Roberts promoted reading with Laura Bush at an all-girls' middle school...
...been conditioned to hate touch screens; we've all spent way too much time timidly caressing tiny laptop trackpads and jabbing fingers at the grubby, unresponsive touch screens on ATMs. But the iPhone's screen is another animal altogether. It's extremely sensitive, like a trackpad, but not oversensitive. There's software in there designed to filter out inadvertent touches, interpret gestures and anticipate what you're groping for. Unlike a trackpad, which goes berserk if you try to touch it in two places at once, the iPhone's touch screen can handle multiple touches. After you take a photo...
Lest you think this is more Steve Jobs magic, the core technology behind the iPhone's touch screen probably wasn't developed at Apple. Rumors swirl around a company called Fingerworks, founded by two University of Delaware professors, that Apple acquired in 2005. This doesn't reflect a weakness in Apple's R&D but rather one of the company's strengths, its ability to ingest other companies and seamlessly incorporate their innovations into its own. People slam Apple as an arrogant organization, but it doesn't have the not-invented-here issues of, say, Sony...
Imagine an iPhone the size of a coffee table, and you'll have some idea of what Microsoft has been working on for the past five years. Milan is, in fact, a table, with a large touch screen for a tabletop; the format will remind the nostalgic among you of the old cocktail-style arcade games. Like the iPhone, Milan's screen can accommodate multiple touches at once. My first reaction was that I was looking at a patent death match in the making, but the underlying mechanisms turn out to be very different: Milan uses a system of infrared...
...Touch screens are unlikely to stop there. They're just too useful. Once you use an iPhone, you'll get twitchy fingers. You'll wonder why you can't swipe your finger across your laptop screen to jump backward and forward in your browser. The touchability exposes the mouse as the crude finger substitute that it really is. Look at the success of Nintendo's Wii, which works on the same principle, converting physical movements into virtual ones. People are ready to break the fourth wall of computing and put their fingers directly on the data. This is manual-free...