Word: touche
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...study by the Economic Mobility Project finds that American men in their 30s are worse off financially than their fathers.) Real estate may not offer double-digit returns anymore, but it does offer an atavistic promise of security, a nest egg embodied in Sheetrock that you can touch and dirt that can't be outsourced to Mumbai. Property fever is in our blood: this country made its fortune in sweet real estate deals--a Louisiana Purchase here, a few trinkets for Manhattan there--and these HGTV shows tap into something primal...
...gimme: the iPhone, Apple's brilliant deconstruction of the common cell phone, due out June 29. The other is a product mysteriously code-named Milan, from a new branch of Microsoft called, not much less mysteriously, surface computing. What the two have in common is a very advanced touch screen...
...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...
...graphical-user interface--the GUI, in the parlance, pronounced "gooey"--a step further and makes it a tactile user interface. You're viewing a little world where data are objects, and instead of just pressing your nose up against the glass, you can reach in and pinch and touch those bits and bytes with your hands. The word is made flesh. Any realer and it would be Tron...
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...