Amphibious
Writings about the business of design and strategy.
Apple Magic Trackpad - A Gesture Too Far?
Remember just a few years ago when Apple used to be lambasted for only shipping a one-button mouse, and there was constant speculation as to why the company stubbornly refused to offer a multi-button mouse? The line was always that more buttons would confuse people, even though PC users seemed to do just fine with them. Since the first Mighty Mouse, Apple's mice have added more complexity, but still, there's something about one-button products that Apple really likes — both the iPhone and iPad only have one button on the front surface. At the very least, Apple likes to minimize as much as possible the quantity of buttons on its products, sometimes effectively, other times with frustrating results.
Today Apple launched the Magic Trackpad ("magic", "amazing", "genius" - hmmm, I think I see a trend in how Apple names and talks about its products...), which aims to do away with the mouse, an interface device that Apple first popularized with the Macintosh. It's intended to mimic the rich capabilities that trackpads have acquired on laptops (and similar capabilities on the iPhone/iPad) and transfer it to a desktop setting. It sits nicely alongside the existing Apple wireless keyboard, and behaves just like the much smaller trackpads on laptops. Personally, if I'm using a mouse it's mostly because it works better than a trackpad for precision graphics, but I can see the Magic Trackpad working for a lot of people.
I love the fact that Apple is building a physical vocabulary of gestures that will surely continue to grow and find new applications across multiple product types. However, the number of things this Trackpad can do has become so large it actually includes a cheat sheet on the back of the box. It does make one rather nostalgic for the simple old days of single-button mice. So was the old mouse really about not confusing people, or more of a choice about minimalist aesthetics? My guess is the latter.
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Very cool
Tucket - July 27, 2010
It's about time that someone makes an interface that can use natural gestures, to control a desktop screen, without having to buy a touch screen monitor. Now just perfect speech recog so that we can do away with unnatural typing And key boards.
looks like a coaster
tAsh - July 28, 2010
simple, elegant and all....agreed!
but the affordance to do 'somehthing' with that nice clean surface cannot be resisted...am already thinking on sketching on it with markers, some people may want to paste stickers on it.....spouses may finally get a "attention" surface, leave a message here will surely be not missed!
!!
Simplicity for use or aesthetics.
Hans Gerwitz - July 28, 2010
So was the old mouse really about not confusing people, or more of a choice about minimalist aesthetics? My guess is the latter.
I disagree.
At least in the 1990's, the primary rationalization for keeping the single-button mouse (amidst vocal opponents) was a desire to restrain developers from introducing too many mystery actions hidden by context clicks. Novice users found (and still find) secondary mouse buttons confusing, and it is not intuitive to many to act upon on-screen objects by way of secondary clicks. Many of us more savvy users also find the seek-and-find UI discovery of many Windows-based applications infuriating, and Apple dramatically reduced the temptation to "just put it in a context menu" by limiting the mouse to a single button. (They similarly constrain developers via the tightly-controlled iOS SDK, today.)
Note that the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad are still, to a novice user, simple "point and click" controllers, effectively hiding the complexity of power-user gestures.
Historical accounts differ on the origin of the single button, but all agree it was not a simple decision (but rather a "long, protracted internal debate."). One simple telling is that Steve Jobs made the call to settle the issue, which may give credence to your guess at aesthetics as motivation. Other, more detailed accounts have it that some Apple engineers found Engelbart's three buttons too expensive, and so advocated two. The issue being open, then, led Hovey-Kelley to hold extensive user testing with clear results: users could not readily recall which action applied to which button during use, so the final chording-with-the-keyboard approach was settled on.
(Also, beware the fallacy that "Apple" is a consistent entity that is driven by the same motivations today as they were 30 years ago.)
classics
michkel400 - August 8, 2010
o I am very pleased with the thought and don’t feel like adding
anything in it. It a perfect answer.
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