This is not about Apple. This is about the possibility inherent in having a touchscreen + big screen interface.
But we will use Apple as an example because it’s what’s here. (A discussion about Apple’s closed network and the PC model of openness could follow, but doesn’t need to.)
The idea is that Apple will provide the basic interactions between the iPhone remote and the big screen. The keyboard. The numbers. The widgets that let you talk to the computer.
And then other companies will copy it. After a period of competition over closed-source, competitive standards, eventually there will be a standard for how people will interact, but it doesnt matter because it will be like mice, only more complicated. But the apple interface will drive innovation.
And then your job is to take advantage of that connectivity to define new applications and services.
This interface — big screen and small touchscreen — will be the way that people interact with their media.
The future of media is being able to navigate the long tail of music, movies, TV shows, and user-generated videos from the couch.
The browsing interface that does that well will look very different from the keyboard and mouse we use to operate the desktop computer, and it will look very different from the remote control we use to interact with a TV.
But it might look an awful lot like the iPhone. Or maybe another way to describe it is — an interactive touchscreen that can shape-shift and change its form to choose many different configurations for buttons that talk to the TV.
- Two of the newest and most interesting verbs are swipe and tilt.
- Swipe is especially relevant for the problem of navigating through large information spaces
- What if you didn’t have a mouse? Or another way to put it — what if you never needed to choose a specific point on the screen to click, and instead you used a swiping motion to navigate through lists and then selected?
digitrix6