“He might say ‘This is shit,’ and snuff the idea. “Because Steve is so quick to give an opinion, I didn’t show him stuff in front of other people,” Jony said. Jony reasoned that he had to show the work in progress to Jobs in private, with no one else around. Jony wanted to show the system to Steve Jobs, but he was afraid his boss would pour cold water on it since it was still raw and unpolished. “This is going to change everything,” Jony told the design team after he saw it. The entire front face is one big, unbroken expanse of glass. This is Jony Ive’s first sketch for what would become the first iPhone.
The projector shone the Mac’s operating system onto the array, which was a mass of wires.
It was a big capacitive display about the size of a ping pong table, with a projector suspended above it. The Input Engineering team had built a giant experimental system to test multi-touch. One of the designers suggested a touchscreen controller that functioned as an alternate to a keyboard and mouse, a sort of virtual keyboard with soft keys. Instead of a keyboard and mouse, users could tap on the screen of the computer to control it. The most obvious idea was a touchscreen Mac. Brainstorming about multi-touch devicesĮxcited by Kerr’s explanation of what a sophisticated touch interface could do, the team members started to brainstorm the kinds of hardware they might build with it.
Kerr explained to his colleagues that the new technology would allow people to use two or three fingers instead of just one, and that it would afford much more sophisticated interfaces than simple single-finger button presses. There was no pinching or zooming, no swiping up and down or left and right. Screens that were sensitive to fingers, not pens, like ATM screens, were restricted to single presses.
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Most touch devices, such as Palm Pilots and Windows tablets, used a pen or stylus. Today it doesn’t seem exceptional, but back then, touch interfaces were pretty primitive. That morning was the first time the team had even heard of multi-touch.