Steve Jobs Describing The Moment He Decided To Do The iPad

The difference would be that the iOS interface is built for touch, even if drawing apps would support a stylus.

Microsoft didn't even build their interface for a stylus. It was built for a mouse, and the stylus was a crutch for making it work on a tablet.

But using a mouse based interface with a stylus is really suboptimal. I had a Wacom digitizer for drawing, but I would switch to using the mouse as soon as I needed to interact with the interface, because it was so awkward.

As long as it's an optional accessory, I'm all for it. There for the artists and designers who need it, but not something that would affect how you use the OS itself.

I think the problem at the moment is mostly technological. I think if there was a cheap, high-resolution digitizer they'd probably do it. What people may not realise at the moment is just how crappy the touchscreen is on the iPhone/iPad in many respects -- it's something that only becomes apparent when you try using a stylus. I'm sure it's just a matter of time until it becomes better, though I imagine it'd still be thirty parties selling the styluses themselves.

> Apple has always claimed to make devices for "creative" people, yet pretty much every artist on the planet wants Apple to release an iPad with a built in digitizer.

Apple only really claimed this back when they (barely) subsisted primarily off of the creative market. Once Jobs came back the focus turned to the wider consumer audience which I think was a big reason why they started cranking out so many hits. They became successful, I would argue, because they largely ignored the demands of the power users.

Yes, I'd say it would be a no-brainer for Apple to add an active digitizer and a pen at this point, considering how many artists are craving for it at this point. They don't even have to bundle the pen to increase the price for everyone, just the digitizer. I'm still hoping Google would do the same at some point with one of their Nexus 10"+ tablets (along with a 3:2 ratio resolution).

Why ask Apple to make such device? They make devices that appeal to a broad spectrum of consumers.

Why not ask a company like Wacom to make such a device specifically geared towards "creative" people?

I disagree that the iPad succeeded because of the 3 reasons you stated above. Tablets had been around for years and had all of those things. I believe the focus on usability and the lack of a stylus were what made the iPad (and the iPhone, for that matter) successful. Microsoft's approach to the tablet was to bolt on a few tablet specific features to the standard Windows operating system and focus on a stylus driven experience.

Apple decided to use iOS rather than standard OSX for their tablet which was built primarily to be a mobile operating system based on multi-touch, not a stylus. I remember an interview with Steve Balmer laughing about the lack of a stylus, but it was a genius move on Apple's part. Often with new technology it's not the hardware capabilities of a device that makes or breaks it but that crucial moment when the average user picks it up and the experience either "clicks" with them or not. The iPad experience clicked with people immediately and that's why it succeeded.

> It would have needed to run Windows, for instance, which would have killed it.

Why do you say "would have killed it"? That's exactly what killed the original tablet PCs.

Microsoft actually used non-windows OSes for lots of tablet-like devices. Windows CE was "windows" in name only - IIRC it was a small custom OS they rebranded from some company they bought, much like what Apple did with the first iPod OS. PocketPC also was stripped-down, not full-blown Windows.

Another example of an act of ego is Lamborghini. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini#Origin:

"Lamborghini was fond of the Ferraris, but considered them too noisy and rough to be proper road cars, likening them to repurposed track cars.[20] When Lamborghini discovered that the clutch on his Ferrari was broken, and actually was the same clutch that he used on his tractors, Lamborghini went to Ferrari and asked for a better replacement. Ferrari responded, saying that he was just a tractor maker, and could not know anything about sports cars. Lamborghini decided to pursue an automobile manufacturing venture with the goal of bringing to life his vision of a perfect grand tourer."

Saying "the tablet vision is from MS" is a bit of an overstatement. The party mentioned would have been in 2005. Apple had released the Newton in 1993 (after having worked on it for many years) and refined it over the next 5 years, inspiring a raft of competitors including Palm (whose first product was software for the Newton) and Microsoft. The Apple MessagePad 2000 (released in 1997) had an entirely tap-based interface with no dedicated hardware buttons - the whole interface was whatever you saw on the screen. The initial vision for the Newton was that it would be a tablet OS that could scale to a variety of sizes - "from a post-it pad to a whiteboard" - the actual sizes released were driven by market considerations at the time.

So Microsoft's efforts might possibly have given Apple the kick in the pants it needed to try AGAIN at a tablet OS at that specific time, but the reason they could do it so quickly and effectively once the decision was made is that Apple had already iterated through the design issues and had stuff along those lines already working in the labs.

Also, Jobs's 50th birthday party would have been in 2005, but the "Project Purple" team that worked in earnest to release iPhone was formed in 2004. And the iPhone took three years to develop (as dated from the formation of that team), not 6 months. So I don't think this story really works on any level. Maybe Steve remembered it wrong - it's more likely he was sitting on the knowledge of what his team had already done in secret and it was killing him not to say anything about it, making the moment especially memorable.

Even if their NDA's have expired their employment may not have and if you value your employment at apple breaking an NDA, even an expired one may be a bad idea.

For mouse based interfaces it is awkward. For touch based interfaces it is about as awkward as a mouse/touchpad. Ever used the iPhone simulator with Xcode? That's how it feels.

Perhaps an interface designed from the beginning around a stylus would work well. I never used the original Palm PDAs, but maybe they did it right?

Thinking about what is unique about a stylus, I can see a few low hanging ideas:

* A stylus is great for tiny, precise movements but awkward for larger motions. Use the stylus only for small, precise motions? Like circling a word to highlight it or striking through one to erase it.

* Distinguish between stylus and fingers, so you can scroll with a finger and edit with a stylus?

I think you're missing the point... At the time the stylus was the device you used for everything, typing, navigation, and so on.

That was awkward and frankly just "bad." Humans don't want to poke at a device with a pen all day, it is unnatural, and also slow (particularly for typing!).

Many of the touchscreens were also terrible (thus why the stylus was seen as a good alternative).

A stylus for drawing is wonderful. But the iPhone/iPad was never a device designed for drawing or creative endeavors specifically.

Not for what it's meant for, but how they used it is.

One of the main things you have to remember is that when people try to do something quickly they have to apply more force to move their limbs, which requires that you apply more force to stop your limbs as well. And getting high peak forces in place with just the right timing to stop perfectly on a specific point in space rapidly becomes more difficult the faster you're moving.

You can even see it if you look at people learning to draw a gun quickly to fire it at a target: they'll overshoot their target slightly and then settle on target. It's one of the reasons for the old saying 'Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.'

I've digressed slightly, but the point is that it's the same for everything, including user interfaces: to do anything quickly people need either a ridiculously high degree of repetition, large hit boxes, or some sort of immediate feedback that they use to trigger a response that does something. (Like, you can type without looking at the keyboard fairly easily, but you can't type without looking at the keyboard on a tablet as easily - at least not without really good correction software - because it doesn't give you the same sort of feedback.)

Related, this is why the better shooter players often turn their mouse sensitivity way down. It's also why, when you're designing a user interface for a program you want the most commonly used options against the edge of the screen - since when someone flicks their mouse there they hit an effectively infinitely deep hit box. (Unless they're on a multi-monitor setup =p )

Stylus interfaces have pretty much always been designed around using the stylus to hit small targets - that's one of the reasons why they used it rather than your finger, so that they didn't have to re-write large portions of their interfaces. And when you do that you pretty much kill usability because there's little real tactile feedback to allow you to fine-tune what you're doing so you have to be looking at the device and taking your care over where you're placing the stylus. It takes forever.

To an extent, people did try to get around that sort of issue with handwriting recognition for text input. However, there's also an element of resistance that you get with pens and an even greater extent with pencils that you don't get with a stylus, which allows you to be more careless in how you apply force. Writing on tablets is messy and large, (and the translation of the writing into text is inexplicably bad.)

It's also worth mentioning that you can hold your arm much more loosely when you're not holding a stylus. As any half-decent boxer will tell you, tension makes you slow. So, again, that's an advantage for the no-stylus camp since you don't have to hold you arm in a particular way to keep the pen in the right position.

So, yeah. They're not bad, for what they're meant to do - mainly sketching. But to bypass not having an interface designed for touch, and to bypass having awful implementations of touch screens, they're the kiss of death. You can sketch with them, you can take (usually messy) freehand notes. But if you're going to be operating an interface entirely off them, then that interface is going to have to be large - and if it's going to be large fingers are better because you get better (though still not great) tactile feedback and you have that absence of tension.

And all this is when the stylus is good, mind, and doesn't require you to click on the icon for a bit to get it to register.