{"id":1090,"date":"2008-06-20T11:34:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-20T18:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bibik.org\/blog\/?p=1090"},"modified":"2008-06-20T11:34:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-20T18:34:00","slug":"direct-manipulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/2008\/06\/20\/direct-manipulation\/","title":{"rendered":"Direct Manipulation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The iPhone didn&#8217;t bring touch screens, gestures or a great internet experience to phones.  The iPhone brought the idea of &#8220;direct manipulation&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Most mobile phone platforms are <b>list and menu driven<\/b>.  Items are presented in a list and then you&#8217;re offered a menu (yet another list) of actions you can perform on these items.  This is confusing because the action may be performed on any of the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The selected item<\/li>\n<li>The list as a whole<\/li>\n<li>The application itself<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;act as navigation, leaving the menu or the list or the application<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;or it might add a new item to the list<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There is no real way of knowing what is going to happen when most labels are under 20 characters with little explanation.  To put this in context, if you select a contact on one of the latest builds of S60, you get TWENTY-NINE different menu items.  Some of these include &#8220;Print&#8221;.   When&#8217;s the last time you printed from your phone?   Hell, when was the first time you printed from a phone?   Yeah.<\/p>\n<p>When people ask me if I like my iPhone, I always say &#8220;What it does, it does very well.&#8221;   Apple took a different approach.  You won&#8217;t see long menus offering actions you may never need and you won&#8217;t even see some key applications like MMS and video recording.  Instead, you have direct access to the content.   Think of this in three applications:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Google Maps:   You drag the map to scroll around, pinch and expand to zoom out and in, click on pushpins to start up driving directions.   You also don&#8217;t get a huge menu of things to do for each item, just a small list of actions at the bottom of the detail pane.<\/li>\n<li>Safari:  Double tap an area to zoom into it, double tap the same area to zoom out, the URL bar hides once a page is loaded, only a small toolbar is exposed at the bottom<\/li>\n<li>iPod: No file management, just different ways of looking at your media collection, use of CoverFlow to see all albums<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You can do &#8220;less&#8221; in comparison to S60, but you can do just about anything you&#8217;d really want to do:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Call<\/li>\n<li>Email<\/li>\n<li>View their homepage<\/li>\n<li>Open Maps to their address<\/li>\n<li>Text Message<\/li>\n<li>Edit details<\/li>\n<li>Add to favorites<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s more natural to click on an email address than to have to focus on a contact name, hit a softkey, scroll through a menu and then click &#8220;Email&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Another reason why the interface feels so natural is the speed.  Unless I&#8217;m doing something silly like running Safari with 5 tabs and trying to get directions at the same time, the interface is snappy.   Every application is fast when running.  The only slowdowns I ever see are switching applications, which is almost to be expected on a mobile phone. <\/p>\n<p>Navigation is still not as smooth as I&#8217;d like.  You have the Abort button (AKA Home) and most applications have &#8220;Back&#8221; buttons built into their upper tool bars.  This doesn&#8217;t feel natural, so improvements can be made there.   I have a few ideas, but nothing for public consumption yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The iPhone didn&#8217;t bring touch screens, gestures or a great internet experience to phones. The iPhone brought the idea of &#8220;direct manipulation&#8221;. Most mobile phone platforms are list and menu driven. Items are presented in a list and then you&#8217;re offered a menu (yet another list) of actions you can perform on these items. This [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bibik.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}