June 22, 2007 - 3:41pm by Andy Kim
I haven't had any real interest in getting an iPhone, but after watching the iPhone Guided Tour, I am pretty much sold. The amount of polish that went into this thing is just amazing. The animation effects are done in good taste and result in a certain fluidity that is mesmerizing (am I too much of a UI geek?). I did worry a little that Core Animation will make a lot of developers put in unnecessary and cheesy animation effects into their apps, but now I can at least hope that they will follow the example set by iPhone; I know I will be. I mean, I can almost forgive Apple for not having the secret feature in Leopard now.
My self-imposed rule about not buying first generation hardware (Apple or otherwise, even cars) will have to be broken this time.
As a developer and user interface designer—after having watched the video 2 times—what impressed me the most were the new gestures revealed to us for the first time:
Flick right to delete
Instead of having to get into the edit mode just to delete an email, you can flick to the right with your finger on a row to reveal the delete button for the row. It's not something that's immediately obvious or discoverable, but it is ingenious nonetheless and analogous to dragging icons off the dock. It turns a 3 tap process into a "flick and tap". Yes, saving a tap is very important. I can see this being or becoming the standard delete gesture in the iPhone.
Tap with two fingers to zoom out
I only saw this in the Google Maps section, but I hope that it's used everywhere. It's better than the double tap for two reasons: 1) there is no confusion about zooming-in or zomming-out: The two finger tap will always zoom-out and 2) you save a tap. I'm wondering if there is a three finger tap that will zoom out two levels at once.
Now, the thing that I care about the most is whether I can accept these gestures in my own web application. The flick gesture might be possible with some pain, but I doubt that the two finger tap will be.
Apple, if you are reading, give us the SDK!