Edward Tufte on iPhone Human Interface Design

Interface Design and the iPhone

I found this thanks to John Gruber at Daring Fireball and have been waiting days for the video to come back on line. It’s Edward Tufte performing a superficial dissection of the iPhone’s human interface design choices.

It’s a treat to hear someone as adept in the field pulling apart the elegance of the iPhone and finding — largely — very little fault in the choices the design team made. He makes an point between the iPhone’s use of “image resolution” and “Cartoon resolution” that I don’t get completely — that it’s somehow a bad thing that the Stocks widget looks cartoony compared to his example of a stock chart, which looks more like Excel. His re-imagined Weather app compared Apple’s elegance to something you might see on a screen at NIST.

It’s short, and worth watching if you’re an iPhone aficionado.

New iPod Classic Busts Apple’s Product Introduction Scheme

For years, Apple’s made waves by wholly replacing successful products with radical revisions that truly evolve the product line. Today’s “Classic” announcement is an interesting departure. I’d fully expected the company to discontinue the current larger iPod with Video in favor of an iPhone-form factor phoneless iPod. They did introduce the phoneless iPod, the iPod “Touch”, but left a slight revision of the old school iPod in the channel.
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