Where All Of This Is Going
If you haven’t read Adam Lisagor’s excellent iPad TV post yet, you should. I think he’s on to something with this:
If you look at QuickTime’s UI elements across the iPad and iPhone OS and compare them with QuickTime X’s UI on the Mac, it’s not hard to conclude that Apple is making efforts at a shared UI language which spans both platforms, for the sake of unity and singularity of purpose. When QuickTime X was released, its player controls now locked within the bounds of the video frame, disappearing and reappearing on mouse hover, Apple was preparing us, ever so subtly, to begin to touch our video.
After a week with the device, it’s becoming pretty clear that the interactions that Apple exposes via the iPad are just plain natural. Handing it off to my mother yesterday, she intuitively knew what to do. To me, that’s amazing.