YakShaving

(from the BettrAt blog)

Pledge to watch the movie over at WaitingForSuperman.com.

Infographic video made by the Creative animation studio Buck.

Warning: This might be a fanboy post, but it’s more about my fascination with an important idea that the best companies can create something out of nothing.

IBM Nipple Mouse

Most people will remember the first (or second) generation laptops that came out. In an effort to save some space and still provide an adequate means to point, they’d have these little red rubber things in the middle that people would use to point, in lieu of a mouse. This is still back before there were svelte tiny USB dongles that you could use to connect external input devices. IBM pioneered the pointing stick, or the “laptop nipple mouse” as it was nicknamed, by the suggestive tweaking nature.

Then came the touchpad, as most laptops have today. Eventually, Apple tacked on multi-touch on its trackpads as user behavior caught up and people felt really comfortable using two fingers (or more) to perform functions and inputs on the system efficiently, while allowing for the simplest of users to use “1 click” simplicity that the device manufacturer is known for.

Yesterday, Apple came out with a device that extrudes this whole interface into another product, the Magic Trackpad. That’s sort of amazing: Apple has the ability to evolve an inferior input mechanism (the stick pointer or trackpad was never as good as a mouse) and turn it into a beautiful looking, market-viable product. I predict capacitive screens on iMacs are coming.

From the product intro:

Why should notebooks have all the fun?
Desktop users, your time has come. The new Magic Trackpad is the first Multi-Touch trackpad designed to work with your Mac desktop computer. It uses the same Multi-Touch technology you love on the MacBook Pro. And it supports a full set of gestures, giving you a whole new way to control and interact with what’s on your screen.

It’s marketed toward desktop users! What other hardware manufacturer would have the rocks to take something that users perceive as inferior (a trackpad) and turn it into a feature of a new product? Brilliant.

As an aside, I am amused that this wasn’t the first time that Apple has tried an external trackpad.

I think I’ll sit on the sidelines for the magic trackpad and opt for a Bamboo Fun to offset the tunnel that ensues when using the mouse too much.