Adrian J. Slywotzky wrote a great article yesterday in BusinessWeek about how Apple competitors may be overlooking the iPhone’s real potential. He likens it to the iPod, when competitors saw an innovative music player but completely missed the underlying business model to distribute digital media. They attacked the pieces of that model individually—the iPod, the iTunes Music Store, and iTunes—with other music players, online stores, and jukebox software, but no one yet has attacked the whole.

Slywotzky says history may be repeating itself with iPhone, and he’s right. All the big players, including Nokia and the media in general, see an innovative phone but still seem to be missing how important the other pieces are: the online registration, syncing with iTunes, visual voicemail, and the OS itself. If they’re seeing the iPhone as a device and thinking, we’ll take our own devices and mimic those new features, they’re almost certain to fail for the same reasons they failed when trying to unseat the iPod:

It’s all about the experience, not the device.

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Apple has published an online video explaining many new details of the iPhone keyboard including the ability to move the cursor using a magnification loupe; a detailed description of how the predictive analysis dynamically tunes the click regions for each letter as you type, enlarging the click regions for likely next characters while shrinking those for unlikely characters; a clearer explanation of suggested corrections; and how the auto-correction learns.

The magnification loupe looks nicely done and should address any concerns about moving the cursor in such a small area. Particularly impressive was the dynamic resizing of the click regions for the keys because it is forward-looking, helping to prevent you from making mistakes in the first place, while the auto-correct is backward-looking, suggesting alternatives for what you’ve already typed. In combination, the two look promising.

Also, it’s just a tiny thing, but the way the auto-corrected suggested word animates into its proper place when you confirm it is delightful, in the truest sense of the word.

For more details, including photos, see yesterday’s article, iPhone’s keyboard: A quick-change artist .

You’ve already heard that iPhone’s keyboard is touchscreen-only. No hardware keys. But maybe you haven’t heard that the keyboard changes to match what you’re doing. Normally, the keyboard presents a standard alpha-numeric set of keys:

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iPhone’s user experience features a brilliant animated language of navigational cues to help you understand where you are, where you’ve come from, and where you’re going. These animations aren’t just for looks; they actually help to make the iPhone user experience work.

The iPhone is much more than a next-generation iPod. The entire iPod user interface is linear: you can navigate forward or backward, but you can’t jump. You always know where you are because you can only get there one way. And the iPod’s relatively simple hierarchy of artists-containing-albums-containing-songs is well suited for the novel clickwheel, which translates rotary motion into a linear motion more suitable for lists.

But the iPhone is significantly more complex. It’s both multi-tasking and random access. You can be viewing your photos when someone sends you an email containing the phone number for a restaurant rendezvous that evening. You click that number to call the restaurant, and while you’re on hold, your friend calls to remind you…well, you know the rest. The iPhone is designed to let you do all those things you want to do, that you need to do, but that your previous cellphones never quite let you do. (Well, they let you, but it wasn’t easy.)

These animated transitions help make it easy.

Zoom in and out → moving between applications

Moving from one application to another zooms in or out with a dramatic transition. The new application appears tiny and far away then grows in size to fill the screen, while the old application either zooms out beyond the boundary of the screen, or simply fades away.

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You have two immediate questions: who is calling, and how should you respond?

The iPhone addresses these beautifully. The caller’s name appears in large type with the caller’s “location” in smaller type below. Both name and location probably scale horizontally to fit in the available width, so a name like Christoper Columbus will appear smaller, but won’t wrap.

Below the name and location, you see three buttons: Ignore and Hold Call + Answer, in black, relate to the new caller and are grouped together by proximity, while End Call + Answer, in red, relates to the existing call you’re already on.

Except for Home, there are no other buttons. Nothing else to focus on but those two immediate questions: who is calling, and how should you respond?

Will users appreciate this? Oh yes.

What a lovely screen.

Reader iNuron adds several interesting observations about Leopard’s Dock relative to yesterday’s article, Apple’s Gravity Lessons – Learning from Warner Bros.?:

The reflections aren’t right. They’re simply upside down and transparent. If they were really reflected on the Dock’s surface, they would distort to conform to perspective.

The shadows aren’t right. The icon shadows are improperly cast, because they weren’t designed for the Leopard Dock’s new angled surface. Also, because the shadows are part of the Finder icons themselves, when the icon jumps, the shadow jumps too.

The perspective isn’t right. When you move the Dock to the side of the screen, the perspective is strange. Icons designed according to Apple’s human interface guidelines lie about 35 degrees below your line of sight. That’s why you can see the top of the icon. Placing the dock on either side of the screen makes it appear as though the Dock’s center is aligned with your line of sight, since the lines of perspective converge on a distant point level with the middle of the Dock.

So the Dock is telling you you’re looking straight ahead, while the icons are telling you you’re looking down. That is bound to confuse, and is probably why the WWDC keynote showed the Dock positioned on the side of the screen only briefly.

And one more point about perspective: when the Leopard Dock slides into and out of view beyond the edge of the screen, whether configured to do so in System Preferences or by typing Command-Option-D, do the lines of perspective change as they should, or do they stay artifically fixed? Almost certainly the latter.

Again, these are all nits, but they add up. If Apple was using real 3D such as OpenGL, these problems would not occur. Instead, they’re using tricks and images to improve the UI, which will likely have unforeseen consequences.

An odd dock indeed. Pretty, but odd.

When Wile E. Coyote was giving chase in the classic Warner Brothers Road Runner cartoons, he focused so intently on the horizontal that he often forgot about the vertical, usually at his peril:

Apple’s made the same mistake by introducing 3D perspective to the Dock in Leopard. Intent on adding visual flair to the Desktop, Apple apparently forgot that it’s called the Desktop because it represents a flat horizontal surface on which items rest vertically. Because earlier versions of the Dock floated above the Desktop, items on Dock and Desktop previously obeyed the same gravitational force: down and perpendicular towards the Desktop.

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Leopard is full of delightful refinements to the user experience. Even Dock item names reveal considerable polish.

Tiger’s Dock

Leopard’s Dock

1. Names are displayed against a semi-transparent cartouche, similar to how Finder already displays selected items on the Desktop, and to the Command-Tab “Switch Application” overlay. As you can see in the Zen Garden example, the names are much more legible against detailed backgrounds.

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Squash and Stretch animation in Apple’s UI

Apple UI designers have learned how to grab your attention using a classic physical animation technique called squash and stretch. Think of a cartoon nose squishing exaggeratedly as it bumps into a wall, then going pop! as it pulls away—that’s squash and stretch. Animators have been using it for decades to give their drawn figures depth and weight. It’s entertaining, too.

iChat in Tiger already uses this technique to tell you someone’s saying hello. When an iChat invitation pops! open to tell you someone wants to talk, the window starts small, zooms quickly to larger than full-size, then snaps! back to its proper size. That final snap! is squash and stretch in action, and passes so quickly you usually don’t notice. The effect of zooming out like that, then back in, is rather like someone leaning towards you, their face growing exaggeratedly in size, then shrinking again as they lean back and away.

That’s how Apple’s use of the technique grabs your attention: it looks like it’s coming towards you.

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Interesting. Today Apple received a continuation of U.S. patent application 6,914,551, the very patent referenced in yesterday’s post, Apple’s coming universal remote.