A MAGIC TOUCH:THE CONCEPT'S SOUND,BUT IMPLEMENTATION OPTIONS ABOUND

摘要

Judging from the hype that Apple's promotional machine has turned out, some might think that the company single-handedly brought the touchscreen interface to market when it almost four years ago introduced the first-generation iPhone (Figure 1). EDN readers are too sophisticated for such marketing shenanigans, of course; some readers were likely developing touchscreen-based systems many years before Steve Jobs' Macworld Expo address in January 2007. Simplistically speaking, a touchscreen is nothing more than a semitransparent variant of a touch, or track, pad, an interface technology that dates back to a 1971 prototype. It saw initial Apple production successes in 2003's third-generation iPod and the 2004 PowerBook 500 series.