Writing on Glass

The story of the birth of the iPad, as retold by the authorized biographer Walter Isaacson, includes an amusing, ironic ending. Steve Jobs was at a birthday celebration with friends, and a Microsoft developer got under his skin by extolling the virtues of Microsoft's tablet PC software. The developer even suggested that Apple might consider leasing the program. 

Jobs told Isaacson, "This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, '[Explicative] this, let's show him what a tablet can really be.

According to Isaacson, "Jobs went to the office the next day, gathered his team, and said, 'I want to make a tablet, and it can't have a keyboard or a stylus.'"

So the single, essential quality to guide the development of the Apple tablet computer was that the interface would be based on touch--fingers unimpeded by pen or keyboard. Jobs claimed that other tablets, like those from Microsoft, failed to take off because "[they] had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, you're dead." 

And why was it that an input device that goes back thousands of years was off the table? The biographer explains Jobs's reason was twofold: "[It was] because it didn't work perfectly, and because he had an aversion to stylus devices." Perhaps there was some lagging regret dating back to the failed Apple Newton, but whatever the source of Jobs's bias, he often reminded the team, "'God gave us ten styluses,' he would say, waving his fingers."

Jobs's vision materialized with an amazingly accurate touch sensitivity built into the tablet screen. Fingers worked out nicely as the mouse, pen, pointer, and zoom control on the slick Gorilla Glass surface. On the other hand, good sense prevailed against the keyboard prohibition. With the first iPad, you could type on a grayscale QWERTY keyboard.

BUT IT'S A TABLET, ISN'T IT?

The iPad began to show up at work in fine leather covers, hard protective shells, or just glass and the bare curved aluminum back. Spreadsheets and presentation slides were shared on screens around conference tables, and soon the need for a few good note-taking apps emerged. 

With it came the desire for a functional stylus. The stylus was an important part because unless you're the recording secretary, you probably wouldn't be inclined to take notes with the glass keyboard on your screen or the one embedded in your binder case. And no one wants to see a junior exec writing with his or her finger at board meetings. 

So despite Jobs's best efforts, the iPad began evolving into a part-time notepad, and companies began to experiment with digital writing implements.

Creating handwriting apps didn't require as much effort as designing the pen. The techniques already working in the successful drawing apps could be pared down and matched with a notebook system of folders. But there were problems with the digital stylus--the hardware that Jobs thought would never "work perfectly."

The stylus for a tablet doesn't work the same way as the old plastic-tipped PDA stylus on a pressure-sensitive screen.