warning: this article mentions the IPhone, so if the site seems to be running slow, it's probably due to the IPhone street team over there at digg.Unfortunately I have no ads for them to view, so no check for the millions this month<shrug/>

EVERYONE, is familiar with the tools that we use right now to interact with our computers. The keyboard and mouse combination has been a well established paradigm for a long time. Forever in computer terms you might say.

Of all the innovation that has happened in computing, how we interact with our computers has not really evolved all that much. According to wikipedia, the first mouse was shipped in 1981. The introduction of the scroll wheel was probably the last great improvement on the mouse in recent memory and that happened in 1995.

For perspective, the Intel 286 processor was introduced in 1982. And the number of innovations to processors just from Intel alone could probably fill a whole book. So, though computers can do much more than they did in 1981~82, we interact with them in the same way.

Over the last couple of years though, things have started to get exciting in the area of human and computer interaction. Most people, as usual will credit Apple and the IPhone with "changing the way we do things", when in fact, Apple, as usual did not invent it, but rather applied it in such a way that it is usable by us mere humans as well as being attractive to us. I'm talking about the multi-touch / gesture oriented interface.

My first memory of what I hope is the user interface of the future was seeing Tom Cruise in "The Minority Report" doing his job as a pre-crime investigator. If you've seen the movie, you know that Cruise wore gloves which gave him 10 points of interaction with the computer screen. What the movie conveyed to me at least was that this mode of interaction would be definitely useful to me.

The way he was able to manipulate and absorb massive amounts of information like video and photographs, electronic files, maps in a rapid and productive way got me thinking about how that could be used in programming or even website design. The work flow is somewhat similar. You have a stack of files spread out across directories that reference each other in various ways and can be manipulated by various tools etc...

It still seemed somewhat way off in the future to me though. I imagined the joy of doing things that way would be left to a generation long after I'm dead or retired. However, I found this video encouraging because it demonstrated that someone was at least doing research in that area and demonstrating it's potential uses. The demonstration happened in 2006.

Still I felt I wouldn't see this on the shelf for another decade or so. I noticed an article on Wired a few months ago that was a follow up on Jeff Han(research scientist in above film). And as it turns out, the demand for this stuff has been overwhelming. Making Jeff Han and his company Perceptive Pixel, very busy.

So now, we have the IPhone, which is arguably the first widely available device that incorporates these ideas to useful effect. And Apple, as always does it in such a way that gets people excited(a good thing).

And of course you know something is really starting to take off when Microsoft is imitating it.

When Apple and Microsoft are starting to show signs that they are thinking about this, this encourages me greatly. There have been rumors that future lines of Apple's laptops will incorporate some of this. Who knows when Microsoft will have it in Vista 2.0, who cares really. The point is, that User Interface I saw in Minority Report is coming. And I hope that history will remember Jeff Han as much as the IPhone.