The knife-edged wheels each rolled in just one direction, transmitting movement information for that direction. Each slid without turning when the mouse was moved in the other direction. Thanks to the Computer Museum for this info and great photo. Read more on their website, click here. One such method was used by Palm in its PalmPilot range of products back in and it was called Graffiti. Each device had a touch sensitive area to detect stylized characters drawn with the included stylus.
There was also a tutorial game included which taught players how to draw stylized versions of characters falling on the screen. PDAs were somewhat expensive for general usage and with components further reducing in size, there was an opportunity for feature phones to rise and become popular devices all around the world. This also gave rise to one of the most used forms of communication worldwide - texting.
Since phones had to use physical buttons, it became a challenge to include an entire keyboard with full features at the size of the keypad. There were many suggested methods and the one that stuck was the one that is still seen on keypad phones. A single button press indicated the first letter for that key, two presses for the second letter and so on. As phone screens grew larger, this system grew more sophisticated with the inclusion of dictionaries on phones as well as the T9 system that began predicting words based on the letters being typed.
One of the unique innovations on this front was from Blackberry. They included a full featured keyboard on the phone with buttons large enough to be used with the thumbs. This keyboard is still very popular with frequent texters and is often included as a slide-out under the original phone. The Blackberry Torch keyboard. A pioneer gesture recognition tech company, FingerWorks, released a range of multi-touch products in including the iGesturePad and TouchStream keyboard.
This company was acquired by Apple in Less than two years later, in Apple released the iPhone with the most innovative touchscreen technology anyone had ever seen, especially on a handheld device.
The phone interface was completely touch based, with every part of the screen having a functionality on every interface in the OS, including the complete virtual keyboard.
The entire OS was designed to take advantage of this touchscreen with completely new ways to use standard applications like the calculator, camera, games etc.
Before we realised, gestures like swipe to scroll, inertial scrolling, long-press, press and drag became commonplace implementations on any and every touchscreen device and mechanisms like pattern locks, tap to focus in camera, gesture based commands became commonplace. Apple changed the phone standards overnight and stylus based touchscreens almost immediately became obsolete. This widespread adoption is still evident in the regularly ongoing copyright infringement lawsuits between Apple, Android mobile manufacturers and Windows mobile vendors, all fighting over the same market.
Many of us remember the announcement of Microsoft Surface, the tabletop gesture based computing interface that completely felt like science fiction at that point of time. Currently, it is used widely by major corporations for several uses. It is not a surprise to see other devices and manufacturers also bringing such touchscreens and tablets to be used on tabletops and public installations, like the entertainment screens on flights, or the ticket kiosks at stations. The recognition systems could only work well with a limited universe of languages, that too with most of the results being statistical guesses.
This feature needed to be set up with a separate microphone peripheral and did not have the ease of use of the keyboard and the mouse yet. This development was highly significant for two main reasons - the first one being the incentive present to provide alternative methods of input for phones, with the screen size being a limitation to include full scale keyboards, and other one was that Google offloaded the actual computational part of the recognition process onto its cloud infrastructure, harnessing that massive computing power to analyse the details of the huge variety of human languages available out there.
Siri, best friend to many iPhone users. Gradually, Google added voice recognition to the entire Android ecosystem and currently Google English voice search includes almost billion words. Alongside that, Siri has definitely made a mark in speech recognition by adding personality into the responses.
It takes what it knows about you to give contextual replies that are even funny from time to time. This level of speech recognition is not just limited to phones anymore, as many devices, including home automation hubs are now including speech recognition and even basing their entire design on that feature at times. Pretty soon, you will be talking to your coffee maker and asking your speakers to keep it low.
The mouse was originally referred to as an "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System" and was first used with the Xerox Alto computer system in Using the mouse, Douglas was able to demonstrate moving a mouse cursor on the Alto computer in The Mother of All Demos. However, because of its lack of success, the first widely used mouse is the mouse found on the Apple Lisa computer. The picture shown here was taken by Maracin Wichary at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and is an example of the first computer mouse.
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