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The iPhone has a 3.5 inch (8.9 cm) liquid crystal display with pixel
dimensions of (320×480 px at 160 ppi). It's a touch screen device
which is specifically created for use with a finger, or multiple fingers for
multi-touch sensing. No stylus pen is needed, nor can one be used - the touch
screen requires human skin (bare) to operate.
The iPhone is different from common desktop interfaces because it uses a direct manipulation
model of scrolling. Where as a typical desktop GUI achieves scrolling by using a
scroll-arrow to push a view-window down and thus the content itself up (or the
reverse, clicking up to move content down), the iPhone interface enables users to move the content itself up or down by a touch-drag-lift motion of the
finger, much as one would slide a playing card across a table. The
speed desired for scrolling is computed based on the speed and acceleration with
which the drag motion is performed.
For text input, the iPhone uses a virtual keyboard on the touchscreen. It
has automatic spell checking, predictive word capabilities, and a dynamic
dictionary that learns new words. The predictive word capabilities have
been integrated with the dynamic virtual keyboard so that users will not have to
be extremely accurate when typing — i.e. touching the edges of the desired
letter or nearby letters on the keyboard will be predictively corrected when
possible. The iPhone also has an optional landscape mode for text entry with the
virtual keyboard has been mentioned by Apple executives as a possibility for iPhone,
although Apple has not yet come to a final decision as to its inclusion in
the shipping version of iPhone. A possible advantage of landscape text entry
would be the availability of larger keys to ease text entry, especially for
individuals with larger fingers.
The user interface also features other visual effects, such as horizontally sliding
sub-selections and co-selections from right and left, vertically sliding system
menus from the bottom (e.g. favorites, keyboard), and menus and widgets that
turn around to allow settings to be configured on their back sides.
The scrolling works as if the list is pasted on the surface of a
wheel: the wheel can be "spun" by sliding a finger over the display. After
lifting your
finger from the display the wheel continues to "spin" for a short
moment before coasting down. In this way, the iPhone seems to simulate the
physics of a real object, which, it is thought, should give a natural feel to
the whole process.
The iPhone photo album and web page magnifications are examples of multi-touch sensing.
It is possible to zoom in and out of objects such as web pages and photos by
respectively "pinching" and "unpinching" them, that is, placing two fingers
(usually thumb and forefinger) on the screen and moving them farther apart or
closer together as if stretching or squeezing the image. This scaling is done
uniformly and proportionally based on the image in question so there is no
distortion of the image itself, as would be the case if the image were actually
stretched or squeezed.
Take a look at these
other iPhone Inputs.
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