Apple has reinvented the mouse. Or, to be more precise, the pointer, that is, its digital representation on the screen. It seems like a small thing, but in the world of bits this is no small revolution, which required study, inventiveness and a certain amount of courage. The small pointer seemed obvious, natural, immutable, but the company led by Tim Cook has shown that instead it could and has been done to adapt it to the new needs, in this case of the iPad . But understanding what happened and why it matters, you need to take a step back first.
The Pointer’s Mother
When in the early 1980s the pirate team put together by Steve Jobs was preparing the Macintosh, which would debut in January 1984 , designer Susan Karea had one of the most delicate tasks of all: drawing pixel by pixel all the elements of the graphical interface, practically unknown to the (few) users of personal computers of the time, who were used to the textual interface of Microsoft ‘s MS-Dos and Apple II’s Apple-DOS.
Kare, to whom we owe the intuition of the garbage can as an icon destined to contain the documents to be thrown away, drew a black arrow, at an angle of 45 degrees to the left. Today billions of people instantly recognize the image of the mouse cursor, which can also be moved by the trackpad of laptops. It is the graphic representation on the screen of the movements made by the user on the table.
The father of the pointer
The “pointer” (as the arrow is correctly called) was invented a little over 50 years ago by Doug Engelbart , a true genius and irregular of the academy and research centers of Silicon Valley , one of the fathers of modern modalities. of human-computer interaction and author of a public demonstration, a “keynote” televised on the big screen of a San Francisco conference center, made in 1968 and called “the mother of all demos”, which from a technical point of view is in still unsurpassed despite our modern technology.
The invention of the mouse and the pointer was neither obvious nor natural: there were other means of interacting with the computer, from the optical pen to the graphic tablets up to small knobs, paddles, trackballs and joysticks. The choice of a mechanism to grip and move on the table thanks to the wheels, with a single button (then they became three) was radical. And he became part of the choices for building the interface of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center Alto system, more simply called Xerox Parc. It was from the research center in the Coyote Hills that Steve Jobs and his people paid for access to the graphical interface (and other futuristic technologies that they did not understand) that became the basis of Apple’s system, the Macintosh.
Pointer phenomenology
The mouse and its virtual on-screen alter ego, the pointer, became ubiquitous after Microsoft’s adoption with its Windows. In practice, the mouse (and the small arrow on the screen) became the standard, with only very small variations: all black that of Apple and oriented to the left, with the white interior that of Microsoft, and slightly longer and pointed to make it more visible and precise.
Since the Eighties the pointer has not had any other substantial evolution until the other day. In fact, it is with the arrival of the first preliminary versions of iPadOS in 2019 and then with the announcement of the new iPad interface that something has changed. Indeed, a lot .
Apple introduced the ability to use a mouse or trackpad to interact with the iPad. And in doing so he also had to invent a way to show the movement on the screen and the point towards which he was going to interact. Except that a black dart bent 45 degrees to the left wasn’t ideal. In fact, it just wasn’t good. As he explainedApple’s head of software and hardware, Craig Federighi, to American journalist Matthew Panzarino «part of what we like and what has determined the success of iPadOS is the way in which we have taken the best of very different tools. The experience comes from tvOS (the Apple TV operating system), from the years of working with the Mac and from the birth of the iPhone X and the first iPads. In this way we were able to create something that was immediately natural for the iPad Pro ».
Reinventing the pointer
The iPad is based on touch and not on the mouse, therefore the iPadOS pointer, which was added after eight years of life of the device and its interfacepractically unchanged, it needed to adapt to the touch environment, made up of different and larger dimensions, and not the other way around. It was not so much and only the presence of the pointer on the screen, but its shape and its sensitivity. Because the fingers on touch devices are “large” and touch multiple pixels at a time, while the operating system tries to create areas – “hot zones” – around the interface elements to make the touch more natural and precise than than it would of course not. Apple immediately intervened massively on this aspect of the interface, both in the virtual keyboard and in the various buttons and buttons. How to do with the pointer?
Apple’s idea was partly anticipated by Apple TV, and it is a round pointer which however adapts plastically to the type of area it is “flying over”. In this way, the cursor is “magnetized” and “magically” becomes square or rectangular, embracing the entirety of the interface element to be operated. This makes the experience of using the pointer very normal and at the same time very functional.
The pointer to the test
During the summer this writer used a 12.9-inch iPad Pro and the new Magic Keyboard which is equipped with a small, very precise, powerful and functional trackpad. Apart from the excellent functioning of the keyboard, which La Stampa has tried in recent daysand which offers a perfect synergy with the iPad Pro, it is the naturalness of the use of the pointer that is one of its real strengths. After a few minutes of use it becomes a totally natural experience to be able to use the pointer just as if you were on a MacBook, and managing the interface is a smooth process that does not give problems. The “gestures” can be perfectly integrated (for example, to return to the home screen at any time just swipe with three fingers, to scroll all the apps from the home screen just move left or right with two fingers; drag is also facilitated -and-drop, which works just like on the Mac: three clicks to select the paragraph,
The Magic Keyboard with trackpad, which is only available for the iPad Pro models (but the keyboard + pointer experience is now standard with the iPadOS operating system), is perhaps an expensive solution and certainly dedicated to an audience of professionals and users. advanced. But it is not exclusive, because it is enough to use a mouse and a bluetooth keyboard to have the same effect: there are many versions on the market, but for mice we recommend the Magic Mouse 2 or the Magic Trackpad 2 from Apple, but with an adapter. Wired mice can also be connected. In this way, even an iPad Mini compatible with iPadOS 13 and later becomes a small hybrid supercomputer. And it is possible to appreciate the latest incarnation of the pointer, reinvented fifty years after its birth again by Apple.
