Link: How Apple Reinvented The Cursor For iPad
Originally Posted: May 12th, 2020
Matthew Panzarino is a Master
I’ll never be able to write anything this eloquent, clear and thorough. I highly recommend you give the full article a read, but here are some excerpts:
Even though Apple did not invent the mouse pointer, history has cemented its place in dragging it out of obscurity and into mainstream use. Its everyday utility, pioneered at SRI and Xerox Parc and later combined with a bit of iconic* work from Susan Kare at Apple, has made the pointer our avatar in digital space for nearly 40 years.
The arrow waits on the screen. Slightly angled, with a straight edge and a 45 degree slope leading to a sharp pixel-by-pixel point. It’s an instrument of precision, of tiny click targets on a screen feet away. The original cursor was a dot, then a line pointing straight upwards. It was demonstrated in the ‘Mother of all demos’ — a presentation roughly an hour-and-a-half long that contained not only the world’s first look at the mouse but also hyper linking, document collaboration, video conferencing and more.
The star of the show, though, was the small line of pixels that made up the mouse cursor. It was hominem in machina — humanity in the machine.* Unlike the text entry models of before, which placed character after character in a facsimile of a typewriter, this was a tether that connected us, embryonic, to the aleph. For the first time, we saw ourselves awkwardly in a screen.
High-tech nerd poetry at it’s finest. So good.
Then, a few weeks ago, Apple dropped a new kind of pointer — a hybrid between these two worlds of pixels and pushes. The iPad’s cursor, I think, deserves closer examination. It’s a seminal bit of remixing from one of the most closely watched idea factories on the planet.
In order to dive a bit deeper on the brand new cursor and its interaction models, I spoke to Apple SVP Craig Federighi about its development and some of the choices by the teams at Apple that made it. First, let’s talk about some of the things that make the cursor so different from what came before…and yet strangely familiar.
Do yourself a favor and read the full article. It provides great context for what the iPad cursor is, and why it’s such a significant development.
iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard
