Everything is a Remix Part 3 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Apple on Tuesday began selling a Magic Trackpad, a new wireless device that connects via Bluetooth to any Mac computer and allows users to manipulate what’s on their screens through gestures.

Like track pads on laptops, the battery-powered gadget can be used instead of a mouse or in conjunction with one. The pad’s entire surface is a button that clicks, so that people can use it in place of a mouse.

“Swiping through pages online feels just like flipping through pages in a book or magazine. And inertial scrolling makes moving up and down a page more natural than ever,” says Apple on its Magic Trackpad web page.

Some details about the device had already leaked, and its official launch had been expected since it was mentioned at Apple’s developers’ conference in early June.

The Magic Trackpad is made from glass-covered aluminum and is the same angle and height as a Mac desktop keyboard, which it’s designed to sit next to. It comes as a standalone accessory and costs $69.

Apple says the device supports a set of gestures that include two-finger scrolling, pinching to zoom, rotating with your fingertips, three-finger swiping, or switching between applications with four fingers.

“Go from typing to gesturing in one motion, or do both at the same time,” Apple says in its product description.

Apple began selling the Magic Trackpad in its stores and on its website Tuesday morning along with an updated line of iMac and Mac Pro computers. Its online store was down for a period of time beforehand, causing the usual fevered web speculation about what the closely watched company might introduce.

Magic Trackpad quickly became a trending topic on Google and Twitter, although not everyone was impressed.

Jobs went on to relate that the iPad had a similar trajectory in that regard. He says that what he was really against was the handwriting-based system for input: “It’s too slow. If you need a stylus you have already failed.”

He notes that Microsoft’s version of the Tablet PC had the battery life, weight, and expense of a PC. “But the minute you throw a stylus out, and you have the precision of a finger, you can’t use a PC OS. You have to create it from scratch.”

Walt then asks him why he built that operating system on a phone first instead of a tablet. Jobs then drops a reveal: “I’ll tell you a secret. It started on a tablet first.”

He had an idea of a multi-touch display you could type on, and six months later his team had a prototype display to show him. After handing it off to Apple user interface experts who “got the inertia rolling,” Jobs realized, “My god, we can build a phone out of this,” and shelved the tablet because at the time the phone was more important.

“When we got our wind back and thought we could do something else, took the tablet back off shelf.”

Can the iPad save journalism?

Kara asks about the future of the tablet from here, and whether or not it can help save journalism and the businesses of newspapers and magazines.

Jobs came out strongly in favor of preserving journalism: “One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press.” He notes that many seminal publications like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and others “are in real trouble” and that he doesn’t “want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers [ouch! -- Ed. note]. I think we need editorial now more than ever.”

He sees the iPad as being potentially instrumental in getting “people to start paying for this hard-earned content.” He says he believes “publishers should charge less than print. The biggest lesson Apple has learned is price it aggressively and go for volume.”

The post-PC era: Will the tablet replace the PC?

Jobs gave an analogy about how the tablet form factor might indeed end up displacing the personal computer to a significant degree in the not-too-distant future: “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”

He goes on to admit it’s not necessarily the iPad in particular that might play this role alone: “Is it the iPad, who knows?”

He also says the time frame for this displacement is unclear, whether one year or five or even ten.

Walt says the lack of a keyboard leads some to posit that the iPad isn’t a great device for content creation. Jobs responds: “Why wouldn’t they be? When I am going to write that 35-page analyst report I am going to want my bluetooth keyboard. That’s one percent of the time.”

He appeals to a more long-range view of the tablet as a form factor and how it may evolve to encompass a lot of the things we need our laptops and desktops for today: “The software will get more powerful. I think your vision would have to be pretty short to think these can’t grow into machines that can do more things, like editing video, graphic arts, productivity. You can imagine all of these content creation on these kind of things.”

He says “time takes care” of a lot of the issues that remain as barriers to using an iPad as more of a primary device.

But quietly, the Slate went away, and now the buzz around HP is that it will use Palm’s WebOS as the foundation for iPad rivals, once it’s completed its buyout of Palm. (On Friday, Digitimes quoted an HP Taiwan exec saying the Slate would use WebOS instead of Windows 7.)

All the tablet buzz now centers around the iPad, various Android devices said to be in development at Dell and other manufacturers, and HP’s future WebOS tablet. What happened to Windows 7?

A Tablet Is Not a Laptop Whose Screen Is Always Visible
The answer: The iPad proved a tablet shouldn’t be a portable computer that happened to have its screen always exposed. Instead, a tablet should be something else. Apple got a lot of criticism early on for not making the iPad essentially a Mac OS X tablet computer, in the vein of the Windows tablet computers available — but hardly used — for the last decade.

Apple — followed by Dell, HP, and the rest of the industry — has realized a tablet is something different, and force-fitting a desktop OS into it simply won’t work. Remember the splash Microsoft and HP made on touchscreen PCs last fall? That chatter has gone quiet too outside the nichy kiosk space, and for the same reason: Windows 7 is not designed for a touch-oriented interaction. Microsoft’s touch extensions to Windows 7 are awkward to use and don’t get around the problem that all the apps and the OS itself assumes the use of mouse or other pointing device. A finger isn’t as accurate as a mouse, and UI elements designed for a mouse-and-keyboard interface don’t translate to the touch world, even with UI extensions that support finger-based input.

Lessons from Apple’s Touch-Native Enforcement
Microsoft needs a UI designed for touch — rich gestures for input and a fundamental UI design that doesn’t involve lots of elements such as tabbed panes, radio buttons, check boxes, and dialog boxes. But it doesn’t have one. Plus, for applications to really support touch and gestures, they need to do more than map mouse actions to finger ones; the interface and operational design needs to be touch-native as well. No mapping layer for libraries will take care of that for you, as you can quickly see if you use a Windows 7 touchscreen PC.

I believe Microsoft recognizes that fact, which is why its forthcoming Windows Phone 7 mobile platform uses a separate, largely new OS designed at the ground level for gestures and touch.

Could Microsoft retrofit Windows 7 to support touch natively through and through, making it appropriate for a tablet? Maybe. After all, the iPhone OS is based on Apple’s Mac OS X, a desktop operating system that supports the same UI expectations and complexity as Windows 7. A lot of the underlying code is the same between the Mac OS and the iPhone OS.

Yet you can’t run Mac OS apps on an iPhone or vice versa. Sure, some UI elements are the same across the two operating systems, but they have more to do with a consistent Apple style than with fundamental operations. Look no further than Apple’s iWork productivity suite for Mac OS X and iPhone OS: Beyond a compatible file format and name, they share little in common in terms of how they actually operate. (I’d argue that iWork for iPhone OS is a disappointment and harder to use than it should be, though that’s due to a murky interface, not to a usage of the desktop paradigm.)

The bottom line is that even though technical components are shared between the Mac OS and the iPhone OS, the irrelevant Mac OS functions aren’t gumming up the iPhone OS, and Apple’s development environment doesn’t let you pull through desktop approaches into your mobile applications. You’re forced to go touch-native.

Apple gets some advantage in both its internal development and its ability to cross-train Mac OS and iPhone OS developers by having that common core, even though the UI and app results are very different. Theoretically, Microsoft could do the same with Windows 7 and a tablet version of Windows Phone 7 by giving them a common core that doesn’t impose itself on the user in ill-fitting ways, as is the case with Windows 7′s touch extensions.

So far, Microsoft has chosen not to do so; instead, it is keeping the desktop and mobile OSes separate. It did the same with Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 and Windows CE/Mobile, but foolishly imposed the desktop UI onto the separate mobile OS, so its developers ended up applying the same application approaches to two separate operating systems, creating the UI disconnect in the mobile environment. HTC and others tried to mask that with UI overlays, but you quickly found your way back to the desktop Windows interface as you used applications.

By comparison, Apple rightfully had its developers focus on creating different types of native applications for two related operating systems, with user-pleasing results.

Microsoft seems to have switched to Apple’s strategy
Microsoft seems to have learned that lesson by providing developers tools for Windows Phone 7 that work in its .Net and XNA development environments, which are familiar to desktop developers. That’s smart, as it leverages what Microsoft developers know but doesn’t impose desktop assumptions on the mobile environment — with a likely result similar to what Apple achieved for its Mac OS X/iPhone OS developers.

But Windows Phone 7 is about smartphones, not about tablets. It’s not at all clear if Microsoft still harbors hopes of Windows 7-based tablets — as Ballmer did so publicly in January — or if it will change gears and evolve the Windows Phone 7 OS to support tablets. In other words, will it stop trying to force-fit Windows onto tablets and adopt Apple’s approach of evolving a mobile OS for tablets? Google and Palm/HP are taking Apple’s approach for tablets, evolving Android OS and WebOS for tablets.

I’m betting that Microsoft will do the same thing.

Sure, a few Windows 7 slate-style tablets will ship — Asus and MSI are said to have models shipping later this year. But those products will go nowhere, because Windows 7 is simply not the right operating system for a slate. (These companies also made a lot of noise around Android slates at the CES show in January, but now seem to have cooled to the idea, a reflection of their short-term market strategies.) And that’s why you won’t see Windows 7 Slate or WinPad or whatever outside tech blog photos.

This begs the question: Is the iPhone losing its sheen?

Android edges ahead

The changing of the guard was signaled earlier this month: Stats released by market research firm NPD showed that Android phones had outsold iPhones in the first quarter of 2010. Google’s operating system accounted for 28 percent of U.S. smartphone sales, versus 21 percent for the iPhone OS. RIM retained the lead, however: BlackBerry phones captured 36 percent of the market.

What turned the tide? NPD attributes the change to the success of the Motorola Droid and Droid Eris. Finally, Android is being coupled with appealing handsets, driving mainstream adoption.

Globally, the iPhone retains its lead, however: Apple commands 46 percent of the market, versus Android’s 25 percent.

Apple vs. Microsoft: Round 2

Google must surely hope the mobile race has the same ending as the original operating system wars: Microsoft versus Apple.

While Apple insisted on running its Mac OS on Apple hardware, Microsoft implemented no such restrictions and chose to license its software to hardware vendors instead.

We all know how that story ended. Windows became ubiquitous; Macs were marginalized.

Android, too, seems to be headed toward ubiquity. Google’s usurping of Apple in the mobile market had little to do with its own handset — the much-maligned Nexus One — and instead can be credited to the breakout success of Motorola’s offerings.

Samsung, meanwhile, has committed to running 50 percent of its handsets on the Android OS. Google must now learn its lesson: Stay out of the hardware business and let others build spectacular Android handsets.

Developers jump ship?

There’s another reason the iPhone is losing its edge. Developers may be switching to Android.

The iPhone’s appeal is in large part tied to the hundreds of thousands of applications available in the App Store. But Apple’s controlling nature has frustrated developers. Its esoteric App Store rules mean that applications can be rejected for all manner of reasons, creating a strong disincentive to develop on the platform.

Apple has earned enemies, too, in its battle against Adobe Flash. By essentially banning Flash from the iPhone, Apple has provided fuel to critics who say the iPhone is a “closed” platform: You can play in Apple’s sandbox, but only if you abide by their rules. The rules, it seems, become stricter every day.

No wonder, then, that Google’s I/O conference this week hinged around one word: “open.” Developers audibly cheered, writes Mashable’s Jolie O’Dell, as Google execs presented their latest creation, Android Froyo.

To the delight of developers in attendance, Froyo supports Flash. Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, received enthusiastic applause as he quipped: “It turns out that on the Internet, people use Flash.”

Amid the applause, there was laughter, too. A rebellion against Apple’s encumbered system.

Apple is losing on two fronts

Apple is fighting two wars and losing both.

It’s losing in the fight for market share. With Android shipping on a myriad of phones and Apple’s growth limited to its own devices, Google seems destined to win the numbers game.

By providing more fertile ground for developers, meanwhile, Google is winning the hearts and minds of app makers. Google’s mastery of the mobile space appears imminent.

Apple strikes back?

Apple, however, could still play a winning hand. The fourth-generation iPhone is expected to launch next month at WWDC, the Apple developer conference.

While we’ll no doubt see a spike in iPhone sales and a short-term reversal in market share versus Android, I doubt the launch will prove an adequate defense against Android’s rise.

One factor may stem the tide, however. Rumors persist that the iPhone may soon be available to Verizon customers. If the mutterings prove true, Apple may regain those customers who abandoned its phones for a reason unrelated to the software, notoriously poor service from Apple’s exclusive partner, AT&T.

Android, then, seems equipped to win the mobile OS wars. But hold off on the parade. Google’s victory is far from guaranteed.

With a multitouch mouse, a user can, for example, browse through a virtual stack of digital photos by flicking a finger across the mouse’s surface, rotate an image by stroking the mouse, or zoom in on a picture by drawing an arrowhead with a fingertip.

“If the [traditional] mouse pointer is your virtual fingertip, we’re giving you a virtual hand,” says Dan Rosenfeld, a researcher with Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group in Redmond, WA. There are multitouch surfaces for tabletops, computer monitors, and cellphone screens, he says, but aside from Apple’s new device, “there’s really nothing addressing the kind of tasks that lots of people do all day long, sitting in front of a desk at a computer.”

The first mouse outlined in the Microsoft research paper consists of a piece of clear acrylic lit with infrared light along its edge, where it attaches to a palm rest. Fingertips on the acrylic scatter the light, and an infrared camera captures the light patterns to track the movement of the fingers. The technique, known as frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR), has been used for other multitouch systems before, but this is the first design that also integrates the classic features of a mouse such as an optical sensor underneath and clickable buttons.

Another prototype, the dome-shaped Orb Mouse, also uses an infrared camera and light, but it reflects the light out of its center to make its entire hemisphere touch-sensitive. The dome also acts as a giant click button.

SideMouse, in contrast, positions the palm of the user’s hand on top and projects infrared light out of its side to track the user’s fingers as they move along the table next to the mouse.

The Cap Mouse abandons the infrared scheme altogether, instead tracking finger movements with a grid of capacitive sensors on its surface. Unlike the mice that rely on infrared technology, Cap Mouse isn’t affected by ambient lighting, consumes less power, and offers a less detailed account of finger movements.

Finally, the Articulated Mouse, also known as Arty, features two mini-mouse finger rests connected to the base. Each of the three parts contains an optical sensor for tracking movement, so that Arty can be manipulated by moving the base as well as each of the mini-mice separately.

In each of the five prototypes, although the user still moves the cursor across the screen by moving the entire mouse across the desktop, multitouch functions are accessed by moving individual fingers. Software created by Microsoft lets the user control their computer using these multitouch functions.

Shahram Izadi, a TR35 award winner who worked on Microsoft’s multitouch mice, says there’s still much work to be done on all of the prototypes. In particular, he says, the researchers need to determine the most natural way for users to switch between multitouch capabilities and standard mousing action. Activating the multitouch features with an extra mouse click makes the device slightly more difficult to use, but having those features available all the time means they might be accidentally triggered. “Users wanted to click the device to trigger the multitouch,” Izadi says. “But it’s not the most ergonomic form to click and then gesture.”

Alan Hedge, a professor of ergonomics at Cornell University who has worked on multitouch devices in the past, says multitouch can be useful, but he isn’t sure it’s right for computer mice. “The real benefit of multitouch is when you can take the whole top of a table or desk and use that to drag things around,” he says. “Confining it to the size of a mouse might actually slow you down,” particularly because clicking is so efficient.

Rosenfeld says that while efficiency is important, it’s not the only goal. A good tool, he says, should be both efficient and delightful. Ideally, a device lets you focus on your task and gets the job done, “but it’s also just a really lovely object to use.”