Bezel Without a Cause

We all know the image.  And we all know the crazy Kremlinology that crops up any time Apple so much as coughs in public or drops a chewing gum wrapper on the street.  They’re acquiring Halls Mentho-Lyptus!  The next iPod Shuffle will be chewable!

Where is the Home button?!

It reminds me of some ideas batted around a few weeks back that I wanted to sort out, but didn’t have time to get around to.  Now, I figure I’ll at least fire something out before tomorrow makes discussion of anything but the unicorn-powered iPad 3QHD and 82″ AppleTV all but meaningless.

A few of us were chatting on Twitter before we made this A Thing.  Talk about a virtual Home button came up, Apple-invitation-unprompted, and got me thinking about what might cause them to “go virtual,” such as it were.  Many people in general seem particularly wedded to the physicality of the button as being of paramount importance, but considering the number of “necessary” buttons Apple exterminated in 2007, I can’t imagine they consider anything sacrosanct.  So long as it provides the same functionality and interrupts software the same way, why not?  However, I couldn’t think of an overriding reason to do so.  The button is easily identifiable, iconic, and satisfying for our monkey brains to press.  It provides an immediate sense of proper orientation when looking straight at it.  It just works.

However…  this does not make it untouchable.  But even sugar-plum visions of WebOS gesture areas wouldn’t displace it.  You would have to need that physical space, and you can be perfectly touch-sensitive all around the Home button.  People might scrape their thumb once or twice, but then they’ll just aim to the side.

A screen, however, would necessitate its virtualization.  You can’t cut a circle through the glass and screen to allow a Home button to physically operate the way it does now.  Moreover, Apple wouldn’t even if they could dream up a stupefying feat of engineering to make it happen.  That’s all I could think of, really.  However, it seems like a pretty crazy idea.

But I like crazy ideas.  And frequently, so does Apple.

So…  what would it get us?  A dozen problems come to mind almost immediately, but they seem more interesting to chew through rather than toss the concept out:

• Doesn’t that ruin the whole point of pixel-doubling to have perfect scaling?  The “smartscreen bezel” in this case would be system-reserved areas.  The inner 2048×1536 would remain the same and be addressed the same way it is now for every 3rd party developer, and the “virtual bezel” screen space would be unto itself.  Hate your app screen being interrupted by a Notification bar, especially when you’re about to tap a back button that gets half-cut-off?  Me too!  Now they don’t.  Notifications now occur in reserved space.
• Dude, you’re thumbing the crap out of that bezel all the time–you HOLD it there!  Admittedly true and potentially problematic, but Apple has done well with “accidental touches” on their trackpads, and I don’t think it is particularly out of bounds to believe they could properly discern grip from purposeful movement.
• Why would you want to clutter the border with crap?  That would not be the purpose.  By and large, it would function simply as the same “black” that the bezel is now, but it presents lots of interesting options.  Not only can you use as the “gesture area” for inward swipes like we recognize from WebOS and are coming with Windows 8, but you can now go outward functionally.  It would have limited to no impact on another device, but if the virtual bezel can summon up lists and icons and anything you can think of?  You can start out small and easy-to-understand, but the possibilities are numerous.  I don’t think Apple would want to alter their “manipulating the image directly” metaphor, but I’d love the ability to pinch and zoom and scroll through content without my hand obscuring any of it.
• Do you think webpages need to be stretched on an iPad?  While sometimes an iPad could benefit from that, it’s not particularly necessary, and webpages are already in the process of redesigning for the tablet landscape, so that will be even less useful as time goes on.  SOME content, however, could take extremely good advantage of the situation.  Video playing that takes over the foreground now has a mutable aspect ratio, so it can fill up a large as image as possible while maintaining maximum quality.  People complaining that the iPad at 4:3?  No longer!  Heck, even a portrait-oriented image displayed while you’re holding the iPad horizontally would be pleasingly large instead of annoyingly scrunched.  It could even intelligently detect if your hands are gripping the device, and resize/shift the media accordingly.  Collect media of any aspect ratio and don’t worry about sizing it beforehand.  Basically anything that performs a foreground takeover could benefit.
• Where’s the camera supposed to go?    Admittedly there will still have to be SOME room left over, but the iPad’s front-facing camera is not so large and high-quality that it would require more than a thin strip to live on, nor does it require pinpoint positioning to frame the subject well.  A camera and other sensors (if desired) could live alongside, even if they are tight on breathing space.
• Do you want to give case designers collective apoplexy?!  Admittedly a lot of cases cover the existing bezel; my own does, too.  This would no longer be encouraged if you have to USE that area for a virtual bezel, so some conventional case design would have to go.  But case re-design is something everyone is used to, and the form-fitting ones would still find enough lip to hold on.  (Their tolerance levels would need to be tightened a bit, however.)  The Smart Cover, of course, would not be affected at all, and more case designers might make use of those magnets for grip, rather than just to try to clone said Smart Cover.  Slip-over shells would probably be worst-off.
• What about the Home button!  And here we come full circle.  As mentioned in the beginning, so long as a virtualized Home button performs the same tasks in the same way, it can take the place of the current one.  But what about the other factors?  Some have spoken of “discoverability,” but it’s not like a virtual one is undiscoverable.  Even blindly scrubbing a finger across the bezel, the iPad can respond audibly or visually if you cross into Home-button-space.  (Or vibrationally, if one demands something tactile.)  It may not be discoverable in the same way, but it can have many of the same queues, and some uniquely its own.  Our monkey brains can get over the satisfying pushy-push, too; we’ve done it before.  Not to mention while single-clicking feels “right,” double-clicking feels more awkward; I think it would actually be faster and more appreciated to use a virtual Home button to Fast Switch.  (Not to mention you can also now use press-and-hold to have new commands issued through the Home button, making app-switching far less cumbersome.)  If “permanent sense of orientation” is considered of paramount importance, VirtualHome could be lit up pretty much all the time, which doesn’t seem like it would draw much power.  (Though I confess I don’t know if you’ll lose out just by not having the screen in a full sleep.)  Offhand, though, I think the iPad could stand to gain from being “orientationless.”  Use the gyro to put VirtualHome on the “bottom” depending on how you’re holding it.  Why seek the button out when it can always be “down there in the middle?”  There will always be some queues from the power and volume buttons and dock, and while they won’t be easily visible from the front, it’s always just a quick side glace to double-check that.

The biggest issues as I see it come from cost and physical engineering.  While Apple’s not afraid of going all-out on their screen (witness the iPhone 4 and, as most are assuming, tomorrow’s iPad announcement) it’s a step beyond to add this level of screen.  Unconventional size, extremely tight tolerances, stupid-huge resolutions…  Apple can force scale, but just how much extra distance would they have to go?  And while I don’t see Apple ever sacrificing battery life for something like this, batteries improve and getting to 2048×1536 seems “close enough” to be able to pull something like this off not too far down the line.  The biggest challenges, however, would be fitting more screen and more electronics into a casing that may lose structural integrity and become a lot more fragile.  If they would lose too many screens in construction and fitting and transportation and warranty replacement…?  It’s a full stop.  And it certainly seems like an impossible engineering feat right now.

So!  Do I expect to see the Home button gone tomorrow and anything even remotely similar to this enabled?  Heavens to Murgatroyd, no!   I’d be as surprised as anyone.  That invite makes much more sense as wanting to keep the image cleaner and not get in the way of the text, and not-at-all a sense of “out with the Home button!  Fie!  Fie!”  Photoshop, not the hand model on the grassy knoll.   However, Apple is at the forefront of design and engineering in this industry, and I don’t put anything as “out of reach” to technological advancement.  While it seems pie-in-the-sky to me right now, it also seems –well– like an eventuality.

And it sure is fun to think about.

–CT