A few weeks ago I was talking with a coworker about a piece on Daring Fireball explaining why there is no clipboard and text selection on the iPhone (in short, the click-and-drag action anywhere on the screen had to be devoted to scrolling). It made me think of a pretty science-fictiony way to fix this. A few days later, I saw a Slashdot article that made my idea seem slightly closer to reality. The article is about an LCD screen developed by Sharp that has optical sensors embedded in it, so that you could scan a piece of paper simply by putting it on the screen, or even perform fingerprint authentication.

Now, granted, it would probably have to be the best fingerprint scanning software ever made in order for this to work, but here was my idea. How cool would it be if the iPhone could tell which finger you were clicking the screen with? Then you could have one scrolling finger and one selection finger. Maybe another finger for Googling or looking up the word you're clicking on in a dictionary. Yes, it might be awkward at first, but if people can get used to thumb typing I'm sure they could get used to this. It seems like a natural extension of having different functions for the buttons on a mouse, each of which we click with a different finger for the most part.

This is to inform all those I haven't yet, which is probably most or all of the people who read this blog, that as of the beginning of September, I have left Robotic Systems & Technologies and joined Blackrock as a software developer. I don't need to tell anyone who knows me that RST was about the best first job out of college that I could have hoped for, and I learned a tremendous amount there. It's tough to leave a team with whom I've spent so many hours and shared so many experiences. But, a few weeks in, I'm learning a great deal in a new area and Blackrock seems to be a great place to work. Call or email me and I can tell you a lot more.