Edward Tufte On The iPhone

Edward Tufte, the guy who wrote the book ... well, quite a few, actually ... on the visual representation of information, has a couple of words to say about the iPhone.

There's an associated video but it's quite a large QuickTime movie, which will start to download immediately, so I haven't embedded it here. While it's well worth a look, if you do follow that link, wait a while before pressing the play button.

The crux of his message is that Apple got it mostly right, using the high resolution 160dpi screen to good effect and not filling it with "administrative clutter".

However, he does think that the widgets could have made better use of the resolution, rather than using very large fonts to display relatively little information.

I think that's probably directly related to the fact that they are widgets, but that's no real excuse.