After a month with the iPod Touch I want to touch my desktop screen, my laptop screen and even the glass on the scanner. This touchy-feely aberration makes reaching for the mouse seem obsolete. Even before the iPad is available in the USA, let alone poor cousin Australia, I’m already asking when my work software will have this innovation.
I am already feeling an inclination to touch my monitor rather than reach for the mouse. With text, paragraphs move around the screen effortlessly. In music software, I push and point chord symbols, copy tracks. Using the thumb and finger technique of expanding, I open a track, edit notes, return to the score. I am a genius.
I sense that the ubiquitous mouse is on the endangered species, and as a mouse induced RSI sufferer I can think of no rodent more deserving of eradication.
Finger touch won’t be available everywhere however. I realise that rubbing a finger across my car window won’t open or close it. That it’s a 1985 Ford possibly has something to do with this. Similarly forgetting my keys to the office in the morning won’t be rectified by a quick swipe across the glass of the front door.
Perhaps we are still a long way from open sesame, but with the right fingertouch or swipe who knows where you’ll be able to go in the future.
Understandably Steve Jobs, the Apple supremo, was most put out by this. An Australian supermarket stealing his trademark. Trademarks are big dollars. They are a big deal. Steve however overlooked the fact that his company inadvertently copied the Beatles’ logo when he and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer in 1976.
For instance, John Lennon drove a Rolls Royce, albeit a white one, covered in psychedelic graffitti. It reminds me of Molly Meldrum’s Rolls Royce in the 70s. Chauffeur driven to his gigs as a DJ in Melbourne, Molly’s Roller was constantly scratched and defaced. Eventually he gave up caring about its appearance and rode around in the worst looking Roller in Melbourne. 
It was a company out of control. Yet there was a man to take the helm, and what better man than Neil Aspinall. Neil wasn’t a man brought in from the corporate world, he was a man of their own stock. Neil met the Beatles back in the 50s. He’d met George and Paul at school, and later, John. It was a meeting of schoolboys. Neil got to drive the truck.
The original court decision rested on the fact that the computer guys and the music guys didn’t have anything in common, therefore both trademarks were legal. As we know, decisions are made to be overturned. The world has changed. Aspinall’s fight with Apple, Inc set the stage for what is hopefully an equitable method of distribution of the Beatles’ catalogue via iTunes. It should be a marriage made in heaven. However, Neil Aspinall died in 2008. He missed seeing the fruition of his battle over the copyright of an apple. 
