popular and able to exploit the developments that were leading to the incredible shrinking machine. “While all these devices could shrink,” Greeley noted, “our fingers can’t, our eyes and ears can’t…so we needed to start thinking about how the user interface of the future is going to work with these devices…what can and can’t be done and how will people really want to relate to them.”
Building a better user interface for handhelds led the Itsy team to a number of interesting innovations, one of which was the addition of a 3-D accelerometer which enabled a user to measure when the Itsy unit was tilted or moved. What good was this? Greeley calls it a “rock and scroll” interface. “The idea is that as you flip the unit around in your hand, it would be basically programmable and would do different things for you,” he explained, using the example of being able to turn pages on a particular application simply by flipping the wrist. So giddy had the Itsy team become with the success of their early prototype device—which was about the size of a deck of playing cards—that they even loaded the popular action-shooter game, DOOM, onto it. Recalled Greeley, “I think my favorite aspect was how you cocked the shotgun, by flipping the unit forward and backward.”
Why did the Itsy team choose Linux as the development operating system? Dick Greeley offers a number of reasons. For one, like many developers, they wanted something they could play with—from the source-code level up—on their own, without any proprietary strings attached. Second, the fact of the matter was that the Itsy project was not a secret; numerous developers from the academic and research communities were also involved to one degree or another. This involvement also led to