Do you know how Apple made a computational revolution in this century? Beeem slowly

Rather, a reminder of my biology student days: do you know how we should anesthetize a blood vessel, so that it goes to alcohol properly asleep and does not contract all? It takes infinite patience to keep slowly adding increasing doses of anesthetic, a task that can yield hours of fun that is literally deadly (pro-hydrochloric) in the laboratory. Or, as Pierce Brosnan said in Dante's Hellif you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it jumps out; if you put it in cold water and heat it up slowly, it cooks without even realizing it.

Well, for Mike Elgan, from Computerworld, we are the frog and Apple has been in the cold water for three years. Guess when the pot we're in will boil! Yes, on the 27th, the Wednesday of next week. In an amazingly informative article, Elgan detailed three elements of the future tablet that, had it not been introduced slowly and gradually, would have been abhorred by consumers.

Essentially, the resources Elgan imagines are at the heart of the new iGadget they would turn out to be a complete failure, had they not been introduced gradually with the first iPhone in January 2007 (and actually reached the market six months later). The first one is the interaction with a machine exclusively through a touch sensitive surface.

Slowly, Apple is implementing increasingly complex gestures on multi-touch machines, so that consumers in 2010 feel much more comfortable with them than they would be in, say, 2005 which is good, as the trend becomes more and more complicated.

Likewise, the iPhone has made the use of a virtual keyboard almost as natural as the QWERTY letter arrangement system: like it or not, those who use it too long end up getting used to it more than they thought possible. Even today, not even the most advanced physical keyboard implementation on the iPhone is officially supported by Apple simply because it would be deliberately working to keep everything on the screen.

Similarly, the habit of watching TV has undergone changes that, packaged by the iTunes Store and video services on demand, increasingly make programs something that you “subscribe” and see whenever you want, instead of a strict grid of times you pay to obey.

Finally, we are gradually getting used to seeing software less as definitive solutions that “do everything”, but cost a fortune (think of Microsoft Office), and viewing each one more as a tool for a specific purpose that, if well executed, makes it worth paying a little for (think of Pastebot).

These changes are there and they were really arriving without us perceiving them as revolutions full of noise or not, maybe there was a little bit (ok, ok: everything was framed by superlatives and hyprboles of the most varied types). In the end, what matters is that nothing happened overnight, but we will certainly see a new milestone being reached on the 27th. Now sit back and wait for the water to boil.