Every once in a while, a game-changing technology overtakes an industry while it's napping. That seems to be happening right now with the iPhone, which Apple has cleverly disguised as a phone, but is really a mind-control appliance to get you to rethink computing.

The game-changing aspect is not the iPhone's weight, shape, size, OS, or even that it lets you carry the internet around in your pocket. It's the total human-factors experience: the fully realized vision of peripheral-less computing. For once, you're not a slave to keys, mice, buttons, or cords. You are the peripheral. Your nervous system is the OS.

In the software business, the game always changes when user expectations change, and that is precisely why iPhone is so important. It is changing people's expectation of what it should feel like to get work done on a computer.

What does any of this have to do with content management? Plenty. (If you just woke up: It's 2007, and the most-used DAM on the planet is iTunes.) High-touch computing began, for all intents, with the iPhone. And it will now overtake the rest of computing in progressive stages. This will ultimately affect all kinds of computing, web content management included.

Touchscreen laptops have been available for some time, but never with a Touch OS that fully exploits the technology. This will change. Eventually, the postage-sized touchpad on your laptop will go away. In its place: your laptop's screen.

The first signs of this are already appearing: Dell this week announced a touchscreen Latitude model, and a Microsoft engineer acknowledged, earlier this week, that Windows 7, the successor to Vista, will natively support touch technology.

Single-finger touchscreens are only the beginning. Ultimately, one-finger touchscreens will be obsoleted by multi-finger/mutli-touchpoint screens. (We know this because Apple has filed for patents on it. See, in particular, United States Patent Application 20070257890, "Multipoint Touch Surface Controller," November 8, 2007). Imagine being able to drag four items into the Trash at once, using four fingers. Or being able to twist an onscreen image by hand to rotate it in Photoshop. Or being able to "pinch" two items closer together.

Can you begin to picture the implications for web authoring? Non-techie authors in a distributed Web CMS environment will eventually expect to be able to finger-flick through media collections in order to select a photo or other visual asset for use on a web page, much the way iPhone users flip through album covers. In fact, Day Software has already gone to the album-flip-through UI in Version 4.5 of its CQ DAM (see image, below). All it lacks is the touchscreen driver.

A non-techie Web CMS author or portal administrator might also expect to finger-drag various iframes or page components around the screen when designing a new HTML layout. Narrowing a column of text can be done with a two-finger pinch. Want to scroll a huge dropdown list? Let your fingers do the walking.

In a year or so, getting work done in a Web CMS may feel a lot more like fingerpainting, and a lot less like masochism. If so, we'll have iPhone to thank.