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Viewing all posts tagged "iPad"
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”People talk about Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field, and I don’t disagree that the man has a quasi-hypnotic ability to convince. There’s another reality distortion field at work, though, and everyone that makes a living from the tech industry is within its tractor-beam. That RDF tells us that computers are awesome, they work great and only those too stupid to live can’t work them.
Fraser Speirs - Blog - Future Shock
This is one of the best must-read essays about the iPad and how it will change computing. In fact, I question whether you can competently discuss the prospects of this device unless you read this, or at least a similar piece from someone who “gets it.”
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Questions about an iPad future
I was on a Royal Caribbean cruise last week during Apple’s iPad announcement. I am just now hanging out at Miami’s airport before my flight home, catching up on coverage and essays about this intriguing new computer. I’m excited, but I have questions.
Is the iPad the liberating, enabling device that so many envision? Fraser Speirs, Craig Hockenberry, Nik Fletcher, Marco Arment, and many more have written some fantastic essays about the iPad’s prospects and how it may actually and finally embody the ideal of “simple computing for all.” So much of the traditional OS cruft and file system confusion is abstracted away in the iPad’s updated version of iPhone OS. The user doesn’t have to know where their photos are stored or worry about accidentally nuking their entire photo library with a misplaced keyboard shortcut. You just tap the photos app, swoosh your fingers around like a maestro, and, indeed, magic happens.
But how will we get our photos onto the iPad in the first place? How will we create our iPod playlists? How will we print a Pages document? How will we create a backup of all our important photos, media, and documents? How will we wipe our iPad and start with a clean (*snicker*) slate?
Users will still need a desktop computer for many of these tasks, at least for some of the time or the initial setup, and any restore thereafter. That means a desktop or notebook computer that is still “stuck” in the previous methodologies of file systems, windowing environments, right-clicking, and all the other confusing complexities that the iPad is designed to gloss over.
I’m incredibly interested in the iPad, and I’m thinking seriously about getting one. But until we learn more about the 1.0 capabilities of the iPad and whatever version of iPhone OS that it ships with, I question how far Apple’s initial attempt at creating a new class of ultra-usable personal computers will go.
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”Just because you’re holding something that roughly resembles the shape of a notepad doesn’t mean it needs to be treated like one.
TidBITS on the iPad and (a good) lack of handwriting recognition features
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”For a species so famous for being adaptable to its environment, we certainly abhor change. Especially a change that involves any amount of money being spent.
stevenf.com - I need to talk to you about computers
Steven Frank is talking about the iPad and the change it represents to the future of computing. But he could have been talking about any number of current events and hot topics.
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”So neither side is entirely right or entirely wrong. But something tells me that Apple isn’t going to cave, and as HTML5 gets rolled out over the next year, they’ll have fewer and fewer reasons to even consider it. Sorry, Adobe.
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”The personal computer of 2010 is hard to understand for novices and people who struggle with abstract concepts. Macs, PCs, all of them. Folks, it’s us, the freaks who understand drive partitioning, regular expressions, virtual disk images, task switching, and shell scripting — we’re the exception. So while we trump up our skills at designing “easy to use” interfaces for our applications, millions of people are still trying to figure out how to get our beautifully designed application out of its zip file or disk image. Or where in fact the Downloads folder is. Or what, exactly, a folder is.
Steven Frank, rightly calling bullshit on iPad parody coverage like this which takes pride in labeling the typical computer user—who does not (and should not need to) understand the complexities in modern OSes like Windows and even Mac OS X—as “mentally retarded.”
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Conversation with Steve Jobs about iPad
A rare glimpse at Jobs in casual conversation with Walt Mossberg after the iPad announcement. He offers some great nuggets here, such as 140+ hours of continuous music playback and 10+ hours of book reading on the iPad. He also doesn’t flinch when replying to Mossberg about writing his iPad review on the iPad itself, noting that you can write in Pages, then export to and email a Word doc version.
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”I keep hearing this thing on the web that the iPad is “a consumption device, not a creation device”. I don’t know why people keep saying that.
Fraser Speirs - Blog - iPad Fallacy #1: “It’s not for content creation”
Don’t forget the zillions of apps already in the store that let iPhone users blog, paint, record audio, broadcast live video, communicate, and otherwise take an active part in the human experience. iPhone OS is about both consumption and frictionless creation.
Some people freak when you take away a few options or toolbars, but 75 million devices sold says that iPhone OS is a hit. I think the iPad’s larger display and more advanced multi-touch input will be an exceptional canvas (nyuk nyuk) for content creators. Just wait.
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If working customer support for a Mac software company has taught me anything, it’s 1,001 reasons for the iPad to exist.
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”When I look at the iPad, I see a clean slate to reinvent pretty much how we think of media, information and in fact the whole user experience. Why do we have to think in terms of a keyboard — real or virtual? How can we not be excited about the very idea of a media experience based on touch?
Why I Am Excited About the iPad – GigaOM
People are getting their panties in a bunch over having to deal with a full-size virtual keyboard, when the iPhone’s has proven to be quite successful. My iPhone typing muscle memory has gotten good enough that I can sometimes type without looking. We can only get better.
But one of the many significant potentials of the iPad is for the keyboard as an input device to disappear from many media, productive, creative, and other software experiences entirely.
Om Malik gets it.
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In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about the iPad. Let’s not. The canvas of the iPad must be considered in a way that acknowledge the physical boundaries of the device, while also embracing the effective limitlessness of space just beyond those edges.
We’re going to see new forms of storytelling emerge from this canvas. This is an opportunity to redefine modes of conversation between reader and content. And that’s one hell of an opportunity if making content is your thing.
Books in the Age of the iPad - Craig Mod
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Looks like iPad has become the fourth supporting leg of Apple’s product stool. With the opening of iPad pre-orders this morning, it now has its own top-level entry in Apple’s store navigation. It also gained its own slot among top-level navigation across all of Apple.com. If it wasn’t clear before, it should be now: Apple’s betting big on iPad.
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”But the truth is that people don’t buy consumer electronics for the quantity of features. They buy it for the quality of experience.
The iPad paradox: Less is more - Mike Elgan, Computerworld, offering a similar positive perspective as Fraser Speirs’ Future Shock essay from January.
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