Many people are turned off by iPhone app development because they don’t want to learn another platform (Objective-C). In many ways, learning Objective-C is taking a step backwards. Things like memory management and pointers are not something the modern web developer thinks about anymore. Also the idea of having to have different code bases for different mobile environments can be a huge deal breaker for adopting a platform. Nobody wants to create an application and maintain different versions of the app for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Not only is it a developer’s nightmare, but the costs can be huge. New development frameworks attempt to solve this problem by abstracting the specific phone platform so that the developer can write in one codebase (usually one that is familiar to the web developer) and deploy to multiple platforms. Here are some of those frameworks:

PhoneGap

PhoneGap is an open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. It is free to use and can deploy to iPhone, Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry.

Appcelerator Titanium

Appcelerator Titanium is another free and open source development tool. You can build cross-platform apps that deploy to desktop, iPhone and Android using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP. I’ve personally tried Appcelerator and have nothing but good things to say about it.

Monotouch

MonoTouch allows developers to create C# and .NET based applications that run on Apple’s iPhone and Apple’s iPod Touch devices. This is great for your typical Microsoft shop or enterprise that has a strong .NET skillset. A 1 year corporate license will run you about $1000.

These are just a few of the tools you can use to do cross platform mobile development while leveraging existing web development skills. It represents an exciting time because as traditional web developers we can quickly and easily create mobile applications. Speaking from my own experience over the weekend, my friend and I created an iPhone app in less than 12 hours using Appcelerator Titanium for the Day of Mobile Hackathon, and we went on to win Best iPhone app. Not too shabby for 2 people who didn’t know any Object-C walking in.

Last week I had the chance to give a presentation at SPARKt, an innovation and technology conference focused on real estate. I got a chance to listen to Alan Warms, founder of Appolicious, Phil Di Gulio, co-founder of WellcomeMat, Bruce Payne, Director of SEO at Tribune. If I had to sum up the conversation at the conference it would be mobile. With the advent of web enabled location aware phones, mobile applications have the potential to be more relevant to the user’s context than ever before. Almost every speaker talked about or mentioned mobile. The audience was even familiar with apps like Foursquare.

Alan Warms mentioned that on his site Appolicious, a mobile apps directory and review site, there were over a 1000 listings of mobile apps under real estate. Phil talked about his latest project Pegshot which was very exciting. To quote his site:

Pegshot is a photo/video service that enables friends & family to experience what’s happening where you are.

It lets you annotate your life based on location. For example, I can take a video of my lunch and post it to Pegshot. My friends can then see my video, complete with a Google Maps that annotates just where I was having lunch. It’s a service that basically rolls something like Twitter, twitpic, qik and maybe foursquare all in one integrated service.

Another topic that was mentioned by no less than 3 people, including myself was augmented reality. It was a topic that needed no explanation, since most people were familiar with it. I think that speaks to the fact that it’s starting to enter into people’s vernacular and gaining adoption. There are many apps on both the iPhone and Android platform that do AR. Yelp Monocle is a particularly cool one that integrates w/ Yelp reviews. By pointing your iPhone around, the screen will show what you see, overlayed w/ Yelp star ratings of the venues.

Speaking of the audience, even though most people were from the real estate industry, most were also very familiar with social media and services like Twitter. In fact more than half of the audience were on Twitter and a few were live tweeting.

I think the overarching theme that we see happening if we take a step back is that computing will no longer be tied to desk. People are able to access information everywhere now and with more mobile devices equipped with even more sophisticated sensors and technology, mobile computers will be able to serve peoples’ needs better by being aware of the context of the user. Also, people no longer need to interface with machines in the traditional keyboard entry way. New devices like the iPhone and Google Android all support some sort of touch capability. A new class of users are using the internet without ever having to go through a desktop computer.

Taking it a step further, apps like Siri combine context awareness and voice recognition.

In short, the field of mobile is super exciting to be in now. Speaking of mobile, yours truly will be participating in the hackathon at the Day of Mobile Conference in Chicago this weekend.

Bringing Style to Flash Camp Chicago

Just last week I had the distinct honor of speaking at Flash Camp Chicago, the annual conference hosted by the Illinois Technology Association. Adobe Flash Camp events are great because they are a single day where the community brings together denizens of the Adobe world such as James Ward, Jeff Tapper, Kevin Schmidt, Michael Labriola, and fledgling member Ben Schmidtke. The opportunity to network with the top contenders in the world of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) makes this style of conference one of my absolute favorites.

Flash Camp Chicago served as the maiden voyage for my talk entitled “Building RIAs with Style,” which I’ll continue to present and refine throughout 2010. I started out the talk by introducing lower level concepts about web graphics for developers, continued by exploring how some popular RIA frameworks handle styling, and wrapped up by comparing two important workflow tools—Adobe Flash Catalyst and Microsoft Expression Blend—to demonstrate how the different platforms operate.

My goal with this talk was to provide rookies with a basis for understanding graphic assets, how to apply styles in RIA development, and the importance of styling as well as provide more advanced tricks of the trade for senior developers.

I always enjoy my trips to Chicago and would like to thank Roundarch for sponsoring my talk and the Flash Camp Chicago organizers for inviting me back to speak this year.

Adam Flater is a Technical Architect and Evangelist at Roundarch and is also the founder of the Merapi Project. For more information on Adam Flater, follow @adamflater on Twitter or visit http://adamflater.net.

Part I:  A Little Background

Saas – Software as a Service
Paas – Platform as a Service
Iaas – Infrastructure as a Service

If you are already familiar with these three acronyms, skip to Part II…

Software as a Service is the most common form of interaction with the cloud.  As previously mentioned, Salesforce.com, a pioneer in this category, has an API that enables you to write programs that extend the features of its service.  In other words, you could write a program that automatically pulls your account leads from Salesforce.com, scans the status of each account and conducts a relevant news search (using other APIs) for idle accounts.  Reports can be generated based on the aggregated data.  The news search service API could be google,  reuters, blogs, rss feeds etc… This type of API-enabled service is widely available across many websites.

Once you have a program that accesses services using an API, then you may have a problem because you want the program to run all of the time.  You can’t run it on your machine, because you don’t want your machine to be running the program all day.  You can’t run it on a web server because it will impact the performance of your website (same with the app server etc…).  You could however write the program and run it in the cloud on a virtualized platform.  This type of the cloud is known as Platform as a Service.  You have essentially chosen a provider that runs the platform you develop on and are comfortable with.  You therefore lease some computing space to execute your program.

Now that you have a report being generated by a program being run in the cloud, what about the distribution of that report?  If you want to make the report available to the very edge of the network across the world as quickly as technically possible, then you could leverage a provider that distributes and caches the report file on servers throughout the world.  This is an example of leveraging Infrastructure as a Service.  Services like Amazon Cloud Front maintain distributed servers for just that purpose.

Part II:  Opportunity

Another way to view the different cloud concepts is to recognize that they are mainly about how systems interact with other systems.  Why is this important to me?

Opportunity

• You should know your options
• Demand for real-time data is growing
• Tech-savvy departments can have more freedom to roam in the cloud, without IT constraints
• Diversification- resell your own data processing services in the cloud.
• Make your services more widely available
• Integration- once an ecosystem of services exists, complete with service adapters between standardized formats, integration efforts can be reduced.

Potential Cost Savings

• Pro-rated licensing charges on a per use basis
• Scale on demand- provision new servers as needed
• Consolidation of resources to manage
• Start-ups may use the cloud to keep costs down and to focus on core competencies, rather than buying equipment upfront
• Larger IT departments with a data center can get more breadth of range using the cloud without hiring a system admin for a new/different platform

Source: Gary Larson’s The Far Side

There are many factors to consider when looking at the cloud.  Greg Shipley, CTO of Neohapsis, a risk management firm, reminds me that choosing a provider is not simple from a risk management perspective. “The potential for cascading failures increases as cloud providers construct technologies and services on top of other cloud providers.”  In other words, if you use a service that culls demographic information for consumers in China, but you don’t realize that the service relies on Facebook APIs, then you could be inconvenienced if China decides to block Facebook.

Not every problem has a solution in the cloud.  Even if there is a viable solution for your business, there may be a fundamental hesitation.  “As the importance of a service to a business grows, there is the perception that the business is at the mercy of their provider”, Griffin Caprio - Founder & President, 1530 Technologies, Inc.  What if the service goes down?  Perhaps the provider is sold to another company and the new owner starts increasing your costs.  Maybe your service provider stops supporting the service you are using for lack of customers.  Whatever the situation, you should be prepared.

So how do you avoid these pitfalls?  Planning and asking the right questions.  These are all manageable issues that are can be properly addressed when you consider each step in our Nine Steps to Cloud Nine.

Part III:  Nine Steps to Cloud Nine

The following steps should help you avoid costly mistakes as you inspect opportunities to leverage or build services in the cloud:

1.  Goals defined
2.  Roadmap
3.  IT involvement / governance / SLA
4.  Choose platform/provider

• Security (user admin access, network, storage, encryption)
• Integration (seamlessly integrated to your systems)
• Portability (migrate a virtual instance between private VPN)
• Vendor lock-in / flexibility
• Marketplace longevity/stability

5.  Lightweight prototype of a core feature
6.  Test thoroughly
7.  Measure/extrapolate against goals (Until success - repeat step 4-7)
8.  Architecture defined
9.  Build the application

The next step is the fun part- determining which strategic goals may have a solution in the cloud.  Look for future posts that discuss some example strategies in more detail.

Roundarch Technical Architect and Evangelist Adam Flater will be speaking at Flash Camp on February 26, 2010 at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S. Wacker Drive, 15th Floor) in Chicago. He will be presenting “Building RIAs with Style” at 2:00pm which will provide a primer to developers on graphic assets, workflow, and applying styles in RIA development. He will compare and contrast some of the popular RIA platforms and tools for styling applications.

For tickets and more information visit http://flashcampchicago2010.eventbrite.com/

As I write this, I am currently the Mayor of Roundarch on foursquare. What does that mean? Does anyone care? These are fair questions.

For those who aren’t familiar,

“foursquare is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things. We aim to build things to not only help you keep up with the places your friends go, but that encourage you to discover new places and challenge you to explore your neighborhood in new ways.”

One way to think about it is like a location-aware version of Twitter. foursquare works on mobile phones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Droid. The general idea is that anytime you go somewhere, you “check in” with the foursquare application on your phone. First, foursquare will provide a list of nearby points of interest where it thinks you might be. If your location is already in its database, you can simply choose it from a search results list and check in. If not, you can manually enter the venue and it becomes part of the database. You earn points and “Badges” for various activities, such as your first time at a new location, a certain number of stops at a given location or in one day, etc.

foursquare on the iPhone

While checking in, you can choose to add a “Shout,” which is just a short line of text about what you’re doing (thus the comparison to Twitter). foursquare also encourages you to leave “tips” about the location. Your foursquare “Friends” can be alerted of your check-ins if they so choose, and the program can be configured to automatically update your Twitter and Facebook pages as well. Doing so posts a link back to a page on the foursquare website for that location, as well as any milestone the user has attained with that check-in.

foursquare Update on Twitter

foursquare Wall post on Facebook

So what’s this “Mayor” nonsense? Whoever has checked in the most times at a specific location becomes the Mayor. At Roundarch, my co-worker Rachelle Bowden (who contributed to this post) and I have traded the Mayor title back and forth for the past couple of months. It makes for some pretend water cooler contentiousness, but it doesn’t get either of us anything. The Mayor doesn’t get to take the day off or fire one person of his or her choice. There are a few others at Roundarch who play - not too surprising since we’re a Web design and development company. But at the other places where I’m Mayor – my gym, a local bar – there’s a good chance that I’m the only person who’s ever checked in, or even heard of foursquare for that matter. So I’m essentially the Mayor of nothing.

Badges and Mayorship on foursquare.com

To quote my father, “Why would anyone do that?” Good question. While foursquare is mostly just for fun now, businesses are starting to take note and rewarding users’ behavior. For example, a bar or coffee shop might recognize the current Mayor with free drinks. Wow Bao and Berry Chill offer such incentives here in Chicago.

Wow Bao Promotion

Chicago’s Office of Tourism has recently started a partnership with foursquare, where users can earn special Chicago “badges” by checking in at a number of citywide locations relevant to one of three iconic Chicago themes: Chicago blues, Chicago-style hot dogs, and Chicago film locations. A partnership has also been announced with Bravo TV, integrating show personalities and their city tips, as well as a Bravo badges, into the game experience.

More recently, the “Special Nearby” tag started appearing on the application alongside certain locations. Clicking it serves up a local advertisement, tied into foursquare. So in that way, foursquare can drive foot traffic to a business.

Special Nearby

Behind the scenes, foursquare is building a database of user behavior. This information can be valuable to businesses, as they will be able to gain access to analytics about their customers and make decisions accordingly.

Of course, these business applications require a critical mass of users. A sample size of one foursquare member won’t do much good for my gym if they’re trying to gain some meaningful intelligence about their customers. With estimates of around 300,000 users now, foursquare may be on their way, but only time will tell about its long-term success. They’re not alone either – a number of competitors such as Gowalla and MyTown offer similar services, and who knows what Twitter and Facebook will ultimately do in the location-aware space.

This critical mass is also key if one of the goals of the site truly is to be a “friend finder.” While early adopters make up the foursquare user base now, it will need to reach the general public to become a useful social tool.

Not to end on a bummer, but there has also been quite a bit of chatter about privacy and security concerns with these kinds of location-aware applications. The cleverly-named PleaseRobMe.com is trying to raise awareness of the “telling everyone you’re not at home issue,” while others have expressed concern over the potential for “stalking” behavior. There’s enough to talk about on this subject for an entirely different blog post, so we won’t get into it here. Suffice it to say, checking in at 2:00am from a dark street corner in a shady part of town might not be the best idea. Although, you’d have a pretty good chance of becoming the Mayor.

Roundarch developer Pek Pongpaet will be speaking at SPARKt, an innovation and technology conference focused on real estate that will be held February 26, 2010 at The Playground Theater (3209 N. Halsted) in Chicago. Pek will be sharing his experience and passion for tech startups, technology, and martial arts. He’ll be touching on topics like microblogging, innovation, mobile and augmented reality, and more. StrataLogica, created by Roundarch with Nystrom, will be featured as an example of bringing business and technology innovation to the client.

For tickets and more information visit http://sparkt.org/

It has traditionally been assumed that enterprise users are very transactional in focus and not interested in fluffy experience stuff.  There are a few key ideas that no longer hold in this assumption.  First of all, the fluffy experience stuff isn’t just fluff.  Enterprise users, even more than consumers, don’t have time to waste.  Forcing an enterprise customer to porpoise in and out of multiple systems through various interfaces and different logins to accomplish a simple, logical task flow is bad for them and your relationship with them.

In the early days of the Web, people were happy to have the ability to get at information and perform self-service.  Enterprise systems exploded with Web offerings and experimentation in the early 2000’s only to have money pulled back after the dot com bubble burst.  These systems continued to creep along and organically evolve into cobbled together sets of offerings.  Meanwhile, this channel moved from being experimental to a core business channel and in many industries, such as financial services, it is now the primary interface to customers.

These customers don’t just interact with the tortured experiences they have with their business partners. In their personal lives they have experiences on Amazon.com, Facebook, iGoogle, and iTunes.  These users come into work and legitimately ask themselves why the business partners they spend millions of dollars on subject them to an experience so far below what they get from the above consumer offerings for free.  It’s this paradox that is fundamentally the forcing function behind the consumerization of the enterprise.

In this series of blog posts I am going to examine the factors a company must consider as the enterprise evolves.  First, I will examine the factors that are driving the consumerization of the enterprise key amongst these: The Shift-consumer digital experiences are driving the demand for a richer experience in the enterprise, The Arrival of the Digital Native in the Workforce-the impact of Digital Natives entering and moving up the workforce dramatically changes the talent pool.  Second, I will examine the factors that directly affect the capabilities of a company to proactively evolve the enterprise: Commoditization of IT and Offshoring-IT organizations are not structured in ways that are highly conducive to the idea of being user centric and consumer oriented, Existing Process/Structure-a basic understanding of User Experience and deliver capability tends to be the furthest most enterprises have gone and many have no capability at all.  Finally, I will provide a very compelling case study that exemplifies the success that can be obtained by reinventing a company’s digital offerings and experience.

Let’s start with examining why the consumerization of the enterprise is not just a luxury, but an essential next step for businesses.

The Shift
In the traditional enterprise model, organizations dictated the tools and technologies employees could use in an inside-out push model.  During this time, enterprise level investment from industry and government (military) fueled both the demand and profit for cutting-edge technological innovations.  New developments trickled down into consumer usage.

Source: Forrester, February 2008.  Embrace The Risks And Rewards Of Technology Populism

However, key forces have shifted the balance of influence, with employees and individuals voicing greater expectations on the tools and technologies they work with, creating a strong outside-in movement.  Users in turn bring their consumer expectations into their work environments.

This trend continues to gain momentum from a combination of:
1.    Vast consumer market growth and rate of tech innovation in consumer products.  Innovation is no longer concentrated at the enterprise level.
2.    Shifting social demographics of the workforce as the boomer generation shifts into retirement or other activities and a growing population of digital natives/millenials/generation Y enter the workforce bringing their native tech skills and expectations (more on this topic below).
3.    Blending work boundaries with employees expecting mobile access to information anytime, anywhere.  Workers are exercising greater flexibility with telecommuting/mobile computing accessing both work and personal information in a location agnostic way.

The enterprise 2.0 user is not attached to a desk in an office. Sixty-four percent telecommute at least part-time, compared with just 34% of non-enterprise 2.0 users.  And more enterprise 2.0 users spend time working at locations other than their desk around the office and at client sites than their nonuser counterparts.  As such, large numbers of enterprise 2.0 users have laptops (55%) and smartphones (27%) — the tools that allow for flexibility in working location.

Source: Forrester’s Workforce Technographics US, Canada, and UK Survey, Q3 2009.

Source: Forrester,  February 2008.  Embrace The Risks And Rewards of Technology Populism

The enormous volume of the consumer market and fast adoption cycles draws new tech innovation efforts.  Users in turn bring their consumer expectations into their work environments.

Source: Forrester, November 2008.  The Hour Of The Vendor Strategist: Three Mega Business Trends Will Reshape The Tech Sector”

Users enjoy rich interactions online and via a growing range of networked devices.  Similarly Social Media has permeated the fabric of life.  As people adapt to and embrace new technologies, the gap between consumer and enterprise experiences creates pressure on organizations to leverage the best tools to enhance worker productivity rather than hinder.

Smart phones/mobile is definitely a huge part of this phenomenon and will be explored further in a separate set of blog posts as it is worthy of its own focus.  Smart Mobile devices are not just valuable to hip consumers but also to sales and services resources in the field and to all workers on the go.  Likewise Social Media is worthy of extended discussion in its own post and is becoming an increasingly important part of the enterprise landscape.

Here Come the Digital Natives
The impact of Gen Y, also known as Millennials or Digital Natives, entering and moving up the workforce dramatically changes the talent pool.  As this generation has entered the workforce their expectations of being able to network and interact on-line has met with woefully poor intranet and extranet capabilities and experiences.  Having not grown up in a disconnected world they are intolerant of this lack of capability and not easily impressed by merely being able to get by with basic functionality  Often missed is that this group is far larger than the generation that proceeded it and depending on how they’re counted, larger than the famous Baby Boomer generation.  They are becoming recognized as an echo of the Boomers.  Much attention has been paid to the impact of the Baby Boom generation and their impending retirement but the impact of the Digital Natives is just beginning to be felt.

The key thing to remember is that increasingly users don’t view there to be a major distinction between the technologies they interact with in their personal lives and in their business lives.  Business in the consumer market emphasizes usability, personalization, and customer intimacy.  In contrast business service providers emphasize security, central control, compliance, cost efficiency, and standards.  When designing new or updated services, companies can leverage the benefits of consumer technology usability and personalization.  People who understand consumer behavior can translate best practices into the enterprise environment.  Total cost of ownership should take into account improvements in productivity and speed of response.

In the next post I will examine the organizational inhibitors that create setbacks as companies work toward the consumerization of the enterprise.

I won’t beat around the bush. The iPad is the future of computing. And I don’t want it. Well, not yet.

Image credit: www.apple.com

Just Like Any Other Tablet

Many look at the iPad as a wi-fi enabled 10” 1024×768 flatscreen with no USB port, SD card slot, or camera. They look at the iPhone OS and wonder why you’d use something with far less functionality than the hundreds of other tablets that have been on the market since the early 2000’s.

What they’re missing is the potential for the iPad to be the start of something new. Coming in the form of an evolved iPhone, something familiar to most of us, it doesn’t seem all that new or different.

But imagine, for a second, using the iPhone as your main computer. The reason you never have to dig through folders to find what you were working on, deal with software conflicts, or spend time cleaning up the iPhone after removing a piece of software is because the iPhone approaches computing from a different angle than the computers we’re used to dealing with every day. By expanding the iPhone from a small pocket tool to a larger device, Apple is trying to apply the iPhone’s model of computing to the tasks we currently use laptops for.

Yes, It’s Underwhelming

At the iPad’s unveiling I could sense the disappointment in the discussions within my company and across much of the internet. When the iPhone was first introduced, it blew away notions of how a phone worked and what kind of experience a low-powered mobile device was capable of.

People were hoping for a similar sense of disbelief with the iPad. They wanted it to save the publishing industry, they wanted new input methods, they wanted “out of control” multi-touch interactions, and most importantly they wanted it to do things they hadn’t even dreamed of doing yet. In short, they wanted to feel like Apple had developed the future and was showing it to them. That’s what the iPhone introduction felt like.

Instead, what people got was something they’d already seen. And so it was easy to pick out the flaws. No open app distribution model? No camera? No multitasking?

But when you’re looking at the prototype of a new computing platform, those complaints are irrelevant. All of them will be added in time. What cannot be changed are the fundamentals of the software design.

The iPhone got these fundamentals dead right from day one, and the iPad is now inheriting them. Fundamentals like a touch-based interaction model. Fundamentals like an easy to understand way to acquire and run applications. Fundamentals like the complete change of focus from navigating a confusing hierarchical file system to a simpler task-based interaction model.

As Andy Ihnatko says,

“It struck me that Apple was making a clear statement with the iPad: ‘We were right about the iPhone.’ They had a clear and ambitious concept about an entirely new computing platform and an entirely new way that humans would interact with hardware. They were so right about it that when the time came to build a tablet device, changing the UI seemed vulgar at best. […] If the iPhone had never existed, the iPad would still have made sense as a touch-based computer.”

Image credit: Sebastiaan de With, http://blog.cocoia.com

A New Interface

The very things that make the iPad so great are also its biggest weaknesses. By developing a new interaction paradigm — touch-based rather than mouse-based — Apple has rendered all existing desktop software incompatible with the platform. To truly take a step forward, this is necessary.

Starting from zero is a daunting proposition. It is the reason Microsoft has never been able to garner mainstream acceptance from the tablets it promotes, despite grand proclamations about the coming tablet revolution back in 2001. In Microsoft’s universe, compatibility is king, hence the constant attempts to put Windows on a touchscreen. The taskbar, windows, dropdown menus, contextual menus, rollovers, and the rest of today’s pervasive interface elements make for an awkward tablet experience, but one with the advantage of an entire universe of software already built for it. Starting from zero, as Apple is doing, takes guts. The risks are exponentially higher, as are the rewards.

Apple is bootstrapping the process by launching the iPad with enhanced versions of the same applications that have been successful on the iPhone. Watching movies, listening to music, browsing the web, checking email, and more are all designed to be seamless and elegant experiences. With these basics, the iPad is capable of meeting the casual needs of some people. In addition, it features compatibility with the existing library of iPhone apps, although this is of questionable value for many. Even with these boxes checked, it won’t come close to replacing a laptop for most people.

I Still Don’t Want One

For years, the tech industry has chased the dream of the device that fills the space between the mobile device and the computer. The difficulty with this space is that there isn’t obvious demand to fill. Devices have to muscle in and make their own space. The iPad may be one of the best to try, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s not something many people need, myself included. My colleague Ben McNeil summed it up when he said, “This device doesn’t seem to blend everything I need but rather gives me one more gadget I own.”

And like a child needing a parent’s steadying hand on the saddle when learning to ride a bike, the iPad needs to be tethered to a real computer for tasks like backing up, downloading photos, and syncing music. Until my files live online, rather than on a hard drive tied to one computer, the iPad won’t seamlessly integrate into my digital life without a lot of awkward shuffling and copying to make things available to the iPad on an as-needed basis. I don’t need to pay for the added complexity of working this device into my life, and my iPhone already does a good job of surfing the web on the sofa.

And Yet

Given the option, the prospect of carrying an iPad around is already so much more enticing than using my laptop. I yearn for the portability, the battery life, and most of all, the efficient and focused interface that my iPhone has given me a taste of.

I want the productivity and joy of using something that sheds the 20+ years of baggage my computer has inherited. The design decisions made in the 1970s that seem unprepared for the scale of my online life today, such that I am constantly having to organize and clean and manage my system.

As Fraser Speirs states,

“The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS. The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.”

I want something that lets me get The Real Work done.

Image credit: www.apple.com

A Whole New World of Apps

Application development on the iPad has the ability to sustain bigger apps than what we’ve seen on the iPhone. The 99 cent app market on the iPhone has exploded because the device lends itself to quick, cheap entertainment. Lots of people will spend a buck for a couple of minutes’ excitement while waiting at the bus stop or standing in line. The iPad won’t be used in those situations, so the demand for those cheap thrill apps won’t be as strong.

Instead, people will start demanding more functional apps. Apple sent a clear signal by showcasing a highly functional and polished office suite in the form of iWork for the iPad. By doing this, they were in effect asking others to follow their lead by developing desktop-class applications. This call is already being answered. The Omni Group, the leading Mac development house responsible for OmniGraffle and OmniPlan, among others, has announced an immediate pause on developing their next generation of desktop software while they port their complete portfolio of applications to the iPad.

Apple also has the advantage of being in a better position than anyone else to cultivate a healthy 3rd party ecosystem of applications. It may be counterintuitive considering the discontent over their tight control of app distribution. But Apple has developed something even more valuable than open application distribution: a cohesive platform. This advantage may diminish in the future, but when launching a new platform it is incredibly important. Software developers will be hesitant to invest significant money developing applications if they are not sure what hardware, and by extension how many users will be able to run them. Android is starting to feel the effects of varying versions of the OS spread across a myriad of hardware configurations. Apple, meanwhile, has shown with the iPhone that it can drive a platform forward while minimizing the expense of dealing with device incompatibility.

What Happens Now

I won’t bother with a prediction about the iPad’s success or failure because they’re a dime a dozen in the wake of its launch. This post isn’t about whether Apple will tumble from its current summit or climb the next peak. This is about understanding why the iPad is more than just another tablet.

For the iPad to succeed, it doesn’t need to be a home run now, it simply needs to stick around and gain a modest number of users who are willing to pay for apps. If that happens, in 5 years time we’ll start to see a healthy ecosystem of applications that begin to turn the iPad into a viable general computer replacement. And in 10 years time we’ll see a new generation of users that have adopted iPads, or whatever Android- or WebOS-based tablets are around at that point, as their main computer. We’ll see existing expert users spending a large portion of their time doing work on tablets.

Of course, even then most of the computing landscape will still revolve around the traditional computers that are deeply entrenched today. But it will also be clear that they are part of a waning era. In 20 years’ time they will have relinquished the spotlight to take the place of the mainframes of yore: running back end services and thousands of custom business applications for years to come, while people use touchscreen devices for their everyday online lives.

And at that point, we’ll look back and realize that this drastic shift from Old World to New World computing, as Steven Frank terms it, began with something that at the time seemed like a boringly predictable, some would even say say lacking, evolution of an iPhone.

Nigel Warren is a UX designer at Roundarch

The Avis iPhone app that was designed and developed by Roundarch is featured in an Apple television spot.