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.

With the introduction of Chrome OS, it’s tempting to criticize Google for what seems like a half-baked product. Compared to OS X, Windows 7, or even Google’s own Android, there is a lot lacking. But there are interesting ideas, even if they are not the first to propose them.

Where they’re not pushing the envelope enough is the interface. It’s a little disappointing that when they thought of making a web-based PC, they turned it into a web browser-based PC. There must be a better way to enable what they’re doing besides putting browser tabs at the top of the screen and an address bar underneath. It would be like Apple being unable to think outside their desktop OS and releasing the first iPhone with an interface that used a scaled down menubar.

Where Google is pushing the envelope too much is the entire rest of the OS. It’s interesting in theory, but not yet practical. It’s a good thing they are starting down this road so that hopefully in 5 years it will have developed into something that will be useful. Currently, there’s simply not enough infrastructure in place to make it a successful experience.

Where is your private file space in the cloud? When you buy a computer, included by default with any and all computers is space to store your stuff. You can share things if you want, but that’s something you opt-in to. If you buy a ChromeOS device, you had better be prepared to spend a lot of time getting up to speed on the privacy controls of each service you use, because private spaces in the cloud are hard to come by. Or you better know about dropbox/sugarsync/whatever and be prepared to pay an annual subscription to rent some online space. Simply put, the vast majority of people are not yet at this point.

Internet access isn’t where it needs to be either. HTML5 is a great starting point for offline connectivity, but so far it’s only a starting point. Will ChromeOS store your entire Gmail archive in its offline database by default, so if you’re working at a cafe without internet, you can reference an email you sent 3 months ago? Not yet.

Thinking about how ChromeOS is being developed and presented, one of the striking differences between Google and Apple is that Apple almost never* releases something before all the pieces are in place that are required to make it completely useful. Apple didn’t make the iPod when MP3 technology first appeared, they waited until they had music management software with an interface that made it easy to fill up an MP3 player AND enough storage could be packed into a small enough space that people could put it in their pockets. Whether Apple will successfully compete in the cloud is to be seen, but you can bet that they won’t release something along the lines of ChromeOS until they can craft an experience that fits seamlessly with the way people live their lives.

And so this is the key to evaluating ChromeOS. It’s unfair to look at it as a finished product to be stacked up against whatever Apple and Microsoft have currently released. For all its flaws, it’s obvious that it isn’t a product built for now. It’s a starting point for the future. Google’s description of using it as a “companion PC” is another way of saying “this isn’t ready for prime-time”. It’s a prediction of where computing will be 5-10 years from now.

Does ChromeOS have more potential than the many other thin client projects that have come and gone every several years? Google’s deep pockets and long gaze are cause enough to pay attention. Watching its evolution will no doubt be informative.

* Apple TV = the reason for the “almost” in “almost never”

HTML (”hypertext markup language”) is the core language that powers the World Wide Web. Any server side technology must in the end, display HTML in order for web browsers to be able to render web pages. HTML 5 is the latest revision of the HTML spec that is slowly being adopted by the different major browsers. There are some pretty exciting additions to the HTML spec and I wanted to go over a few and what they potentially mean for the future of the web.

New Tags
Structure Tags
New additions to the HTML markup family include tags like header, nav, article, section, and footer. From the visual perspective these probably won’t have a huge impact as users are unlikely to see the difference between pages built on the old DIV based layout and the new structure tags. However from the search engine perspective, these tags will make it easier for crawlers to distinguish between what’s the meat of the content and what is just fluff. Current DIV based layouts structure the content semantically through unique IDs and classes. We give these DIVs IDs and classnames like header, footer, post, etc in an attempt to classify and organize the markup. However these are abstract concepts from the browser’s perspective. If they wanted, there’s nothing stopping the web developer from naming the header something arcane like foobar or even call the footer something like nav_sub2. As you can imagine then, search engines and web crawlers must develop sophisticated algorithms to detect patterns in order to infer what’s a header or footer. However with these additions, the developer must clearly demarcate what section each HTML piece is, thus taking the guesswork out of the search engine. This has the benefit of potentially improving search engine results.

Canvas Tag
The new Canvas tag is exactly what is says it is - a blank canvas with infinite possibilities. Flash developers used to drawing pixels on the MovieClip object will immediately be able to relate. Essentially one would use the canvas tag to render any number of things from manipulated images, animation, or even 3D imagery. With the canvas tag, you could build applications such as a paint program, or a 3D slideshow without having to rely on Flash. As usage of the Canvas tag increases, you’ll see more animation and renderings that were typically done in Flash re-envisioned completely in HTML5 and Javascript. The drawback however is that whereas Flash is build once run everywhere that supports Flash, an HTML 5 solution would leave you vulnerable to browser compatibility issues.

Here’s a video of a Coverflow implementaion done purely in JS + the new Canvas tag

AV Tags
The Audio and Video tags promise to simplify the mess that is currently the state of the art when embedding video. Whereas before you had either the <embed> or the <object> tag depending on what browser you are using or maybe you just turned to a javascript based wrapper to handle your media needs, you can have a very simple video or audio tag. With the ubiquity of the Flash platform as a video player, I’m not sure this is going to make much difference. Sure this is a lot easier, but we really could have used this 10 years ago.

<video width="640" height="360" src="/demo/google_main.mp4?2"
autobuffer></video>

Web Worker
Think of Web Workers as threads - any jobs that can be computationally expensive and intensive. In the current model, a complex task on a webpage might bring the interactivity of the page to a crawl while it’s busy number crunching. A worker thread could be spawned off to do some intense client side crunching without bogging down the page. This is even more relevant in today’s time when so much is being offloaded to the front end UI with javascript libraries. A good candidate for web workers would be a browser based excel spreadsheet like Google Docs where number crunching on the client site is potentially very slow.

<script>
   var worker = new Worker('worker.js');
   worker.onmessage = function (event) {
     document.getElementById('result').textContent = event.data;
   };
</script>

Application cache
The Application cache allows web applications to function offline when it’s not connected to the Internet. Google Gears is an implementation of this. All the developer has to do is provide a manifest of files that the web application needs in order to function offline. I see this as a really great feature to make web apps more robust. With most webapps, if you lose connection, you most certainly lose whatever you were working on. I can see more and more applications handling loss of network connectivity more gracefully by taking advantage of the application cache.

All you need is this code snippet and a manifest file which lists all the files the application needs.

<html manifest="foobar.manifest">

Geolocation
The Geolocation API provides a scripting interface that lets the developer determine the user’s location (based on GPS or inferred from IP, Wifi, etc). The user must however allow the application to access that information. Although geolocation has been inferred by IP for a while now on the backend, we’re seeing an increase of functionality performed on the front end with AJAX and this is no different.

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position));

Should I be using HTML5 tags?
Here’s a table outlining features I played around with in the latest browsers from Google, Apple and Mozilla.

* only certain formats
** sort of worked

As you can see, coverage on some of the new HTML 5 features is pretty good on Firefox and Safari. However with the audio and video tags, I did find that Firefox supports the open source codex Ogg Vorbis while Safari’s supports all the formats that Quicktime supports, naturally. So if you are looking to use some of the new HTML 5 features now, coverage on all the browsers is sketchy at best except for the Canvas tag. If you are trying to do video or audio, you’d best stick to Flash. I think where HTML5 is useful for the here and now is in the mobile sector. Many new mobile OSes including iPhone OS 3.0 and webOS have started supporting some of the HTML 5 features and since you would be developing platform specific apps, compatiblity issues are non issues.

Safari launched Safari version 4 Beta on Tuesday. There’s some good things and bad things about it.

I won’t go through every facet of the update (you can find a list on Apple’s site). I’ll be focusing on the features that stand out to me the most.

Tabs

Tabs are the most obvious UI change in Safari. In version 3 and earlier, Safari had inverted tabs placed below the address (and bookmarks) bar.

before:

Now, tabs are integrated into the top window bar and serve 2 functions:

- a draggable bar to move your application window around
- a group of individual tabs you can cycle through

after:

the bad: Because the top bar is now serving a dual function, it’s harder to focus/select an individual tab. This is because Safari’s first response to an interaction (click/press) with the top bar is to treat it as an application window you can drag. If the interaction hierarchy were flipped, and tab selection was first priority, window dragging would prove to be nearly impossible.

While you can focus a tab by carefully clicking anywhere on the bar, it takes a few tries, unless you start to train yourself to move straight to the right corner of a tab, where you’ll see the ‘grip’ lines.

Bottom line, Fitt’s Law is being comprimised.

the good: On a positive note, about 20 pixels of vertical screen real estate is gained with the combined browser/tab bar. Economy of space is a great thing and it’s especially relevant on laptops.

Web Inspector - Design Consistency & Data Visualizing

A great feature that I probably won’t be using very much is the Web Inspector. For developers out there that use programs like Firebug within Firefox, the Web Inspector will look very familiar. It allows you do to look behind the scenes of a given page and view the HTML and style sheets as well as see how quickly all the elements within a page load. Coupled with the Activity window, it’s a great way to debug websites.

Like all things Apple, its not only how well the Web Inspector works that makes it great, but how well it’s visually designed. When I toggled from Elements view to Resources view, I was again pleasantly surprised to see that they had appropriated repurposed the iTunes Resource visualizations for the iPod and iPhone:

Web Inspector - Resources:

iTunes - iPhone capacity:

RSS Feeds

I don’t get the option to choose what application/service I want to use to read feeds when I click on the RSS icon in the address bar. Firefox gives me the option to choose Google Reader.

What happened, Apple?!

Address Bar & AutoComplete

This is the clincher for me. Safari 4 Beta does not let you type in any part of the address, or title, of the site you want to go to. This has become an integral part of navigating the web for me and the best improvement from Firefox 2.

It’s a feature that’s easy to overlook until you don’t have it anymore, then you realize you can’t live without it.

Summary

Safari 4 is in many way’s a solid step up from from Safari 3. Nothing feels broken or incomplete, and it is dramatically faster (as reports have claimed). Along with the autocomplete issues, the lack of add-ons is the only other major drawback that’s keeping me from switching from Firefox 3. Adblocker, Delicious, Tabs Open Relative - sure I only have 3 add-ons, but they make a world of difference when browsing.

For the non-techie user, Safari is an excellent choice.

It’s like a Porsche without power windows and door locks - sure they’re drawbacks, but the car still drives like a dream.