Fraser Speirs

Lovely piece by Dan Hill on the City of Sound blog about the iPad:

a distributed phalanx of tablets will be far more palatable, more civil, than the walls of laptop screens that are temporarily erected during meetings now

This is one of my fervent hopes for the iPad in school settings. Putting the screens down on the desk changes the shape and feel of the classroom.

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. It's fast enough, it has enough storage and it has some seriously powerful applications. If that's your opinion, please enlighten me in the comments.

I spent this morning going through the Apple iPad videos - the keynote and the promotional video - trying to pick up some cues about how the UI conventions are supposed to work. The result is in a set on Flickr.

The iWork demos were most enlightening. Here are some screenshots. Apologies for the quality - they're screenshots of Quicktime Player:

Pages Styles Inspector

Pages Layout Inspector

Numbers Formula Library

Keynote Transition Inspector, showing Magic Move

Look at what's in here: a full stylesheet engine, multi-column page layout, a complete library of cell formulae and a full set of builds and transitions. You can create a Magic Move transition on the iPad. That's probably the most advanced technique you can do in Keynote, and it's there on the iPad.

Someone on iPad4Edu pointed out that the Tech Specs page states that:

The Camera Connection Kit gives you two ways to import photos and videos from a digital camera. The Camera Connector lets you import your photos and videos to iPad using the camera’s USB cable. Or you can use the SD Card Reader to import photos and videos directly from the camera’s SD card.

So you can import media from a camera on the fly, and you can use all the power of the iWork suite to create documents. I haven't even mentioned the Brushes demo that was in the keynote.

Are you still telling me this isn't a content creation device?

This tweet from Chris Espinosa got me thinking:

"the personal computer is a petri dish for malware. It's a terrible consumer product. You wouldn't accept that flaw in any appliance"

..followed by:

Control over code execution is just a part of 21st century digital consumer products. You can argue with *how* Apple does it, but not *why*

What if someone at Apple looked into the future and saw computer vendors in the dock for knowingly selling defective products to the unknowing consumer in the same way that tobacco companies have done in times past?

Sounds like a great resume-builder for any hungry young DA, no?

I have absolutely no doubt that the major OS vendors know of serious security bugs in various parts of their products, but have decided that the task of fixing them all is far beyond the cost/benefit curve.

What if "starting over" (conceptually, if not literally) is the only way to demonstrate good faith?

I'll have more to say on the iPad later but one can't help being struck by the volume and vehemence of apparently technologically sophisticated people inveighing against the iPad.

Some are trying to dismiss these ravings by comparing them to certain comments made after the launch of the iPod in 2001: "No wireless. Les space than a Nomad. Lame.". I fear this January-26th thinking misses the point.

What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that's because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won't work on their local roads. (Sorry computer/car analogy. My bad.)

I'm often saddened by the infantilising effect of high technology on adults. From being in control of their world, they're thrust back to a childish, mediaeval world in which gremlins appear to torment them and disappear at will and against which magic, spells, and the local witch doctor are their only refuges.

With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.

Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what's happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there's no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn't have any windows open, understand what's happening here.

The visigoths are at the gate of the city. They're demanding access to software. they're demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.

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.

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get "real work" done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the "real work".

It's not. 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.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.

In the meantime, Adobe and Microsoft will continue to stamp their feet and whine.