Apple have revealed the iPad and in doing so shown their vision for their native tablet ecosystem. Touch as standard and web as standard – the device to replace the laptop.
It is important to realise that the iPad is not being aimed at the professional artist or the hardcore tech guy, but for most people. That means that you are not going to need a manual to use it, and it also means that the guys at the spec-oriented end of the commentary spectrum are not going to have much to talk about! Like Dr. Ernest Prabhakar who managed Apple’s Mac OS X open source strategy at Apple wrote – reducing the iPad to a list of features “is like reducing the experience of eating chocolate to a list of chemicals.”
It’s not about the hardware, it’s about the applications – so that is what I will focus on here.
Browsing the web, doing email, photos, video, music, casual games.
It is not about running your iPhone apps on a bigger screen – these activities all look very different when you apply them to the touch environment. Think back to when you were young and you had to choose between using a paint brush and using your fingers when painting a picture. Using your fingers always felt much more natural and that is why we love to zoom, tap and scroll around a screen – free of the limitations a mouse imposes on our movement.
The Apple team demonstrated the touch version of iWork that they have been working on for the past year. These applications look very different to their desktop partners and for good reason – many of the old metaphors don’t make sense now! It is going to be interesting to see what developers build in this space when they too have had a year to work on it.
It would have been easy for Apple to install their regular Mac OSX onto tablet hardware but what really separates the iPad from the other guys is that Apple have been training developers on how to develop their applications for a touch-native environment for the past two years, through the iPhone, and they will launch the iPad with over 140,000 apps.
Designing for touch means completely rethinking the typical user interface widgets that work really well with a mouse – hot spots towards corners, long thin scroll bars, manipulating objects by using buttons at their edges, having buttons at all… these elements don’t make as much sense when you are using your fingers. We are more likely to want to navigate and move around chunks of content by touching and gesturing the blocks. This fundamental conceptual shift will continue to challenge designers to think about the Minority Report situation while giving them a mass-market platform that exists today, to build it on.
But the importance that is placed on applications does not mean that Apple has put themselves at the mercy of developers. Apple build their products to satisfy customers first:
- The operating system was for Macs, not for every computer ever.
- The music store was for iPod owners, not music distributers.
- The phone was for people, not carriers.
- The app platform is for people, not developers.
The constraints that have been placed on developers are really interesting to follow because most people don’t need background processes, most people don’t need a file system and most people don’t mind using a single store to buy everything. Like they have done in other markets, Apple bring their loyal customer base of over 125m credit card enabled iStore accounts to the table and this demand means there is a void to fill – so developers have released over 140,000 apps that have led to a combined 12 billion iStore product downloads so far.
It is interesting that nobody ever complained about the lack of multi-tasking before. Your camera takes photos, and nothing more. Your GPS only gives you directions. Your DVD player only plays movies. Most devices single-task and when they need more they make it a seamless integration. Your oven has a clock in it. Apps can do the same thing. There is a much more technical discussion to be had but the decision to keep apps independent is a strong one.
It says a lot that during the announcement keynote Steve Jobs and his team sat down on the couch to demo the device, because if you can do things from your couch you can do them from almost anywhere. But it is not a phone, it is a tablet.
I am going to try to replace my MacBook Pro laptop with an iPad. I don’t see the constraint of running a single app at once to be a hurdle, because I will always have my iPhone with me and that is already where I run 80% of the things I do – my action list, my calendar, my email, twitter, skype, facebook, train timetables, maps, foursquare, the camera, last.fm and more.
The iPad will hopefully satisfy the remaining 20% of tasks that could be grouped as content and manipulation – the internet, filtering masses of data, writing lengthy emails, watching movies, producing documents. The internet is the main one – I really liked playing with the Google Chrome OS because it reminds you that computers are now largely a window to the web. Right now the iPhone with its touch interface and gestures is the closest you can get to holding the internet in your hands, and the iPad is going to be a much more intimate and natural scale for doing that. The web is most of what I do online.
I am certainly curious about how this combination will work – is enough of my life online to enable it? Will I have enough access to the information and files I need to work with? What new opportunities will it lead to?
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