One week till launch.
Im going to go out on a
very unpopular branch here and say, that having thought about this for quite a while, and from a totally objective non-Apple-fanboy viewpoint, in five years this will probably be seen as the most important user interface development since the original GUI. Ill even be wreckless enough to say that this will be more important than the iPhone in terms of changing its respective industry.
Why? Its all about abstraction. Most of us here, especially people in this thread who care about these kinds of things, are tech-savvy. But 99% of people
arent, and theres no good reason why they should have to be to benefit from technology. If you truly sit down and think about it from a non-techy point of view, computers nowadays fail at delivering seamless experiences for users. Example: Mac OS X is often lauded for how easy it is to install smaller shareware/freeware programs usually you open a disk image, drag the application to the Applications folder, then eject the disk image. It may seem dead simple to you and me, but in reality its needlessly complex for most people (my mom had to ask me the first time she had to install something using this method). The idea of a disk image is a weird concept, the idea of installing something by copying it is a weird concept, and then ejecting a non-existent disk and having to throw away a .dmg file? I mean seriously, is there
anything intuitive about that? Ive seen people run applications straight from disk images because they didnt know what to do with them. On the other hand, on an iPad, you click Install and then it gets installed. Done.
I mean, really, I think all semi-techies take
way too much for granted how familiar we are with computers. Just consider for a second how much the
most basic of GUI operationsthe file systemscares most people. How many people do you know who pretty much only use the desktop for organizing their files? Thats because its a physical, intuitive abstraction that they can latch onto. The rest of the file system is just scary innards to them. It doesnt matter that we have nice names for these folders like Documents or Movies many people are convinced that if they mess with anything outside of the desktop all hell will break lose. Im not just talking about grandma here, Im talking about a majority of the computer-using population. Most people dont need to be exposed to this crap.
So, yes, in a technical sense the iPad is a supersized iPod touch. But in terms of UI design its so much more important than that, because it brings the UI developments of the iPhone OS platform (in particular, enormous levels of abstracting away things) to something that is actually usable. For example, I generally prefer browsing the web on my iPhone than at my desktop, because as humans we are hard-wired to enjoy tactical experiences more often than not. However, I browse on my desktop a lot more because the iPhones viewport requires a laborious amount of scrolling and panning. I can browse the web comfortably on my phone for minutes at a time; you could probably comfortably browse the web on an iPad for many hours at a time. I cant imagine trying to make an entire Keynote/Powerpoint presentation from scratch on my phone; I could easily imagine making such a document on an iPad, and if that means I get to deal with an easier-to-use interface than whats on the desktop, then why not? The screen size is
everything. How many of you bitch that Dell sells computer monitors in multiple screen sizes at disparate price points?
Point is, everything that has made the iPhone OS successful needed to be scaled up to major computer use at some point, because its too good and too important for mass-computer-consumerism to not to. Current desktop OSs are like manual transmissions; the iPad is an automatic transmission, which is what the rest of the world wants. So far weve only gotten a small taste of it with our cell phones and iPods, but now Apple is bringing it into mainstream computer usage.
I know most of you will disagree with this evaluation. Ill just say that if five years from now Im proven wrong, Ill eat my words and you can mock me all you want. Im not going to be wrong though.
Though I'll be intrigued to see how well HTML5 players work on other mobile devices, say for example the Symbian Nokias that have been floating around for years.
