On the iPad

What is interesting about the iPad?

There are a bunch of technologies making interesting convergences in the iPad including search, mobility, task oriented Human Computer Interaction (HCI), and networks, but let’s just look at the HCI part.

The iPad is all over the future of task-oriented-computing HCI, as were the OLPC XO, iPhone, Palm Pre, Android, etc. They make no attempt to even try to consider faking being a netbook, tablet, laptop, or any other general purpose Windows, Icon, Menu Pointer (WIMP) system. There is a bit of duck typing there, but make no mistake, the iPad isn’t a duck, er, a tablet PC, just like the Android isn’t just “a phone”.

A history lesson

Back when Led Zeppelin was still touring, and wizards flipped switches, punched cards, and built up circuit boards by hand, there was limited abstraction to computing. Users had to know what their computers were doing at a pretty low level to do, well, pretty much anything. Their hacking wasn’t mediated by much at all. There aren’t many metaphors to soldering on silicon.

And operating systems advanced. Abstract command-line interfaces (CLI) became prominent. CLIs tend to user ‘verb, noun’ command oriented systems.

rm -fr ./drafts/

vi on-the-ipad.txt

ping grantstavely.com

less /var/log/httpd/access.log

And they tend to have hierarchical organizational metaphors mediating the user experience.

_/home/grant/mail

/dev/modem

/var/www/html/grantstavely.com/index.php_

Then WIMP came along. WIMP tends employ ‘noun, verb‘ command oriented systems.

Select all objects, drag them to the trashcan.

Double-click header, click the Bold toolbar button

When log file is on screen, drag scroll bar down to scroll through entries

And they too are hierarchical experience metaphors with spatial orientation, and overlapping windows, and cursor and menu driven insanity mediating everything. Click here sort of stuff.

Both mediations — both abstractions — have advantages, and over time, lots of us, never having to punch cards or solder boards, put PCs in our homes and businesses, and solved problems with them. Wow.

But there are other mediations, other metaphors, other abstractions. Jacob Nielsen’s noncommand interfaces1 abandon these verb/noun, hierarchical, graphical intermediaries. They are what he calls task oriented. Like the iPhone.

Launch phone app, task-oriented device becomes a phone.

Return to task-selection “home” screen.

Launch camera app, task-oriented device becomes a camera.

This is deceptively similar to our trusty old world systems.

Write daemon in c that will spit bits out /dev/modem. Fax from minicomputer.

Or more recently.

Load Windows IBM Fax Application from floppy disk and the big beige box, monitor, and printer can be used like a cumbersome fax machine with too many buttons and a terrible UI.

Or even more recently.

Download skype, extract and install. Launch skype. Webcam on desktop computer runs a video-phone-ish document on the desktop on the CLI system.

It’s easy to forget that CLI and WIMP command interface experiences even are mediated, but at some point we learned how to pipe a stream through sed, to grab a scrollbar by carefully positioning a pointer using a brick of plastic with buttons on it, to layer windows, to manage running processes, to find hierarchically organized documents — we learned the syntax of verbs and nouns and adjectives. But don’t forget that these are metaphors constantly, always, mediating our experience.

Mediated Experiences

The menu is not the meal. Please refrain from eating the menu.

On the iPad, Pre, Android, and insert-your-favorite-hardware-here equivalent, our finger touches the data — a web page, or a picture, or a video — and swipes. The data moves. We pinch, rotate, zoom, or discard, the data. Launch a task-mode app and the device transforms.

Okay, this is starting to sound a lot like it came from the marketing department, bear with me. It’s still a mediated experience, but we can see the advancements in abstraction right?

Look, the experience is so different on these mobile task-oriented devices that comparing them to say, netbooks, is kinda silly. A touch screen, keyboardless iPad-ish PC running Windows 7, or fvwm, or whatever, is not a task-oriented system, but some of it’s applications might quack like one.

But where is the market?

That there are Apple fanatics muddies the water if we let it, but it’s such a boring way to look at the experience, the market, people, and so on.

The iPad might arguably be the first real shot anyone’s given at a general-use, task-oriented computing platform — well, at least since the iPhone and every device that copied it. But it’s not a phone. It’s not an ebook reader. It’s not a laptop. It’s a really weird set of limitations with a web user interface, and that’s about it.

That’s kinda insane.

I think the market is out there for an abstracted, task-oriented, noncommand, web-enabled device, converging apps, mobility, search, and so on. The iPad might not be it, but it is a tell as to where things are headed.

For Example

The WIMP browser, still interfaced with a CL-ish address bar, is cumbersome. You did not get here by selecting your address bar and embracing the hierarchy that is uniform resource locators. You didn’t think to yourself (I’m guessing):

Ah, http, the protocol, next to the grumpy :// guy that has two frowns. And then grantstavely.com, the Domain Name System A record for Grant’s web server. And lastly, “Oh, joy”, the virtual directory that is really just Apache trickery, “/blog/on-the-ipad”.

We’ve all watched people not do this. We use the web by searching for our favorite sites, or repeat-visiting subscriptions and bookmarks, or by following suggestions like the dozens in this article. Ugh.

So?

When an article at Read Write Web became the top google result for “facebook login” because of a popular article they published about Facebook’s distributed login platform, the search-protocol web browsing mode failed. Not realizing that they weren’t reaching Facebook through their normal, human, protocol-following google search, dozens of Facebook users complained to Read Write Web.

ok cool now can I get to facebook

The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN.

I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!

EXCUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE ME!!! WHY NOT JUST LEAVE IT ALONE!!!1111

Read Write Web had to edit their article to help them.

Dear visitors from Google. This site is not Facebook. This is a website called ReadWriteWeb that reports on news about Facebook and other Internet services. You can however click here and become a Fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, to receive our updates and learn more about the Internet. To access Facebook right now, click here. For future reference, type “facebook.com” into your browser address bar or enter “facebook” into Google and click on the first result. We recommend that you then save Facebook as a bookmark in your browser.

An Aside

See the click here, noun, verb stuff followed by the directions for how to use the verb, noun command-oriented parts. Note the suggestion to perpetuate the problem in the last helpful hint. I mean, the instructions are right, and necessary, but the opportunity here is obvious. Isn’t it?

6015+ days hath September 1993, and we are still scratching our heads about this?

Anyway

Those folks would probably be more successful with an iPad and a Facebook app. An app abstracts the address, like a browser’s bookmarks were supposed to. Arguably, bookmarks already do this, but making a bookmark an app privileges the bookmark in a powerful way, beyond the full-screen, customized, scaled experience that is the app. In an environment of full screen apps at the same level of importance as the browser, the search model of finding the same thing over and over again loses it’s efficiency.

But it’s just an iPhone

I think the size factor is more important than that. Looking at photos, watching videos, and reading articles on phones is a pretty poor experience. The pocket portability is a strength and a weakness on phones. I don’t plan on buying an iPad because it doesn’t solve any problems for me; but not because it’s too small, or too expensive to not multi-task — being a camera window, and an email window, and an IM window, and a menu, and a process management list all at once is a weakness, not a strength — I don’t plan on buying one because while I would like to have one, I’d like to have one less than I like to eat and drink really well, or get more camera lenses, or fly more places and check them out — and because I feel pretty damned unlimited with the CLI and WIMP crap I already have.

But I get the idea, and I think it’s really, really, fucking cool.