Technology

For those of you who aren’t up to speed on the Apple/Adobe/Flash/iPhone situation, here are the highlights:

• Apple sells a handful of mobile devices: iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.
• Adobe owns and promotes the Flash platform, which is throughout the web for games, video streaming, and advertising.  In general, these are the three things for which Flash is well known and widely used.
• Flash sucks on the Mac. It always has. Adobe blames Apple. Apple blames Adobe.
• Apple has thus far refused to allow Flash to run on the iPhone.  Steve Jobs has explained why.
• Adobe has thus far failed to demonstrate a competent implementation of Flash on a mobile device.

It seems that, on the topic of Flash on the iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch), we’re at a bit of an impasse.  For the sake of brevity, I believe that Flash can die a fiery death and claim its rightful throne in an outer circle of Hell.

Don’t get me wrong, I wholly recognize and accept that Flash filled a very genuine need for a long time. I also insist that this is no longer the case.

With the advent of HTML 5 and open video standards (ignoring the Ogg Theora vs h.264 debate), we no longer need Flash to stream and embed video files.  If you need a demonstration, just take a look at SublimeVideo.  This knocks out the first of three primary uses for Flash.  In the wake of the iPad, many of the most popular sites on the ‘net have rebuilt their sites to harness HTML 5 and eschew flash.

HTML 5 has also provided an alternative for rich user experiences in web-based advertising.  For a demonstration, check out Apple’s preview of iPhone OS 4. Skip to the 49 minute mark.  I’ll wait. See? Flash is no longer necessary for rich, interactive advertising.

That leaves us with games. I don’t have an answer to that, but I’m starting to see some early indication that this, too, will be solved shortly.

Also, for the sake of discussion, I accept that Flash provided a platform upon which web designers could double as web developers. HTML 5 may replace a lot of the functionality inherent contemporary uses for Flash, but you need to be a developer to use them.  Adobe could build an HTML 5 development suite to solve this problem, but I haven’t seen any indication that they care to do that.

Then, there’s the problem of security. In 2009, malicious PDF files comprised 80% of all exploits (source). Flash has its own security problems, yet Adobe doesn’t seem to be serious about addressing them (source).

This brings us to a recent release, “Our thoughts on open markets”, from the chairmen and co-founders of Adobe.  Rather than sharing a lengthy response, I’ll direct you toward the Macalope’s appropriately snarky reaction.  It’s worth reading, and I mostly agree with him.

The one part of their letter that really bothers me, though, is this:

In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? And we believe the answer is: nobody — and everybody, but certainly not a single company.

Let’s look at the numbers.

According to StatCounter, in analyzing the traffic of more than 3 million websites, mobile web browsers are responsible for a paltry 2.29% of all traffic.  Of that 2.29%, Mobile Safari is the second most popular, taking a 20% share of the mobile market.  That means that Mobile Safari is responsible for 0.05% of all traffic on the sites surveyed by StatCounter.

0.05% works out to 1 out of every 2000.

And yet, despite these relatively minuscule numbers, Adobe has the gall to imply that Apple is somehow controlling the future of the open web by banning a proprietary runtime from running on their device.

That makes no sense to me.

Get with it, Adobe. Flash is a sinking ship.

A while back, I came across a screenshot of the upcoming Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. It looked like a fine enough upgrade, visually, but one thing stuck out like a sore thumb:  the save icon.

Observe:

If you’re reading this blog, odds are you can spot the Save icon immediately.  For those of you who don’t recognize it, it’s the fourth icon from the left in the top row — between the folder and the printer.

Now that you see it, I have two problems with it.

Reason #1: It’s a floppy disk, f’r cryin’ out loud!

I haven’t used a floppy disk since 2003. I don’t own a single floppy disk, nor do I own a single device capable of reading a floppy disk. Why? Because the floppy disk is dead.

The icon works for most users because they know what a floppy disk icon represents. For many of us, that icon has always been a floppy disk. But what about the kids that are in school these days? Most of them have never seen a floppy disk, so you can forget about them ever actually having used one.

This raises a couple of questions:

1. Why not update the icon with a new image?
2. What should we use instead of a floppy disk?

As far as I can tell, the most prevalent argument against changing the icon is that “the save icon has always been a floppy disk”.

That’s fine, I suppose, but at what point do we hamper ourselves by continuing to do things a certain way simply because that’s how they had always been done?  Ignoring that sort of groupthink is one of the most essential elements to innovation in any field.  This sort of leads me to my second point …

Reason #2: Why do we even have a Save icon anymore?

In a day when you can buy a gigabyte of storage for less than $0.10, many of us have more storage available than we could possibly use in the foreseeable future.  I easily know a dozen people with more than 500 GB of free space on their main hard drive, so why not put that space to use?

Instead of forcing users to manually save their work, and having to teach new users the mantra of “Save early, save often.”, why not do the dirty work for them?

Applications should save your work automatically, at regular intervals, and store the last several versions of your document in a single file.  Add a “Browse File History” dialog to your application (or, even better, to the operating system itself) and you’ve added the ability to go back in time to undo something that you may have done, then saved, then wish you hadn’t done.

For most things (like Word documents), the file sizes would remain trivially small (under 1 MB in most common cases) and the user would never again have to worry about losing a term paper or an important proposal because of something like this:

As a bonus, you can unclutter your toolbar a bit by knocking out that ridiculously outdated floppy disk icon.

Solving the second problem also solves the first.  It’s a win-win for everyone and the implementation is trivial, so why don’t more developers do it?

My guess is that it breaks the habit of how things are done.  No one wants to train users that they don’t have to save their work for their work to be safe, nor do they want to be blamed when the data file is corrupted or some underlying problem (such as hard disk failure) prevents the save from executing successfully.  That only makes sense to me if you’re a lazy developer.

Interestingly enough, Apple has been trying to solve this problem in a lot of its most recent consumer-oriented software.  iPhoto and iMovie both save your work on exit, although I’m not sure if they save on any regular interval while those applications are running.  The same is true for the iWork suite (Keynote, Pages, and Numbers) on the iPad.

iWork on the Mac still requires the user to save manually, but the Save icon is absent from the toolbar.  Instead, saving your work is done through a keyboard shortcut (⌘S) or a menu command (File > Save).  Apple goes so far as to recommend this keyboard shortcut as a de facto standard in its Human Interface Guidelines, so this is fairly consistent on the Mac platform and makes sense to most Mac users.  I almost expect the next version of iWork to make autosaving its default behavior.

Microsoft Office?  They have an icon that has been essentially unchanged since 1992:

The floppy disk is dead, folks.  Please let it rest in peace.

Okay … Here’s a quick rundown of what’s installed on my iPad right now.

First, a quick look at all of the stock apps:

• Calendar — The first of the built-in apps, Calendar is quite improved in its upgrade from the iPhone.  The Month view, especially in landscape orientation, is everything I wanted it to be.
• Contacts — This app takes on the look and feel of a Moleskin address book on the iPad.  Its functionality is pretty straight-forward.
• Notes — This is basically the same as the iPhone app, with the addition of a list of all your existing notes on the left side of the screen when in portrait orientation.  It still has that god-awful font, Marker Felt, which I absolutely hate.
• Google Maps — Arguably the most improved app, compared to its iPhone version, Maps on the iPad is fast. The larger display lends itself well to the experience, resulting in a touch-interactive map that is roughly the same size as the map I see when I use Google Maps on my computer.  This is the way Google Maps was meant to be used.
• Videos — Used for playing movies, TV shows, and other videos, this app is pretty straight-forward.  There is a lot of aesthetic polish (watch the transition from one view to the next, as you select a movie, then press play), which makes for a very satisfying experience.
• YouTube — Again, this is a pretty straight-forward app.  It uses the h.264 encodes of the videos on YouTube, which usually come across surprisingly crisp.  There are a lot of minor compression artifacts, but that’s just the nature of the beast.  The best feature here is the ability to read the detailed video info, browse for similar videos, or read and post comments, all while watching the video in the top half of the screen.
• iTunes — This is just another view of the iTunes Store, formatted to better fit the iPad screen.  It harnesses a lot of the HTML5 upgrade we saw to the store last year.  You can use it to find and buy music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks, and iTunes U content.  I still don’t understand why this app is called “iTunes” (versus “iTunes Store”).  It confuses users who are used to using iTunes to play their music on their laptop desktop.
• App Store — This is functionally identical to the iTunes app, but is exclusive to downloadable apps.
• Settings — Not much has really changed here from the iPhone, aside from a list of all the setting groups (the top-most menu on the iPhone app) on the left hand side, allowing you to quickly and easily jump from one group of settings to the next.
• Safari — There are a few minor aesthetic changes (mostly in the navigation and location bars), but this is otherwise the same browser you’d find on the iPhone.  The larger screen and blazingly fast A4 SoC make this feel like a desktop browsing experience.
• Mail – In portrait orientation, this app is virtually unchanged.  In landscape orientation, a list of all your messages for the current mailbox (Inbox, Sent, Trash, etc.) will appear on the left.
• Photos — I haven’t used this much, but it seems to be a from-scratch build, specifically designed for the iPad.  Photos are grouped into visual stacks (based on Event or Album information), then you use your finger to select and open any of the piles.
• iPod — As its name would suggest, this is the music playback app.  Its visual interface has been completely redesigned for the iPad, but I’m not sure that it makes the best possible use of the screen real estate.  If you’ve ever used an iPod, you’ll know how to use this app.  I still don’t understand why Cover Flow and iTunes LP were omitted.

Now, for the apps that I’ve downloaded:

• iBooks — $0 — This is an eBook reader, built and designed by Apple for the iPad.  It came with a free copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, which I thought was a nice touch.  The artwork is bright and vibrant, as you’d expect on this gorgeous screen.  There’s a built-in dictionary (just double-tap on a word), one-touch brightness controls (saving you a trip back to the Settings app), and a built-in search tool.  The iBookstore is literally built onto the backside of the app, where you can instantly buy and download a book to add to your library.  You can also download free books (ePub format) from Google Books or Project Gutenburg, then sync them to your iPad from your desktop iTunes software.
• Netflix — $0 — This might just be the killer app for the iPad launch.  It’s basically a custom web interface for the Netflix.com website, but it also enables access to all of the streaming (aka “Watch Instantly”) content they offer.  A Netflix subscription is required, starting at around $9 per month.
• ABC Player — $0 — Like the Netflix app, this is basically a custom web interface to the streaming section of ABC.com, where you can watch the latest episodes from many of the network’s most popular series.  It’s pretty buggy right now, though, as I haven’t gotten a single episode to load successfully.
• WeatherBug Elite for iPad — $0 — This is one of the best weather applications I’ve seen, on any platform, and for any device.  It uses the Google Maps interface and mapping data as its base, then adds several layers of radar and satellite info.  It also has widgets for current conditions, a 6-day forecast, and local weather cameras.
• Twitteriffic — $0 — This is the least worst of all the Twitter apps currently available for the iPad.  It gets the job done, but it absolutely pales in comparison to Tweetie 2 for the iPhone.
• Harbor Master HD — $0 — This is a line-drawing game where you have to guide ships to docks so they can unload their cargo, then guide them from the dock to the edge of the map.  The goal is to unload as many ships as possible before two of them collide.  This game is simple, addictive, gorgeous, and free.  What’s not to like?
• Labyrinth 2 HD Lite — $0 — This is the demo version of Labyrinth 2 HD, which itself is an adaptation of an old wood-and-marble game I mastered in elementary school.  It adds a lot of new mechanics (lasers, magnets, fans, and more), which add to the fun and keep things interesting.  I’ll probably be buying the full version of this (for $8) before too long.
• Zen Bound 2 — $8 — This game is sort of hard to describe, but the goal is to wrap a piece of rope around a wooden block, covering the entire block with rope.  You do this by twisting and turning the block with the iPad’s multitouch interface.  The soundtrack is calm and ambient, adding to the meditative nature of the whole package.  Highly recommended.
• Canabalt — $3 — I bought this for my iPhone about six months ago and have really enjoyed it.  It’s a one-button action/arcade game, where the goal is simply to jump across various gaps and obstacles as your character runs — at an increasingly faster pace — across a city’s skyline.  The pixel-based artwork scales beautifully to the iPad screen, which alleviates the biggest problem I’ve seen with running iPhone apps on the iPad.

So, there you have it: a quick run-down of everything currently on my iPad.  There are a lot of details left out (like the ink bleed-through rendered on the back of every page in iBooks), so I’m sure that I’ll be going in-depth on one or more of these before too long.

For a closer look at the built-in apps, plus iBooks, check out this set of guided tours from Apple.

I’ve had this thing in my grubby little paws since just before 9am, so it’s probably time to share some of my first-day impressions.

1. The iPad is quite a bit heavier than I expected.  It weighs in at 1.5 lbs (roughly twice what my wife’s Nook weighs), which is enough to fatigue your hands or wrists if you try to hold it for any substantial amount of time.  Holding it with one hand can be difficult, due both to its size and weight.  It really seems to be designed to hold in both hands or propped against something like your lap or the arm of a chair.
2. There weren’t any headphones in the box, which is kind of obnoxious.  For $499, you figure those would be included.
3. The screen is absolutely phenomenal.  It’s razor-sharp, blindingly bright at its max setting, and readable at all viewing angles.
4. Media files sync to the iPad a lot faster than they do to the iPhone or the iPod touch.  I suspect that the Apple A4 SoC is the primary culprit here.
5. Speaking of the A4, this thing is fast.  It absolutely leaves my iPhone in the dust.
6. All of the Twitter apps suck.  Come on, Tweetie.  Get with it.
7. All of the built-in apps have been rebuilt to take advantage of the iPad’s speed and size.  The Calendar app is the most improved, in my opinion, but all of the apps are significantly improved over their iPhone counterparts.  The iPod app is missing the Cover Flow interface, which is kind of peculiar.
8. If you hold the “Volume Down” button for more than a few clicks, it automatically jumps to the “Mute” position.  I’m not sure if I like that, but it’s an interesting peek into some of the thought and care that went into building this device.  (The iPhone doesn’t have a similar behavior.)
9. John Gruber tweeted, “Running iPhone apps on your iPad is like driving your new BMW on the sidewalk.”  I completely agree.
10. The iBooks app came with a free copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, which was a nice surprise.  The app itself is pretty slick, but I don’t see it beating the Kindle or Nook at the e-book game.  Anyone who is serious about reading e-books will go with an e-ink screen.  That said, this will probably be huge with parents who are reading to their kids and teaching them to read.
11. After a day of hands-on experience, the iPad feels less like “a big iPhone” than the iPhone feels like “a small iPad”.  That’s sort of obtuse, but I haven’t come up with a better way to say it.  After using the iPad for a few hours, then picking up my iPhone to make a phone call, the iPhone felt smaller and more cramped.  Comparatively, the iPad felt quite natural (rather than “expansive” or “spread out”) when I first picked it up.
12. The new keyboard has a bit of a learning curve, but I’m getting used to it.  I can easily see that some people will strongly dislike it and never quite get used to it.  I can’t help but wonder if that’s why the iPad ships with support for Bluetooth keyboard and has an optional keyboard dock available.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the iPad so far.  It really is a new type of device, standing somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop.

It differs from previous efforts at tablet-style computers in one important way: almost all of its predecessors are trying to use existing operating systems to run existing software with some bolted-on touch interface.  For whatever reason, that simply hasn’t worked.

This isn’t a Mac.  It isn’t a PC.  It runs the iPhone OS, but it’s not an iPhone.  It’s a new device, with new goals and new ways of thinking.  It’s certainly not for everyone, but I think that Apple is onto something with the iPad.  This may not be the future of common computing, but a lot of the ideas and paradigms on the iPad (and the iPhone, for that matter) are here to stay.

I just finished reading Cory Doctrow’s latest piece for BoingBoing, entitled “Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)“.  In it, he makes a few points that I feel need to be addressed.

First:

[L]ook at that Marvel app (just look at it). I was a comic-book kid, and I’m a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for me was sharing them. If there was ever a medium that relied on kids swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics. And the used market for comics! It was — and is — huge, and vital. I can’t even count how many times I’ve gone spelunking in the used comic-bins at a great and musty store to find back issues that I’d missed, or sample new titles on the cheap. [...]

So what does Marvel do to “enhance” its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous [sic] sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites.

On this point, I actually quite agree with Doctrow.  Unfortunately, however, this is the direction that all consumable media seems to be headed.  Consumer content, in the near future, will all be downloaded media.  This started with downloadable music nearly ten years ago, but has since grown to include books (see: Kindle, nook), movies (see: Xbox Live, PlayStation Store, iTunes Store, Amazon Video on Demand), and video games (see: Wii Shop Channel, DSi Shop, Xbox Live, PlayStation Store, iTunes Store).

I’ve said for years that “the disc is dead”, meaning that physical media is on a rapid decline.  The Corporation doesn’t make much on second-hand sales (via places like used CD and video game shops), so they’ve spent years trying to find ways to get rid of that secondary sale.  With downloadable media, they’ve done exactly that.

That’s not to say that the disc is necessarily extinct, just that its life as a primary medium is rapidly coming to an end.  There will always be the guy who wants to have a stack of stuff on a shelf somewhere.  The tactile experience is important to a lot of people, but those people are very quickly becoming an overwhelmed minority.

So, gone soon will be the days of swapping CDs, DVDs, video games, books, and even comic books with your friends and neighbors in hopes of finding something new and exciting on which to spend your money.  The future is full of 30-second samples, game demos, book excerpts, and movie trailers.  Whether you like it or not (and I don’t), this is an inevitability.

Next:

Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of "that's too complicated for my mom" (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn't too complicated for their poor old mothers).

Here, Doctrow is at least partially off his rocker.

Sure, the hardware is locked down, but how is that different from any other component in any modern system?  You don't see people modifying motherboards or video cards anymore, do you?  Do you find people opening their cell phones to install high-gain antennas? What about a neighbor down the street who has upgraded his microwave to give it more power?

No?  I didn't think so.

As platforms grow in complexity, they create a necessity for obscurity and eschew openness.  You need a degree in Computer Engineering to even begin to understand the complex nature of most modern electronic systems.  Even if the latest, greatest gadget shipped with a full system schematic and detailed pin-out charts for every IC, the vast majority of us would have absolutely no idea what to do with that information.

Sure, it would be nice to know that any given system is wide open and modifiable as the Apple ][, but let's face it: that's a long-bygone era.

Now, as for the software hackers?  This is easily one of the best-documented platforms available.  Sure, you have to pony up $99/yr to run your own code on your own iPad (which I disagree with), but the tools and information necessary to build software for the iPad are free and well-documented.

To further this point, just take a look at the phenomenal success of independent, part-time developers on the iPhone OS platform.  There are no guarantees in life, but there are enough one-man operations making healthy earnings in the App Store that it’s impossible to dismiss as a fluke.

Furthermore, the 30-pin dock connector is well-documented and accessible from the iPhone SDK.  If you want to build an add-on hardware component for the iPad (or the iPhone, or the iPod touch), you can.

Continuing:

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

This is so narrow-minded that I almost laughed it off completely.  There are so many opportunities to teach the “take it apart, learn how it works, and put it back together” ethic to your kids that any argument to the contrary is absolutely absurd.

Don’t believe me?  Take apart your vacuum cleaner, build a t-shirt cannon, or build a high-end radio-controlled car from a hobby kit.

Moving on:

I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who’ll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff. The reason people have stopped paying for a lot of “content” isn’t just that they can get it for free, though: it’s that they can get lots of competing stuff for free, too.

On this, I mostly agree.  Major media outlets in all formats have thus far completely missed opportunities to evolve with the modern state of technology.  Instead, they’ve looked for means by which to resist the need to revisit their archaic, out-dated business models.  Music publishers and movie studios, for example, are so busy trying to sue the hell out of anyone who illegally downloads anything that they’re not trying to figure out why these people are so unwilling to pay for content.

Finally:

Gadgets come and gadgets go. The iPad you buy today will be e-waste in a year or two (less, if you decide not to pay to have the battery changed for you). The real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.

This is pure, unadulterated fear-mongering.

Do I think that the iPad and the strategies surrounding it are flawless?  No, I don’t.

One example: I haven’t written about it here, but I’m not a big fan of Apple’s approval process for the App Store.  I don’t mind the idea of a central repository, but I think that Apple has so far fumbled in its role as a gatekeeper.

Doctrow’s EFF-fueled rage against the iPad, however, is pretty predictable.  He’s a high-profile activist for open, transparent systems (even which such a system is infeasible), so of course he’s going to launch this sort of volley against the iPad.  I don’t think that he totally missed the mark, but I’m also not convinced that he’s being completely genuine.

In late 2007, Asus launched the first volley in what may prove to be a revolution of computing.  The Eee PC, as they called it, seems to be a homogenizing device.  What started as “a cheap, utilitiarian subnotebook running a specialized Linux distribution” would, in a matter of months, evolve into “a cheap, capably-powered subnotebook running Windows XP”.  The difference was subtle, perhaps, but it was important.

The hardware upgrades — esp. the introduction of Intel’s 1.6 GHz Atom CPU — would elevate the device from being a modern tinker toy for hackers to being a legitimate low-end hardware platform for anyone who just needs a basic laptop for checking their email, surfing the web, and littering Facebook with Farmville updates.

This low-end platform would come to be known as the “netbook” (a portmanteau of “internet” and “notebook”).  It’s a smaller than the average notebook or laptop, it has ridiculous battery life (6-8 hours or more, in most cases), it’s both cheap (referring to its components and build quality) and affordable (referring to its retail price), and it’s enough of a computer that most folks can do most of the things that they want to do most of the time.

Until last summer, however, I’d never actually given the netbook a fair shake.  For me, it was always the bicycle companion to my sports car.  I recognized its value and usefulness, but didn’t necessarily want or need one.

Then, after her five-year-old iBook finally bit the dust, Doni (my nerdy cousin-in-law and blogger extraordinaire) traded a collection of gift cards and cash for a shiny new Eee PC 1000 HD.  It featured a 900 MHz Intel CPU, a 10″ widescreen LCD (up from the then-standard 9″ displays), a 160 GB hard drive (in a world where an 8 GB flash drive was standard), and 1 GB of RAM.  She asked me if I thought it would be “good enough” get her to the end of the year, when she’d buy a new MacBook.  I gave her a few caveats, but the consensus was that it would be mostly sufficient.

Then, over the next three or four months, something happened.  She didn’t complain about the crippled hardware, the small screen, the tiny keyboard, or even the fact that it ran Windows XP.  Instead, it mostly did what she wanted it to do.  It didn’t gracefully handle CPU-intensive tasks (like photo or video editing), nor did it play well with HD video content, but it did just about everything else she needed from it.

For me, though, it would’ve been a deal-breaker.  I do a lot of highly processor-intensive stuff on a fairly regular basis, so having something that chokes on a 15-megapixel JPG is simply not an option.

During that time, I came across Joey Devilla’s “Fast Food, Apple Pies, and Why Netbooks Suck“.  His conclusion, as you might surmise, was pretty predictable:

Netbooks, as a blend of the worst of both mobile and laptop worlds, will be a transitional technology; at best, they’ll enjoy a brief heyday similar to that of the fax machine.

The people are going with smartphones, and as developers, you should be following them.

This is a sentiment with which I mostly agreed, so I didn’t really give it much thought.

It’s also the sort of conclusion that Google reinforced — perhaps inadvertently — with their introduction of Google Chrome OS, which returns us to the dumb-terminals-and-mainframes idea that the network is the computer.  Google is building a system where all of your data resides on an internet server, somewhere in the cloud, and you just need a low-cost way to access that information.  For them, the netbook appears to be the most obvious solution.

When Doni had finally scraped enough pennies together to spring for a new MacBook, I offered to buy the netbook from her.  I needed a small Windows client for a few tasks, but I also wanted to take Google’s new OS for a spin on target hardware instead of using a virtual machine on my Mac.

Then, several weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to find Jeff Atwood’s “A Democracy of Netbooks” in my RSS queue.  The core of his argument is pretty compelling:

Netbooks are the endpoint of four decades of computing — the final, ubiquitous manifestation of “A PC on every desk and in every home”. But netbooks are more than just PCs. If the internet is the ultimate force of democratization in the world, then netbooks are the instrument by which that democracy will be achieved.

No monthly fees and contracts.

No gatekeepers.

Nobody telling you what you can and can’t do with your hardware, or on their network.

To dismiss netbooks as like laptops, but lamer is to completely miss the importance of this pivotal moment in computing — when pervasive internet and the mass production of inexpensive portable computers finally intersected. I’m talking about unlimited access to the complete sum of human knowledge, and free, unfettered communication with anyone on earth. For everyone.

In 134 words, my entire perspective on the netbook platform had been changed.

Suddenly, I was looking at netbooks with less of an expectation as to what they could do for me, but more with regard to what they could do for everyone else. Most people don’t need to render hours upon hours of video files, sort through tens of thousands of photographs, manage a library of 8,000+ songs, or host a 4-way video conference.  In other words, I realized that I am the exception.

It’s a good thing, too, because Apple would introduce the iPad by the end of the month.  Steve Jobs is unrelenting his argument against netbooks, but I would argue that the iPad is effectively Apple’s take on the netbook idea.  They’re reinforcing the bicycle analogy, and the idea of “a computer on every desk and in every home”, but they’re doing it their own way.  That’s what they do.

(Notice that I didn’t say “a Mac on every desk”.  Apple appears to be quite content to be a luxury company, selling luxury devices, catering to a smaller market, and maintaining wider profit margins.)

Before the debut presentation had even concluded, I was reading critical reviews of the device.  I’ve already addressed some of the most common criticisms (here and here), so I won’t go into that again.

Then, over the next few weeks, something remarkable happened.  More people started to “get it”.

John Gruber:

Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.

That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

That’s not to say there aren’t trade-offs involved. Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they’re more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics. So too it’ll be with computers. Eventually, the vast majority will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.

Minimal Mac:

You know what is not being accessed in [the] future?

Files. Folders. Desktop.

You know what is being used?

Images. Video. Data.

Welcome to the future.

Neven Mrgan:

A detail from the iPad keynote: Steve demos the Mail application and he puts it in horizontal mode. Oh, look, an Inbox list pops in. Neat.

And I think, hmmm I wonder if you can resize that splitter, making the source list wider. Its a tiny target, so it would be hard to grab…

And then I realize: you can’t resize it.

And a bright light did shine upon my liberated face and a voice did whisper a thunder: You’re free. Free of pointless preferences and finger-baiting adjustments.

Rob Foster:

The third conversation came from a completely unexpected source. I have a good friend and neighbor who works remodeling houses and who reluctantly agreed to have me design a website for his company after being pressured by his family. I don’t know anyone else who hates computers more. He has refused to get an email address. He doesn’t use his mobile phone to do anything other than make a call. And he often mocks me anytime I even mention computers. I want to make it perfectly clear that I’m not exaggerating his attitude. At all.

He stopped by my house the day of the keynote to talk about his new website and when he walked in I happened to have some iPad photos open on my laptop. He asked me what they were about and I casually described the new Apple “tablet” that had just been released. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it considering his historical lack of interest in computers. He asked me a couple of questions and then we discussed his site.

Three days later, he called me and the following exchange ensued. “Dude, I think I want to get one of those Apple tablets for my business.” “Really?” I said. “Yeah, I went and looked at them and they seem really easy to use. I think it would work great for showing potential customers my work and for doing bids on.” I was completely speechless.

All of this serves to reinforce this idea that the iPad and the netbook both provide a means by which to establish ubiquitous presence for personal computing.  I think that we’re on the verge of a revolution in personal computing, no different from the invention of the integrated microprocessor and the introduction of the original Mac in 1984.

The iPad and the netbook, however, each offer distinctively different theories on where we’ll be as the dust settles.  The netbook seeks to miniaturize the experience, whereas the iPad is trying to strip it down to the essentials and completely redefine it.  Which is the better case?

Until last week, I wasn’t sure that I necessarily leaned one way or the other.  Then, about two weeks ago, Google and ReadWriteWeb demonstrated just how much I take my technical understandings for granted.

Basically, for whatever reason, “facebook login” is a common search for Google.  On this day, however, an article on ReadWriteWeb showed up as the first hit for that search.  Then, instead of using critical thinking or deductive reasoning to find the correct search result, people just clicked on the first result, found the Facebook logo, and logged in.  Mike Melanson did a post-mortem from his perspective.

Compounding this problem, perhaps, is the way some of the address bars work in some of today’s web browers.  In Firefox and Chrome, for example, typing a non-URL string (ex. “facebook login”) into the address bar invisibly does a Google search, “I’m Feeling Lucky”-style, and delivers you to the first result on the list.

For some of us, hilarity ensued.  For others, it was a shocking example of just how bad things have gotten for the typical user.  Ed Finkler wrote one of the best problem summaries I’ve read.  This is the money quote, but you really should read the whole thing:

As a Nerdy Power User, I am well-versed in how to navigate a multitasking interface, and for the most part I understand how and why it works the way it does. I, in fact, enjoy learning about the intricacies of these kinds of systems. [...]

What I’ve learned from interacting with most computer users, though, is that they do not give a rat’s ass about how computers work. They want to accomplish certain tasks, and will do this in the way that is most sensible and direct for them. And the way they end up accomplishing these tasks within the multitasking window motif is typically not the way I would do it. [...]

When folks need an elevator, we should give them an elevator, not an airplane. We’ve been giving them airplanes for 30 years, and then laughing at them for being too stupid to fly them right.

There are a ton of great responses to this piece, but I think that Jono DiCarlo captured my reaction:

The idea of navigating by URL is so fundamental to how the Web works that it’s hard to imagine abstracting it away. More than that, trying to abstract it away is dangerous. Imagine someone who doesn’t understand URLs clicking on a link in a phishing attack that takes them to a fake PayPal or whatever. If they don’t know to look at the URL, how are they going to have any idea that they’re not on the real PayPal?

People using the Web without understanding URLs are quite literally putting themselves in danger, just as if they went out driving on the road without understanding how to read road signs.

I’m not suggesting that we make people take a driver’s test or earn a license before they’re allowed to use the Web. I’m not sure what solution to this is, but I know it involves doing a better job of educating people. Maybe Firefox could do more to teach first-time users what URLs are and why they should pay attention to them.

If there was ever something like a video-game tutorial level for the Internet, then reading URLs surely ought to be one of the skills that the “player” needs to master before moving on.

Then, as I was driving to work the other day, I realized something:  This won’t be a problem on the iPad.  If a user wants to use Facebook, he launches the Facebook app.  This logging-in-to-the-wrong-page problem is effectively solved on the iPad because, for the most part, it doesn’t exist.  The Facebook app is the single most-downloaded application on the iPhone.

So, I suppose that the question stands.  Assuming that we’re on a path toward “a computer on every desk and in every home”, and that either the iPad or the netbook will be the means to that end, which is the better solution?

Quite honestly, I don’t know, but I don’t think that they can peacefully coexist.