The IPad UI stupidity

Even though I don’t really care one way or another about whether I’m blogging about what everyone else is blogging about, after seeing pictures and having to deal with weeks of (over)-hype:

With all due respect to the Blogosphere, Mr. Steve Jobs, and Apple Inc., that IPad looks like it has serious flaws that are going to damage it long term in market.

It looks like a cross between the IPhone and the ITouch, and has a similar user interface.  While it will help Apple short term, long term, it will hurt them.

There are two giveaways of what will cause radical change in tablet design in the presentation:

One: If this device is so great and portable, why would I need a docking base with a keyboard, particularly for it’s size and the billing that it’s a device that allows me to break away from such unnecessary extras?  This is, after all, supposed to be the super-portable machine.

Two: As part of the whole demo,  Brushes for IPad was showcased.  It essentially looks like a very lightweight copy of Adobe Photoshop.  One of the interesting choices they decided to do was to show off different brushes in the program and how a person can in fact draw (and draw well, there were copies of Picasso).  While it is extremely true you can draw with your fingers (and I highly recommend it), this again highlights a unique problem of the IPad.  If it weren’t an issue about portability and cost, the Wacom Cintiq 21UX plus Photoshop allows for much finer grained control of the exact same task (because it is a pen) with an equally crisp screen.*

Considering the weight, form factor, and the physical dimensions, I actually can imagine someone lugging the IPad around.  Right now, the IPad complies with IPhone/IPod Touch apps and watches movies with you and browses the web with you.  At its current size, it can be taken to task to do more than just broadcast information (something that the IPhone has been critiqued for, that users use information more than they produce it).

Considering that there are already some apps that fulfill business needs (including small businesses) and individual needs (such as the few available to Doctors), the idea that the IPad would become popular because it is super-portable is not a large stretch. However, any hint of a large market is not going to happen without better input for marking up and producing all sorts of documents and objects that all sorts of people produce.  When people talk about the imaginary world of content production, it is probably incorrect to think of them in the Web 2.0 pyramid (a hattip to Andrew Chen for starting to point out the usefulness of the Bartle Square of MMO player types as how we interact in digital enviroments.)  Even though the Bartle Square is still wrong, it is useful to know that in fact the Bartle Square points out that we don’t consume blindly, and we interact in a wide environment with a wide variety of needs.  The IPad needs to quickly deal with your Aunt Martha’s pictures, while you scan the headlines to make sure that new ordinance isn’t based in your town before heading to work where you will write up some documents based on some shared spreadsheets.  And you may work for a small business too which is going to be affected by said ordinance, so you really need to know for that report and spreadsheet. (which means your Aunt Martha will just have to get a cheap Birthday Gift, I’m sorry.)  Just because that comment isn’t appearing on Twitter, Facebook, a blog, or a comment doesn’t mean it doesn’t have ripple effects on a wider world and that a large community of people are not doing all sorts of activities (including creative activities) because of what is in the public sphere.

The idea that the dock with the keyboard is unnecessary is not the problem. (It’s not, how are you going to use the thing comfortably when it is in a dock of some sort?)  The idea that one should buy a multi-thousand dollar special screen to draw on is silly.  It is that when push comes to shove, will there be a lot of input on that screen when one has to hold it one handed and type on a touchscreen, even if there are subsets and custom/semi-custom screens?  Will people take the IPad to task for their everyday lives as Nurses, Teachers, Electrical Engineers, Accountants, Waiters, Programmers, Designers, IT people, Chefs, Seamstresses, Professors, Vinters, Construction Workers, Architects, Doctors,Bankers (even if the world hates them right now, they are still potential users), Paralegals, Secretaries, ect.  Or all we all just going to read magazines, play video games, and paint with them? (Not that there is anything wrong with that, just not starting at $499, I think $500 is too much, I bet  it could be done for $300 once they are produced en mass -this is scarily going to become a commodity item within the next 3-5 years once the design is done correctly.)

It is is this object, when everything is combined, fast and simple that the IPad will cause mass adoption on its own terms?  If you want to really test out this theory that right now the UI is impossible to grow more as something where one can be productive, I don’t think Apple can or will have any plans to hand them out en mass to their store employees (with say Square plus a custom app that logs purchases per employee), even though all of them carry around a kind of custom tablet computer with a custom OS already.  I bet you (nothing, I don’t have money), that they won’t.  The OS compared to the minimal form isn’t durable enough for people to work with.  There isn’t enough tool in the machine to imagine what can be done by the end user.

I vote down.

*I’m going to be taken to task about this.  Pen computing is extremely controversial, though I still think it is a dynamic and high growth field in the long term for a wide variety of industries.  The reason it is controversial is the following:

1. People interweave pointing and writing.  This creates problems when you need to have very fast word recognition. (hasn’t been solved yet)
2. Anti-aliasing between pixels has to be considered a norm, which it is slowly.  Pen movements are based on the edges, and if they are not smooth, it is harder to follow the pen. (partially solved, see Apple’s usage of font’s and Microsoft’s ClearType)
3. Most Digital Pens have x/y calibration error to the screen (called a parallax error, except it is not about any sort of visual forshortening).   It throws off how people want to point and draw because they can’t see properly where the tip of the pen is touching the screen versus where it is on the screen when the edge appears as a digital representation. (not solved last I checked.)
4. Everyone has real life preferences with regards to writing material (and I am using that vaguely on purpose. You also can only mimic, not give exact one to one feeling. EG: I actually have preferences when it comes to drawing material and papers because of the way I draw.  This is very typical. It is also the same reason why Office Depot sells a ton of different kinds of pens. (solvable, offer custom/semi-custom coatings for both the tablet and the pen.  I’m sure lots of people will buy lots of spare semi-custom pens that have a certain slick feeling to go with their “rough but delicately thin feeling paper” tablet.)

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