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The Apple Tablet Interface Must Be Like This
kylevh writes "On one side, there are the people who think that a traditional GUI—one built on windows, folders and the old desktop metaphor—is the only way to go for a tablet. In another camp, there are the ones who are dreaming about magic 3D interfaces and other experimental stuff, thinking that Apple would come up with a wondrous new interface that nobody can imagine now, one that will bring universal love, world peace and pancakes for everyone. Both camps are wrong: The iPhone started a UI revolution, and the tablet is just step two. Here's why." There are lots of cool UI ideas in there, even if it is entirely speculation. It's worth a read just to think about what the future could be like.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary
I get that the idea of an Apple tablet is intriguing, but is it worth all the stories popping up in the tech world? I mean, there's speculation about it showing up on gaming blogs. Lots of these articles are genuine, but I'm starting to smell a little astroturf too.
It is okay for files to go away, right up until the point that I notice I can't access some data because it is stuck in some app.
And I don't mean that files should never go away, I just mean that each time I notice it, I get confirmation that they aren't done making whatever it was that they changed work correctly yet.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
i hereby nominate apple speculation as the most boring internet subculture
Oh, huh, I must have missed the announcement that the Apple tablet wasn't just a rumor but actually a real thing. Odd, normally I'm on top of things like that. Oh well.
From the article “For its part, Asus has netbooks and smartbooks running on Android and Chrome OS in its R&D labs, according to Shih, but is waiting until conditions are right to release them.” “Prototypes of tablet or slate PCs - touchscreen machines with no keyboards suited to watching media, reading e-books and web browsing - are sitting in Asus labs but Shih said the company is holding back on releasing any devices.” There may also be a product cycle from a hacked prototype in the R&D lab to full consumer release. The article makes it seem like they have the things in boxes ready to ship, its just that the Chairman Jonney Shih is waiting for the right time to slam his hand on the easy button and get them to market. What bothers me about this is it seems these comments are aimed at confusing investors into believing Asus is leading the way with these technologies like they did with the Eee PC. That does not seem to be the case.
It turns the center of iSlate into a heater good for making coffee or heating ramen noodles. The CPU is right under that spot. All I do it run a program that counts how much Steve Jobs is making and it heats up real quick.
netbooks have crappy margins. building a tablet where you are forced to buy "content" just to use it is a stealth way of increasing average revenue per unit
It's true enough that a tablet PC that's essentially just a scaled up iPhone would be pretty cool. If it's based on something similar to iPhone OS it'd be easy for developers to port existing apps too, so the App Store would fill up with software for it relatively quickly too. A tablet scale version of Orbital would be brilliant.
But...
It'd cost a lot. It wouldn't be particularly usable for traditional apps like email. It'd be great for watching films and stuff, but not as good as a TV. I guess it'd appeal to a narrow band of Apple nerds; even fewer than bought into the Macbook Air. While I'm sure Apple are capable of releasing something like that, and making a profit out of it, I can't help but think they're cleverer than that. Whatever is coming is going to have to be bigger (in the sense of appealing to the populace rather than a tiny subset of it) than a mere tablet even if they make it super snazzy.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
It never ceases to amaze me how some people think that things like files
and folders are too confusing for the novice. They are a pretty intuitive
metaphor and heirarchical organization is something that humans tend to do
naturally. A lot of this seems to be mindless fear mongering and I really
don't get what the "self interest" is here.
A "normal" person can navigate Virgin Megastore but they can't do the same
thing with the same content in files and folders?
Nonsense.
People are being actively discouraged from exploring the interface and gaining
any understanding it. This is limiting even with this "revolutionary new UI"
that the iphone is supposed to be.
Even the "databases" that files get sucked into still end up being simple and
relatively flat heirarchies.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That would be one, then? [ducks for cover]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'll be disappointed. But if it is going to be a color eInk reader with similar friendliness as the iPhone, then there might be hope.
The "briefcase" size is the maximum transportable computer size with the most comfortable size screen, keyboard; largest battery, memories, peripherals.
The booksize computer is the smallest screen that gives you decent megapixel. So much software and webpages runs out-of-the-box for the megapixel screen and not on the one-eighth siblings- the smartphones. The book size easily fits into a daypack or handbag.
Raskin describes this idea of the interface for every task being different. The device mutates and models itself on whatever is being done. The UI CHANGES to suit the task.
This sounds remarkably like the EXACT OPPOSITE of the sort of "consistency" that's supposed to be the bedrock of "good interfaces".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Humans see in 2 dimensions, we can infer 3D data from various signals I will not go into in this post. When you are viewing something in a 2 dimensional plane, you can see the entirety of the plane at once. When looking in 3-space, you can only see a projection of that space onto a 2 dimensional plane. You will never be able to simply understand everything in that space at one point, which is why they aren't popular. They are difficult to use, and are only useful for gimmicks.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
Has anyone RTFA??? The author claims that the iPhone is radical because it "transforms" into various appliances.... an idea lead by the "visionary" Jef Raskins (Oh, let's forget about that stupid Canon Cat idea which kinda F'd up any idea of how much of a Nostradamus this guy was.
It's called "Maximize" in any modern GUI. Hide the start menu, make your screen black, set up "one touch" for desktop icons, and every application now magically has an iPhone interface.
The article author seems to think that the iPhone interface is going to take over everything. That the app-that-takes-over-the-whole-screen paradigm is the universal solution to all computing.
We did that, twenty years ago. As soon as we developed computers powerful enough to multitask, we did. And I don't mean playing music in the background, but running multiple programs at once and interacting with them. For a small screen mobile device the one app at a time paradigm is pretty much mandatory. For larger screens, you want to see multiple things at a time.
Yes.
At the very least, forcing users to learn something new can hardly be considered a usability improvement. Trying to represent files on a computer in anything more than two dimensions is always going to fail because it messes up the presentation to information ratio.
3D file managers are like powerpoint presentations with lots of animations and noises. The concept sounds really cool, until you actually realize that you are not adding information, but rather distracting from it.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I've always thought that the desktop metaphor was a short sighted misstep in interface design. It doesn't scale well. It tries to duplicate a convention that is the result of the realities of storing and managing physical files, and along with that it duplicates all of it's shortcomings. I have been very pleased to see, through the iPhone and the internet, that it is finally passing away.
I too hope that the tablet mac follows this trend. Rest in peace desktop metaphor, may your days on my computer soon be ended.
There's a difference between devices that are mostly for receiving information, and those that are for doing something with it. Music players, "e-book" readers, navigation devices, and entertainment devices in general are mostly-receive. They need a much simpler interface than a creation device. Try to cram a CAD application into the iPhone interface. It's possible, but it's not happy there.
This is a bigger distinction than the form factor. Mostly-receive devices can get along with a blunt interface of big buttons.
Once the Wall Street Journal starts publishing details, you know that they are using a purposeful leak. They wouldn't put their reputation on a rumor, and Apple has to keep their secretive product development intact to preserve their brand identity.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703405704575015362653644260.html
Can someone please SERIOUSLY ( no pro or anti apple fanaticism please) explain what exactly is so revolutionary about iPhone interface?
They have pages of icons - kind of like desktop UI, but pretty much EXACLY like 90's PalmOS and many other portable OS's.
They added gestures on OS level (scroll bar everywhere, instead of certain part of the screen), which was also available on PC and some advanced PalmOS apps - although it was a nice touch to make it part of OS. Multi-touch is cute, but hardly a revolution (except maybe literally)
They removed many standard UI components like date pickers and replaced them with clunky wheels - that was probably a step back.
They added a software repository- the kind Linux world was using for a decade.
They added extra sensors to the OS - which were nice, but also been available on other devices for a while.
There is nothing new here except for putting bunch of existing things all together, for which they certainly deserve praise, but all in all it seems like a great evolutionary work, hardly a revolutionary one.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
This is the sixth article this month on Slashdot directly relating to a apple {vaporware} tablet...
It's not that 3d user interfaces have been fully explored, but that simulated 3d interfaces on 2d desktops have some fundamental limitations. We already have some amount of simulated pseudo-depth: windows can lie on top of other windows, etc.
The problem is that by the time you get around to interacting with something, you're interacting with a 2d euclidean plane which presents a projection of some 3d model. It doesn't make the plane 3d. You can't reach around and touch the "middle" of an 3d object projected onto a 2d plane. That's a problem. These might be somewhat ameliorated by true 3d interfaces (where the display itself is 3d), but that tech has yet to mature.
If you think about it, even the way we work on our typical desk is mostly 2d, from a topological perspective. I have a pile of papers and some random crap lying around my desk. When I go to grab a document to work on, I don't just reach into the middle of a stack and pull out the right one. I don't have that capability. I need to go and start flipping pages, basically morphing my 2d topology to reveal some object hidden in 3d, and only then interact with it.
That's not to say that all 3d effects and stuff are useless. Simulated 3d is a great way of providing visual cues that we have been training ourselves on since we opened our eyes. That can be a very important aspect of intuitive interfaces.. but fundamentally it acts as a visual highlight. The goodness or badness of any particular 3d interface depends entirely on how effectively the _2d_ projection is.
Thirdly, "true" 3d is actually too limiting. We are forced to live in a 3d world, but our computers give us access to many more dimensions, weirder dimensions, than that. We can provide 2d projections of abstract non-fixed-dimensional objects, like n-ary trees (e.g. filesystems). An example of a projection of that abstract object to a 2d interface would be spotlight. It provides a 2d textbox which behaves in strange and weird ways - a 2d textbox that projects 2d manipulations (type some characters), into an arbitrary traversal of the tree. Compare the utility of that to the utility of a "true" 3d rendered filesystem. What value would that add? Sure, it would look neat, but what extra thing would you gain from it?
There's nothing magic about 3d. Computers operate above and beyond limitations of 3 dimensions, and are currently constrained to expose their behaviour through primarily 2d interfaces. Simulating 3d on top of 2d user interfaces, aside from the "visual cue" aspect, is kind of an arbitrary choice.. not necessarily the best one.
-Laxitive
The netbook craze has shown one thing: average users no longer care about speed or enormous screen size. Honestly, I would have never believed anyone if they said I could buy a gigahertz phone in 2010, I'm not sure I would have believed them. If it can play MP3s, 720p, and requires little maintenance, most users are going to be happy.
Pretty soon the only thing the user is going to care about is the size of the screen. They'll want it to dock to a keyboard and mouse when they sit down to write a paper. Otherwise, they'd like to drag it around the house. It won't be a computer, so much as an interface to their data - as the article states, a true information appliance.
The Apple product may suck, but it will probably sell people on the idea that tablets are "cool." And in a way, that may be the most important thing to go to the next level of interaction with computers.
Think about the iMacs that were just released: wireless keyboard and mouse, enormous display with a stand that only requires a power cable. Exchange the stand with a dock and make it smaller with a touch interface. Hopefully they will provide some good hardware I/O on the dock, but again, for the regular users, they won't care if it has every sort of port in the world. As long as they can get on youtube and facebook without having to fuss with a traditional computer, they will be fine.
The average Slashdot reader probably owns about 50 paperback books. It sure is a neat for factor, isn't it?
The thing is that nobody has ever made a half-decent paperback-sized tablet. Odds are that it will sell.
I agree with TFA that the iPhone OS is the best choice of OS for Apple. Not because it is the best possible OS for a tablet, but because it is a great OS that people like. It has an interface that keeps people buying apps and songs and whatnot (books seem like a good thing for a table). It has an interface that keeps them from developing their own software and thus keeps them from hacking and "stealing" so-called "intellectual property"...
Or so it would seem. Good luck with that in the long run. :-)
I hate posting negatively, even more so about the dead, but it really is time the legend was buried with the man.
Back when it was still possible I was in a fortunate position which gave me access to many of the Valley's elite.
Raskin still sticks out in my mind as far and away the least credible.
Put simply, he suffered problems I've seen afflict other failed would-be futurists in other places. His ideas were all grounded on a past that had never existed. And when the world didn't turn out to match his dreams, it was everybody else's fault.
On a more positive note, I'm looking forward to forming an opinion of the tablet next Thursday (my time) but don't have over-inflated expectations. At launch, the Touch was clearly the most important user interface innovation since 1984 and the only product in recent years I both ordered and received on the first possible day. But applying Stuart Kauffman's analysis of navigation strategies for rugged fitness landscapes, there is ever less scope for radical innovation and more likelihood of gain from incremental strategies, the bleedingly obvious double click on a word resolution of the supposed problem of a selection interface being a case in point.
Leaving aside the media capabilities that we can safely assume, my judgment of the tablet will be based on whether it looks likely that it will eventually run a few litmus test applications well enough: Bento, OmniGraffle, Keynote, TextWrangler and Perl 6. I won't need all of them, but might find it harder to justify without at least a couple.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
If the digital handwriting problem could be solved, there would be demand for a tablet. Taking notes is something that computers still don't do particularly well. You can get by, sure, and there are some applications which aid in that, but it's not quite the same as being able to easily sketch or make simple diagrams by hand and integrate those with text.
The other main use for a tablet form factor is for consumption of media. Touchscreens will probably not be as good as typing for quite a long time, if ever. But if you don't need to type much, then it can be fine. Watching movies and reading books would work with a tablet. The main problem, of course, is cost. When you can buy a laptop that also does those things, why in the world would you bother with paying more money to get a tablet? What do you gain, other than perhaps something which is lighter weight?
Having endured through tons of interfaces that required a stylus to properly operate, the iPhone was the first that combined a "finger friendly" environment with sleek hardware and the ability to plug into the apple ecosystem.
I lived through various early versions of Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Windows Mobile on Palm, blackberry, and Good Technology (exchange connectivity many years ago before Microsoft built it into the product).
At the time they were all great since that was the best we had. Once iPhone came out, all those other solutions felt like ancient technology.
A similar phenomenon happened with the iPod. MP3 players were around long before iPod, and they were cool, since that is all we had. Once iPod came out, all prior MP3 players looked clunky and old.
Apple has a habit of setting the bar for design, and a couple of years later, once everyone else catches up, people think that the state of the art always used to be this way. In reality, many technologies did exist before Apple did their version, but Apple has a way of raising the design standard, and forcing others to raise theirs.
-ted
yeah, the apple hype on this is disgusting.
There hasn't been any thing said by apple. As soon as they made an announcement that something was going on at the end of January, everyone else start hyping something that no on knows anything about.
Watch those corners