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.

Comments

This is how it will all play out

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary

The world is paved with astroturf

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The world is paved with astroturf

[Theaetetus]

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's the biggest story in personal electronics for the next 6 days. After the iPod and the iPhone, Apple coming out with a new product is a major deal - particularly in how it influences the already existing markets of, respectively, music players, smartphones, and tablets.

Re:The world is paved with astroturf

[iamhassi]

"is it worth all the stories popping up in the tech world? "

Thank you!

Actually I'll take it a step forward: shut-up already! Tell me when it comes out and give me a full review with a components breakdown. I'm so incredibly tired of every tech site I go to running a article every day with potential design mock-ups, hypothetical processor specs, and emerging screen technologies that might appear in the new not-formally-announced Apple tablet. I've been reading Apple Tablet stories on slashdot for five years, and frankly I'm tired of hearing about it.

This thing has more hype than Duke Nukem Forever and half the credibility, at least Duek Nukem Forever had confirmed release dates.

So what about it /., am I still going to be reading Apple Tablet might-have stories on /. in 2015, or can we finally stop beating this very dead horse and bury it until it's really released?

Re:The world is paved with astroturf

[amicusNYCL]

It might be genuine people writing genuine articles, but it's still fed from the strategic "leaks" put out by Apple, with the purpose of generating hype. So the genuine people writing their genuine articles are actually Apple's PR strategy for getting people to talk about this without them having to make an official announcement. Of course, when they actually do make the announcement the hype will be so much that the free media coverage Apple will get out of it will be worth more than they would have ever wanted to spend on a pre-promo campaign for it.

So yeah, the articles are genuine, and it's also astroturfing, even if the authors don't realize they're astroturfing. Apple speculation is ridiculous and useless. It doesn't matter what the speculation is, we'll all found out exactly what Apple plans to do, exactly when Apple wants us to find that out, and it will have all of the features that it would have had if no one had been speculating.

Re:The world is paved with astroturf

[thesandtiger]

Tell me your address and I'll send the police over immediately - I know it's terrifying being forced to read these stories at gunpoint, but help is on the way!

Screw talking about some hypothetical gadget - what we should really be discussing is the huge number of people who are being forced to read and comment on articles they don't want to read. Why isn't the government doing something about this?!!

Files

[maxume]

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.

yawn

[Anonymous Coward]

i hereby nominate apple speculation as the most boring internet subculture

Missed a story?

[mathx314]

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.

Are they ahead of the market?

[trafic_man]

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.

more like a product in search of a market

[alen]

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

Files too much for n00bs...

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Files too much for n00bs...

[Coriolis]

I'm surprised you think this. I've watched friends and family (all smart people, before anyone starts implying anything) graduate from novices to regular users, and some to power users. I remember them being initially utterly perplexed by the file and folder metaphor. I couldn't tell you why, but I could suggest why: the metaphor is imperfect. Files and folders do not behave like paper, and the differences in behaviour can be very confusing. For example, if I file something in a physical folder and go to look for it later, there's usually no chance that I'll have look inside a nested folder that is, apart from the name, practically indistinguishable from the one that contains it. The problem seems (to me) to be that users have trouble establishing a sense of place, of where the documents are stored. Where's my letter? What's this "drive" you keep talking about? When I edit this picture, why doesn't it update in both the letters I was writing?

Geeks don't have this problem, because we think like this. We prefer to break our information down its atoms.

Don't get me wrong, the metaphor is better than what came before it, but I don't think it's the best we can do.

Obligatory...

[Hognoxious]

It would have the right number of buttons

That would be one, then? [ducks for cover]

briefcase-size versus booksize versus cellphone

[peter303]

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.

Re:briefcase-size versus booksize versus cellphone

[dangitman]

Firstly, "megapixel" is a stupid marketing term for resolution. But the way he used the word wasn't even grammatically correct. I don't think it's even technically correct - what does "decent megapixel" mean, that one megapixel is better than another megapixel? "More megapixels" would be a better usage, but still redundant as we already have the word "resolution."

...and another thing.

[jedidiah]

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".

Re:...and another thing.

[WilliamBaughman]

Consistency doesn't necessarily mean "stays the same," it can mean "does the same thing, the same way." Take OXO Good Grips, for example. A different tool for every task, but the handles are always black and little squishy so even people who have never cored a pineapple know how to hold the tool.

If a UI changes to suit a task, that's ok. The UI in the iPhone is constantly changing, but a button shaped like an arrow pointing to the right always opens a sub-menu. Selecting a text box always brings up a keyboard. And it gets more specialized than that, but not more confusing. If you're typing in a field that expects an email address, you get a ".com" button. I haven't seen anyone look at the ".com" button and freak out.

Desktop going away?

[ceoyoyo]

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.

In short:

[Sir_Lewk]

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.

Mostly-receive devices

[Animats]

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.

Nice, sure, but revolutionary?

[Em Ellel]

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

Re:Nice, sure, but revolutionary?

[radish]

As you say, it was the combination and the polish. There's no one thing (that I can think of) on the iPhone that you can't find on some previous device/software. But there's also no previous device with all (or even many) of those things, polished to such a high degree. From a feature list point of view it's certainly evolutionary - but I'd certainly say it was revolutionary from an overall user experience point of view.

As the Gizmodo article points out, the general UI idea of a page of icons which load full screen apps is just like Palm. And I was a big Palm fan back in the day - their problem was that although the UI was fine, it was hampered by the tech to the point where even if the concept worked it was so unattractive to use as to be very niche. Resistive touch screens required stylii, which suck. Early models were monochrome, even color models had nothing like the graphical fidelity of the iPhone. The graphics chips couldn't do things like full screen animations, fades, etc and of course there was no such thing as persistent wireless internet (and yes, I had the Palm III GSM modem, it blew chunks even then!). Apple waited until the tech existed to do what they knew would impress people, rather than try to make something they hoped would sell within the limits of the available tech. In the process they pretty much totally reinvented the highend cellphone market and IMHO brought the PDA concept back from the dead.

My personal story: I'm not an Apple fan. I do own a Mac, but it's my least used machine and I really don't like it very much. I grew up on Atari, DOS/Windows, Palm, Nokia and later Linux. When the iPhone came out I had no intention of buying one, until I happened to be by the Apple store in a mall on launch weekend and popped in to see what all the fuss was about. Within a couple of minutes of playing with it I was in line to buy one, and several upgrades later I have no regrets. I still detest iTunes, and am officially "meh" on OSX, but nothing is tempting me away from the iPhone. Android has potential, but it's not there yet.

Re:We'll see.

[BobMcD]

I think you're overlooking the overall design. TFA alludes to it well, but I'll be explicit about it:

Apple is looking into killing the Mac as we know it.

They have a world in their mind's eye where they control all content through a single iTunes store. Your phone, your appliance, your workstation - all the same, with all of their users shopping directly from Apple itself. All applications that the machine will run are vetted and controlled, and Apple gets a cut of everything. They also get gobs and gobs of data from the purchase habits and the apps themselves.

If this tablet succeeds, they inch closer to their goal. Thus, they could well slash the cost, probably beyond any hopes of a profit, towards achieving their goal of getting a cut on all the software.

And if you like a world where you can download and run free software, this concept probably should frighten you, at least a little. Because if Apple does it, and does it right, the world will follow behind them.

At any rate, bookmark this post. You may want to come back later and compare it to what actually happened... ;)

Re:my "stove top" app has been accepted by Apple

[DCstewieG]

You only think you're joking.

http://mashable.com/2010/01/04/pocket-heater-iphone/

Re:Is there a market or hidden demand for tablets?

[Sancho]

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?