The Father of Mobile Computing Is Not Impressed (fastcompany.com)

harrymcc writes: Starting in the late 1960s, Alan Kay envisioned a powerful portable computer that would be a revolutionary learning device, then built some of the necessary tech at Xerox PARC and elsewhere. Today, his ideas are all around us -- but Kay is distinctly unimpressed with the iPhone, iPad, and other modern devices, which he says encourage passivity rather than creativity. Brian Merchant talked to the computing pioneer for a wide-ranging interview on FastCompany. An excerpt from the interview: Google has been around for a long time now. I bitched at [Google] for years: Why the fuck can't we type in a question and get a decent answer? There's all sorts of pre-processing you can do with the computing we have now to put a lot more semantics in there, and look at the shit you're retrieving. And by the way, the stuff that isn't popular -- which is probably what most people need to read, if the thing even knew what the question is -- is buried [in Google search results], and most people won't go past a couple of results or clicks.

Comments

Re:The difference is stark

[tlhIngan]

Apple used to ship the best starting programming environment ever developed, Hypercard, for free on all of their machines. The same company doesn't allow programming on iOS except in very limited (in-game typically) ways. There is absolutely a sense that you should be a consumer, not a producer, on modern devices and it drives me crazy.

Well, get a Mac and program on iOS. Since iOS9 (or 8?) Apple has allowed users to deploy their code to personally owned iOS devices without paying $99 a year, and without Apple's approval.

In fact, there's a small underground open-source community of people who use this to put "unapproved" apps on their devices. Stuff Apple will never let in the store, yet you can deploy it to your devices and use it. And yes, it has to be open-source. Apple actually frowns on people using this method to distribute binaries.