A Rain of Frogs

The boy was born in the city and lived in the city till he was seven, a true child of the Big Smoke. The year he turned seven however, the whole world changed. It changed in part because his father decided to follow a dream, and also because the deep recession gripping the country had left his parents with negative equity in their west-end condominium. So, with nothing but a truckload of possessions and a few hopes they moved more than half-way across the continent to a small town town in the B.C. interior.

The boy was pretty excited about the change, largely because it had been presented to him as a grand new adventure like the ones he had read about in his books, but also because he was too young to feel the cold sting of leaving friends and family and everything he knew behind. His sister, older and more aware, was miserable about the whole thing, convinced it was the end of the world.

But move they would, and one warm summer morning, after one last tour of the bicycle path around the condominium building on his orange banana-seat bike, after seeing the bike packed carefully into the big yellow truck and after one last check of the moisture of the soil in the potted plants that filled the family car they would tow across the country, the boy settled into the long bench seat beside his father and prepared for the great experience. His mother and sister followed behind in another car keeping each other company in misery.

Later, the boy would remember driving through endless rows of perfectly spaced evergreens as they drove away from the city. He would remember the feeling of near hypnosis as row after row of trees passed by, so perfectly spaced that he could see lines of trees stretching not only off to the side of the road, but diagonally forward and to the back as well. But that was later, for now he babbled in the way of seven-year-olds, asking his father a million and one questions, and receiving a million and one considered and patient answers about the new home they were heading toward, the particular colour of the sky, the nature of life.

As they drove the topography of the land slowly changed from the gentle flat farmlands and perfectly gridded forests surrounding the city that the boy had always known. Rock formations, bigger than any rocks the boy had ever seen steadily displaced the farm fields and grid-like forests. Drumlins formed further from the road as the landscape became lumpier and more rugged. The boy asked his father if the drumlins were mountains, and his father laughingly responded in the negative, that real mountains were so big that he’d barely be able to see the top from down here.

They had driven for hours before the boy finally asked how long the drive would be. When his father explained that it would take five days to drive across the country, and that they’d see a lot of really amazing things on the way, the boy bounced on the bench seat in excitement and munched on his peanut butter sandwich. Ten minutes later he was fast asleep, his happy dreams blanketed in the steady engine thrum of the big yellow truck.

The iPad isn’t an oversized iPhone.

If the iPad were an oversized anything, it would be an oversized iPod Touch, since it (currently) lacks the ability to make telephone calls. Many versions also lack the assisted GPS available in the iPhone, again making them more like the Touch.

The iPad isn’t a netbook killer.

The Netbook killer is in fact the modern Netbook itself. Too many features, too much cruft. The original purpose of the Netbook was to be a small, limited function computer that wasn’t a pain to take everywhere. Modern Netbooks are laptops, with (slightly) smaller screens.

I can hear all the gear-heads and tinkerers freaking out right now, because of the ‘closed’ operating system, because of the ‘closed’ app process and store, and because it’s made by Apple and they just don’t want to like anything Apple makes.

I can also hear them whining that the iPad doesn’t do anything that their Netbook can’t. It’s just a glorified, overpriced and under-featured Netbook. Nevermind the best-of-breed touch screen, never mind the operating system. Never mind the sheer joy of using it. And, never, ever mind the way you interact with it.

Whether or not people realize it, the iPad represents a fundamental shift in the way people not only use computers, but the very way they think about them. And no Netbook is ever going to do that. Steve Jobs was wrong, in my opinion, to draw the Netbook parallel in his presentation.

If anything, the iPhone and iPod Touch are more like miniaturized early iPads. Perhaps they were Apple’s way of teaching people how computing is going to work in the future, without scaring them away.

The iPad isn’t a metaphor.

Millions of people know how to touch their data instead of try to fit computing into a stale and difficult metaphor, thanks to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Now Apple has given the world something more useful.

The iPad isn’t a finished product.

The original iPhone bears very little resemblance to the current iPhone 3GS in terms of use and even appearance. The same will hold true for the iPad. Apple is again proving the value of one of the core principles of the Umbrella Manifesto, the one pertaining to perfection:

Perfection is a goal, not a destination. Create something today, improve it tomorrow.

The iPad isn’t a perfect product.

But it’s on the right road.

Just hours before Steve Jobs gets up on stage to announce what is widely expected to be an Apple table (either called the iSlate or iPad, according to the rumour mill), I want to say a couple things about it.

First, I think we are about to witness what the future will recognize as the beginning of the end of the desktop metaphor paradigm. This shift looks to be as big as the shift from CLI (Command Line Interface) to GUI (Graphic User Interface) pioneered on microcomputers by Apple in the early 1980s. The office/desktop metaphor has been with us for 26 years, and it’s likely time for the next step. That might be something like the iPhone/iPod Touch interface though I expect it will be a bit more refined and a lot more extended than the current iPhone 3.0 interface.

Second, I think we are about to witness a massive change in the way we consume media. In the past, we’ve had books, newspapers, magazines, radio, LPs/tapes/CDs, television, cinema and the web as primary sources of media. More recently, there has been a convergence of these media types into a single media interface, namely the computer. Books have been available in digital format accessible by computer for more than a decade, newspapers and magazines have been publishing on the web for even longer. Radio is available on our computers, in both traditional radio formats (Last.fm, for example) and more recently as podcasts. Music has probably been the most visible example, with the iTunes Music Store, driven by the wild success of the iPod, completely changing the way people buy and consume music. The iTMS has also been making similar inroads with television and movies.

But the face remains that the computer, in it’s current form, is not an ideal media interface. With its keyboard, mouse and familiar desktop interface, it has been far better suited to creating media.

I think this is what Apple, and more specifically Steve Jobs, are aiming to change this, by changing the paradigm – the very way people use computers. Instead of sitting at a desk (or setting on our laps a computer), clicking on the things with a mouse or trackpad, and typing on a keyboard, people will be ‘touching’ their media on the screen, able to manipulate it ‘directly’ rather than through a metaphor for a real-world experience. Coupling the touch screen with other technologies that Apple has been exploring, such as voice recognition on the iPhone, people will be able to speak to their media in addition to touching it.

While I think the hype surrounding this tablet announcement is rather extreme, I think this is in part because even non-techie people are glimpsing the potential that this device represents. It’s not the device itself, it’s the way in which it will fundamentally change our interactions with technology that is exciting people. Even the voices on the Jazz radio station that I listen to in the mornings were talking about it, and this is a station that is not generally up to speed on the latest technology, let alone the rumours surrounding it.

So I raise a glass to Steve Jobs, who may well be doing the ‘most important thing’ he has ever done by changing (again) the way we interact with technology. And I raise a glass to the new paradigm, which, like all new things, will be disruptive to existing paradigms, but open up massive new opportunities for those who are able to see past the actual hardware to the human interactions underneath.