In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the Commodore 64, I threw together this timeline of the computing devices I or my family have owned using Timeline 3D. The C=64 had a huge influence on my life. You can read what I wrote about it on it’s 25th anniversary here.
I’ve been using dual displays since 1997 or ’98. Any time I have to use Photoshop on my MacBook without a monitor connected, I find it frustrating. I need that second screen for the UI.
Adobe is doing something really intriguing with iPad app development. They have just announced three new iPad apps. Easel is what you might expect: a finger painting app, though I must say it looks impressive. The other two apps are basically Photoshop add-ons. After all, a serious Photoshop user isn’t going to replace their laptop or desktop with a tablet. But if you have an iPad, could it be useful while you are working in Photoshop?
Nav is an iPad app that gives you a customizable tool bar. Tap a tool on your iPad and it is immediately selected in Photoshop on your Mac. It also presents the foreground and background color chips, and it let’s you navigate your open documents, selecting which one to display in Photoshop. I love this concept! Color Lava takes a similar approach, giving you a palette on which to mix colors. You can create swatches that you can then send to Photoshop and use immediately.
To top it off, Adobe has released the Photoshop Touch SDK that will allow developers to create their own apps that communicate with Photoshop. This is brilliant, and I can’t wait to see what developers come up with. It is likely we will see support apps for other software as well. It’s an exciting development that may have significant repercussions on desktop application design.
Rosenfeld Media was having a great discount on their books at Interaction 11, which they were selling from a little, wheeled cart deemed the Bookmobile. I decided to take advantage of the offer and pick up Nathan Shedroff’s Design is the Problem, a book I’ve been wanting to read for some time. I asked if they were accepting credit cards, and Lou showed me his iPad. He selected the book I was purchasing within an app and then swiped my card through a little square doohickey plugged into the headphone jack. I was then able to sign with my finger and later received an email receipt that included a Google map pinpointing the location at which I made the purchase.
The doohickey is the free card reader that comes with Square:
Square enables people from all walks of life to accept credit and debit cards. Taxi drivers can get paid quickly without dealing with the headache of printers, pens and paper; a pastry chef that only sells at seasonal farmer’s markets now can accept payments without getting charged a monthly fee; food trucks now have a simple and mobile way to migrate from being limited to cash. You can even have your friend that owes you $20 pay you with their card since their wallet always seems to be empty when you remind them about it.
Square takes a 2.75% processing fee for each swiped transaction as it occurs. That’s it. This seems like a very efficient and affordable way for small and/or temporary shops—especially mobile ones—to handle credit. It also appears to be a really good business model for Square. The card reader and app (for iPhone, iPad, and Android) are both free, lowering the barrier to potential users of the service. In other words, I could sign up for the service, get the reader, and download the app just to carry around with me in case I wanted somebody to be able to pay me with a credit card. This could be used for Girl Scout bake sales, church fundraisers, and garage sales. That’s hip.
Friday saw the release of the Interaction 11 app for the iPhone and iPad. Smudgeproof has done an excellent job on this one. There are two parts of the application: Sessions and Map. The Sessions part is a detailed schedule organized by day that provides access to descriptions of each presentation. The killer feature is the ability to mark sessions and events for inclusion on “My Schedule”, a second mode that only lists what I’m planning to attend. I puzzled over the lack of this feature in last year’s application. This is extremely useful, and I’ve already planned which talks I want to see.
The map feature will also be very useful to attendees, as it marks all of the conference hotels, many of the outstanding restaurants, party venues, and of course, the conference venues.
The visual design of the app is quite good, utilizing the conference visual identity. Screens are primarily gray so that it isn’t blinding when viewed in a darkened auditorium. The interface design is also nicely done. I like their mechanism for indicating selected sessions. I do wish the map linked out to the web, providing direct access to hotel and restaurant websites, as well as Google’s directions. I also would prefer to swipe from one day to the next in the schedule, rather than having to press the arrows. Finally, the name of the app is unfortunate. It isn’t the IxDA app—it’s the Interaction 11 app—and the “i” should be capitalized. But, overall, this is a very good app that will be useful during the conference.
Releasing the iPhone SDK was a significant milestone in the current Apple device phenomenon, but I consider the App Store to be even more significant. Sure, there are complaints about the reviews, and some feel that it isn’t easy enough to browse, but the App Store made it so easy to purchase, download, and update applications right from the device that I think it deserves a lot of credit for the popularity of iPhone apps. Instant gratification is a powerful force. Today, Apple brought that concept back to the desktop with the new Mac App Store.
Many probably breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t added as yet one more section in iTunes. The application is a simple one with five views: featured apps, top charts, categories, purchases, and updates. There are already over a thousand apps offered for purchase. I believe that this is going to fundamentally change the way computer software is not only bought and sold, but designed. We’re going to see even more independent developers competing against the Adobes and Microsofts and winning. We’re going to see a lot of smaller, more focussed, elegant, and yes, cheaper, applications. Desktop computer software will become a consumer item, purchased as readily as a song or movie—just like it is on the iPhone and iPad.
The Mac—the world’s friendliest computer—just got a fair bit friendlier. Okay, Microsoft, you can announce your copycat marketplace now.
If my own family is any indication, Apple has had very good sales for the gift-giving quarter. The wives of both of my brother-in-laws were playing on their new iPads. My brother finally got his first Apple product: an iPod Touch. I gave four Apple TVs as gifts, one of which was to my parents and was their first Apple product. Out of six households, that’s seven Apple products, not to mention the apps and media purchases that they will result in. Of those six, mine was the only all-Mac household. Ten years ago, I never would have guessed that they would all be using Apple products, but the iPhone, more so than the iPod, changed everything. Apple is ripe for the picking.
I’ve chronicled my wife’s decision to replace her old PowerBook with an iPad, rather than with a new MacBook. Now that she has been using it for a couple months, I’m pleased to report that it is filling the role nicely. She loves it, and doesn’t regret the decision at all. She has put together and given Keynote presentations with it and has most recently begun using Bento for general organization.
The best illustration of the iPad’s suitability was just last Friday when she took her car in for the state inspection. She took her iPad with her, and while she waited, she was doing work—she was being productive and logging time she will be paid for. She confirmed for me later that, without the iPad, she wouldn’t have taken her laptop with her and would most likely have played games on her iPhone.
A few months ago, I theorized about the future of publishing. In that post, I suggested that the iBookstore has the potential to remove the middleman—the publisher—allowing authors to easily sell their work directly. Lulu, arguably the most prominent self-publishing service, is staying on top of things. They recently announced that they are an “Apple approved aggregator.” This means that they can get your book listed in Apple’s iBookstore. They’ll convert your book to ePub format, submit it to Apple, give it an ISBN, and provide sales reports. Of course, this all comes to the tune of 20% of the sales after Apple takes its cut. They’re also providing the service to other publishers, allowing them to get their entire catalog onto the store without having to do the work themselves.
It’s a brilliant move and a promising business model. Considering that Apple has not yet detailed how indie authors can self-publish to the store, I expect Lulu’s service will be enticing.
I have yet to succumb to the siren song of Twitter. Most of my fellow interaction designers are shocked to learn that fact. It is assumed that everyone attending a conference is hooked into the “backchannel”. I’ve heard all manner of arguments as to why it’s better than blogging/email/IM/SMS/forums/sliced bread, or at least why it should be used in concert. I’ve even had an acquaintance insist that he follows me on Twitter. I just don’t have the time to write constantly about what I’m doing. I think it’s more than enough to write a daily blog post. If you think I’m signing up for DesignAnHour, you’re fooling yourself.
There are two things that have made me seriously consider signing up. The first was Interaction 10, out of fear that I would miss a lot. I don’t think I did. The other is the prevalence of tweet-based promotional give-aways. I’ve seen two or three promotions in which anyone that tweeted about a certain product would be entered into a drawing for a free iPad. There were two Mac software bundles I purchased for which I could have received an additional app if I had tweeted about the bundle. That’s great viral marketing, but I can’t even keep up with all of the blogs I subscribe to. Where would I get the time to read hundreds of tweets a day?
Charlie Stross and other journalists are theorizing that Apple is trail blazing a new world for computing. As Charlie puts it,
Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future… on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist.
If they are to be believed, the iPhone OS, also found on the iPod Touch and iPad (which Apple just announced the sale of the first millionth), represents a vision of the future of software and user interface design. The desktop metaphor is being replaced… by what?
I wouldn’t say there is a singular metaphor to replace the desktop. There is, however, a replacement theme. It’s a theme that we’ve been seeing in movies, like Minority Report and Avatar, for quite some time. It’s been echoed across everything from Microsoft’s Surface to Autodesk’s multi-touch wall. The theme is “direct manipulation.” As such, we are seeing a plethora of very literal visual metaphors, such as page flipping, spinners, and details taken from physical objects, right down to the stitching in the leather seams of the “pocket” in the Notes app and the stitched binding in the Contacts app on the iPad. Some of them are behavioral, while others are merely decorative, but they all speak to a very familiar, physical approach to interaction.
