Safari has become the new Finder. Say goodbye to the desktop metaphor.
After being lured into the world of Macintosh back in 1984 by a "new user experience," followed by a couple of decades of fine tuning my brain and eye-hand coordination, now the UI again represents both a challenge and an opportunity. I think I will adjust pretty easily despite my advancing years, and the new iPad should broaden computer usage to a much wider audience.
Files now live in the "cloud," hiding behind aliases and short cuts disguised as web pages. Locating things has become a search, rather than one's way down through a hierarchy of folders and files... type a few letters and you're there. Could it be that this is a better way for those among us who are not "list-oriented?"
Data entry has a new set of tools, Or a lack thereof.
No arrow keys. No undo. A pointing tool that has a mind of it's own. No Save commands. No Print or Print to PDF commands. A keyboard without numbers. A spelling corrector that fights with me that "Macintouch" should really be "Macintosh."
Some of these changes are "fixable" by using third-party software "apps." Others just require slight mind-adjustments, like using a special shift key to get numbers and punctuation.
The iPad is seductive despite its challenges. It's light. It's sturdy. It's "cute." it works well at most of my everyday tasks involving the web and email. It looks like it will integrate easily into my "system" for managing and viewing digital images, as soon as the necessary "camera adaptor" arrives from China.
It gives me a third option for portable computing between my MacBook and smartphone (Treo 700p). Deciding what to carry should be fairly easy since each product brings its own tradeoffs of functions vs weight. The Treo will go everywhere. The iPad will go with me whenever I have room. The laptop will go wherever I have to deal with troubleshooting or creative/design activities, or need other software capabilities that don't exist for the iPad.
For two and a half decades I have lived and taught the philosophy that good software, properly matched to the task at hand, will provide a menu command to perform whatever needs to be done. The promise of the iPad and its new interface will ultimately succeed if Apple and the app developers succeed at maintaining that same consistency and predictability. The iPad has a good chance to become the modern "computer for the rest of us," and for "them," too.
