The iPad is Disruptive

There has been a lot of positive and negative commentary on the iPad and while its future has not been written, it seems to me that's its going to be very, very bright. A really good article about the disruptive potential of the iPad was penned by Chris Mexcer on MacNewsWorld Yesterday.

For those folks who doubt the potential of the iPad, just remember that the iPod wasn't hailed as a game changer when it was introduced. The iPhone was criticized for its lack of features, 3rd party applications, and use of AT&T when it was introduced. As one person wrote (sorry I can't find the article) Apple doesn't release a product with all the bells and whistles immediately. It releases a device that provides a powerfully simple user experience and then builds on that foundation in iterations over the course of several years. iPad may not have every feature you want in a slate, but its going to get most of them - or at least the ones that matter - within the first couple of years.

The iPad is going to fundamentally change the way we interact with content from video to publishing. Just look at all the "me too" announcements being made about new slate devices. The iPad hasn't even shipped and its already defining a new market.

iPad for Publishing

In an April of 2009 blog post I predicted that the iPad (which I called the 10" mystery device at the time) would allow Apple to dominate the video industry (games, movies and television) in the same way that the iTunes/iPod allowed them to dominate the music industry and the iPhone to dominate the mobile phone industry. I stand by that prediction, but I want to add another industry to Apple dominance story, publishing.

When I speak about publishing I'm talking not only about books but also magazines and newspapers. Just take a look at announcements by Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, and Wired. They all plan to support the iPad and you can bet they'll have applications on the ready when the device launches or shortly there after. But why are these major publishers so interested in the iPad? I read this article on Baynewser which answers that question. The article quoted Chris Anderson of Wired at TED 2010 stating that the iPad "[is] an opportunity to reset the economics," of digital publishing. "For the first time, people may value this experience so much they'll pay for it." That got my attention.

One of the problems with digital content on the Web is that people expect it to be free. In fact, that's one of the greatest strengths of the Web: the amount of free content. While free is great for consumers and the World, it doesn't do much for publishers in terms of putting food on the table. The iPad provides an opportunity to change all that. We've already become accustomed to paying for iPhone applications, its seems natural to pay for iPad magazines, books, and news papers provided the experience is significantly better than the dead-tree versions. And it will be.

The iPad is the perfect blend between the traditional in-the-hand dead-tree reading experience and the digital on-the-desktop reading experience. In fact, its superior to both. iPad will allow you to read what you want, when you want just like a paper book, magazine, or newspaper. But the iPad will also allow you to do so much more like search for keywords, make notes, carry two dozen books/magazines/newspapers with you at once. The iPad is far more versatile than its comparatively anemic brethren, the Amazon Kindle. With a full color screen and a powerful set of application tools, you can do amazing things with the iPad. Things that no other eReader has been able to deliver except for the iPhone.

iPad for Education

Back in the mid 80's when I was in collage for engineering I was thinking about how cool it would be if textbooks could be more interactive like computers. Back then computer animation was still pretty primitive compared to today, so it wasn't really feasible at that time.

When the iPad was announced I began racking my brain for applications - which wasn't hard - and one that came back to me was for text books. How cool would it be to learn chemistry or biology or physics using an interactive text book based on the iPad. Well, obviously this is not a new idea. I think eLearning has been around for a long time, but still if a publisher could translate the text book experience to the iPad the possiblities would be endless.

Well, I'm happy to say that one company is doing that for some major academic publishers. According to the WSJ via PCWorld, ScrollMotion has been tapped by publishers like McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin, and Kaplan to create interactive text books for the iPad. I would love to work on something like that - maybe a programming book could be written to be more interactive. Wouldn't that be cool? Anyway, I'm excited to see the results.

Ron George and Josh Blake on OCGM

Josh Blake contacted me to about a paper on OCGM that he and Ron George authored. First, I'm glad that he and George are collaborating. I think both of them have a lot to contribute to the NUI conversation and I'm always impressed with the posts on their own blogs.

The paper they wrote, which will be presented at a NUI Workshop at CHI'10 is interesting. It draws on research on child cognitive development, cognitive linguistics, and compares the purpose of OCGM to universal grammar. You could spend all day just reading the referenced papers. As far as academic papers go I think its fine, but I'm still not entirely comfortable with OCGM as a foundation for developing a metaphor for NUI.

A while back I tried to explain the differences between objects, containers, gestures and manipulations as described by Ron George. It's an interesting idea, but what I don't understand is why does OCGM really matters all that much? It's suggested that its a universal metaphor for any UI, and so I guess that could be true. But is that useful? How is it applied in anything other than an academic setting?

Can OCGM provide the foundation for the development of metaphors for NUI? Is there a universal metaphor for NUI, or is OCGM as close as we will get? Does it really matter? I mean, sure we have WIMP for GUI, but so what? WIMP is just a label for a common GUI design, not design guidance. Or at least I hope its not. How will OCGM help me design better NUI experiences?

iPad: Yes it is revolutionary!

I've been in Costa Rica on vacation and haven't had the enough time or Internet access to comment on the iPad until now. I watched the keynote and read as much as I could about the device including the developers guide and UI guides already available from Apple. They are both excellent documents and I recommend them if you want to really understand the differences between this device and the iPhone and iPod Touch. While a lot of people think the iPad is just a bigger iPhone they couldn't be more wrong. It's a completely different form factor which simply leverages the foundation of Cocoa Touch API and the iPhone OS, which are also used in the iPod Touch.

What really sets the iPad apart is its screen size. That may seem like a minor difference but its actually huge. The screen size affords so much more in terms of what developers and designers can do with the device. If Apple can produce the iPad with the same touch accuracy and vibrant screen as they did the iPhone and iPod Touch, then the iPad is going to be a big hit.

Back in April of last year I speculated in a blog entry, "What Industry Will Apple Dominate Next? Video.", that the slate device Apple was rumored to be working on was a video play. I hit the mark on that one but missed the obvious Electronic Readers angle. At any rate, the iPad is going to have a huge impact on at least four markets.

1. It's going to be a kick butt video game platform - one that will send Sony and Nintendo crazy.
2. It's going to be a great portable video platform for both Movies and TV shows.
3. It's going to be a great Electronic Reader platform, one that puts the Sony and Amazon.com devices to shame.
4. Finally, its going to be an awesome application platform.

While the video game, video screen, and electronic books industries are of interest to me as a consumer, its the application platform that is most important to me as a professional developer/designer. I can already see the Health Industry locking on to this device as a portable digital assistant for doctors. Other industries such as Hospitality, Package Delivery, and Retail, to name a few, are also obvious target markets. Personally, I'm pretty pumped about these more enterprisey applications, but the market for personal and utility application is of course also big. What data do I have to back this up? None. Just my gut instinct which has served me fairly well over the years.

It was my gut that told me to switch to Java in December of 1995, to focus on EJB in 1998, Web services in 2003, and Multi-touch in 2008. I've probably made some bad calls as well, but I can't remember anything very significant. I never bet on SOA, which it turns out was a good thing to avoid. I haven't bet on cloud services either - there is only so much space in that industry for developers. So while I have absolutely no evidence that the iPad will be a huge success, my gut tells me it will and I'm going to trust that.

More importantly, for me, is that I love the device. The idea of it alone was cool, seeing the final product was very exciting. I know its missing a camera, but to be perfectly honest that's probably the only flaw I see in the current offering. Of course there are a lot of folks saying the opposite - one of the more funny commentaries was this one by C|NET. But I don't agree and I know they will be wrong and I wonder how they will excuse themselves for predicting that the iPad will fail, because it won't. I think that Hugh McGuire is spot on as to Why the iPhone Matters.

As I'm still on vacation I'm trying to pack as much into this one blog entry as I can - it may be while before I post again. So here is some other news that people who read this blog or have read any of my books might find interesting: I'm currently in the process of proposing a book on developing applications for the iPad to a publisher. If all goes well - and that's not a sure thing at all - I hope to start working on the book next week and finishing it fairly quickly.

After developing applications for the Microsoft Surface and the iPhone I feel I have a lot to contribute to developers who will be trying to understand and master the iPad. The book I want to write will also touch on design but I'm going to focus mostly on development as that is my true strength as a writer. Design is, for now, covered really well by the Apple iPad UI Guidelines. Maybe after doing development on the iPad I'll have something to contribute to the design side of things, but for now my skills as a developers and a writer of developers books is going to be my best contribution.

I haven't written a book for a while (although I did edit one last year) so this is a pretty big commitment from me. Writing books - good books - takes a lot of focus and effort and I don't take on that task lightly. But my gut tells me this is the thing to do and I'm going to follow that advice.