Does Apple Think Multitasking Is A Bug Not A Feature? And Other Questions....

I wrote a little essay for Time.com on the iPad launch (and the reactions to it.) Here's the opening riff:

If you time-traveled back to 1995, and asked the leading futurists of that time where our machines were soon to take us, you might well have heard just as much rhapsodizing about document-centric interfaces as that about hypertext and the World Wide Web. The first generation of software interfaces forced the user to think too much about the tools, the story went, and too little about the task. If you wanted to write a memo, you had to think, "First I must launch Microsoft Word, my tool, and then create a new document." If you wanted to embed some piece of information that Microsoft Word wasn't optimized for, you had to launch another application, create and modify a new element there, and then move back to your original application environment, where you could deposit the alien data object. A number of proposed interfaces — most famously, Apple's failed OpenDoc initiative, shut down shortly after the company acquired NeXT — promised to reverse the priorities: our desktops would prioritize the tasks over the tools, the documents over the applications. The user wouldn't launch documents inside an application. They'd just create a document on its own, which would lie there like a surgical patient, and if you needed a specific tool — a little word-processing here, or some video-editing there — you just grabbed that tool and started working on the patient in front of you. In the application-centric model, you were constantly lugging organs into other operating rooms and then dragging them back.

The weird thing about the iPad is that it has landed us 180 degrees from where we thought we were heading. The iPad interface — like the iPhone's — tries to do everything in its power to do away with documents and files. There is no Finder or root-level file navigation. It's apps, apps, apps, as far as the eye can see. According to the demo last week, the main way to launch iWork documents is by an internal document-selection process after launch, where your files are presented to you in a gallery format. 

I truly don't know how I feel about this. It might be genius. Maybe most users are more confused by Finders and File Explorers than I've realized. But I can't help thinking that if the iPad really wants to be a device that you might take on a business trip instead of the laptop, it's going to need a little more document-centrism. By a wide margin, the most disappointing element of the user interface, or UI, is the home screen, which is virtually unchanged from the original iPhone UI. (The iPad is far, far more than a blown-up iPod Touch, but you can't tell from the home screen.) Surely there's a better way to exploit multitouch and that extra screen real estate for navigating all the information that will be stored on these machines. I have no inside information on this, but given the inventiveness of the iWork user experience, I can't help thinking that an iPad-native home environment was a project that didn't make the ship dates, and that they slapped on the old iPhone screen for continuity at the last minute. But time will tell.

You can read the whole thing here.

Comments

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Steven, for me Dr.Snow and Whitehead are heros, as all others on our Planet that care about life,
for me, Steven, you are too, hero, it is important to tell us about the epidemics, and also about:
GUN UNDER PILLOW, SOMEDAY IT’S GOING TO GO OFF

If the trends of asymmetric warfare continue, and the suicide bombers start detonating suitcase nukes – at that point, all bets are off.
The one thing we can do now to prevent such a dark future is to reduce, if not eliminate, the current stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the World.
The United States alone has around 10,000 weapons in its active arsenal.
This is madness in an age of asymmetric warfare, where mutually assured destruction is meaningless.
If only we could eliminate, the current stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the World. Just live without any weapons, just live without terrorizing each other (my note).
It would be an epic undertaking, yet history shows we are capable of projects on this scale, if we apply ourselves. We eliminated smallpox from the wild, after all.
If we can rid the World of a microscopic virus, we can eliminate weapons the size of tractor-trailers..
We hear a lot of war-on-terror rhetoric cajoling us to be realistic about the threats that face us, to confront those threats without pity or foolish idealism.
That’s why we have elective wars and unauthorized wiretapping: because we’re realists now, or so we’re told.
But wherever each of us stands on the wars and the wiretaps, we need to agree that maintaining a stockpile of 10,000 nuclear weapons is the very opposite of realism. It is, in fact, an idealism of the most starry-eyed sort: the ideal that says we’re better off spending billions of dollars maintaining devices that would, were they all detonated, potentially end life as we know it on planet Earth.
We are, as a species, sleeping with a gun under our pillow. It may make us feel safe to know that we have all that firepower so close at hand, but someday it’s going to go off. Steven Johnson and me
sorry I put some my note, but I am happy that some people think like me, I'll read this in my writing class,
old Russian woman - very much idealist

[Andy Polaine]

(That's an odd comment above me - spam?)

Several apps access the camera roll as documents, by the way. I'm not sure you've witnessed enough people getting confused by the Finder or Explorer - it's totally confusing if you don't get the central mental model of it. I have had people say, "I saved it in Excel," for example. When I asked what they meant, they said, "In the application." It turned out they had no idea where they saved it, just that it appeared in the list of recently saved documents in Excel's menus.

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[pmn]

Thank you for the hint at and interesting distinction between tool- and task-focused interfaces. It the reason I think the iPad will be a failure: the people who can or might want to afford it don't need it. Buisnessmen can't do business and students can't study with it. You can get a lot of books for 500$. But one day Apple or someone else might come up with a solution to the problem: A tool with which you can work on any task. And then they solve the compatibility issues. And then we really are in trouble.

The App-structure just screams "TRUSTED COMPUTING" all over the place, only it is not the state intervening by penal law, but private corporatitions manipulating what we see, say and do, subtly hidden behind innumerable layers of contracts.

On the other side is Google with its maximum-compatibility philosophy. They don't need the control over all tools if the few they are selling sell well. But their interest in our privacy and self-determination ends pricesely at the point where it stands in the way of profit.

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[Matthias Wagler]

A great article, Steven! I wrote a quick post about the multitasking issue (http://blog.intuitymedialab.eu/2010/02/11/multitasking-is-evil-leaving-the-desktop-metaphore-behind/). You also might be interested in the great article "The iPad screen is not your desktop screen" (http://craigmod.com/satellite/ipad_screen/) by Craig Mod which is also related to your thoughts. Keep up the good work!

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