mercurious

What about Ubiquitous Computing?

Yesterday, Pope Steven P. Jobs convened his disciples to unveil the latest creation of his orthodoxy. In surveying the mainstream, industry and social media response, we have observed the following archetypal reactions to the announcement as negative. We offer these playful animal names to stretch the archetype metaphor as far as it can go:

1. The Sheep: May have fallen prey to the lead-up media hype
2. The Elephant: Strong gut instinct to forcefully remain skeptical of new devices and models, especially those from Cupertino
3. The Crow: Fixates on feature lists and spills vitriol when an expected bullet point cannot be printed on the product’s marketing materials
4. The Wolf: Rejects the App Store model as the “mall-ification” of the open, free, pastoral internet currently enjoyed
5. The Beaver: Invested heavily in mastering Flash development and resents how Apple and Adobe relations ends up hanging them out to dry

Therefore, we conclude that the iPad could only deliver rapture to devotees.

The iPad tablet computer appears to simply extend the form factor of the iPhone/iPod touch devices to a larger screen dimension. But to say that the iPad is only an overpriced web browser, or underpowered touch laptop is to miss the point by approximately one mile.

A Small Herd of Elephants:

A designer/developer retorts:

Hypothesis

The simple enlargement of the oleophobic multi-touch screen enables an incremental but significant expansion of the Touch OS to afford a greater set of user interaction complexities and sensitivities to the capacities of the human body. Indeed, the device fashions itself more to the user than anything we have yet been able to purchase. Rather than machining the user into the requirements of the computer, the iPad’s beauty is how it instinctively and delightfully adapts to human factors.

These demonstrations of Apple’s iWork productivity suite exemplify how the GUI and basic modalities of the 20th century operating system have evolved towards a significantly more tangible, less mediated, indeed “intimate” experience. Direct manipulation of objects emerges in favor of severely mediated interactions guided by your disembodied hand, symbolized by the arrow pointer. We remember how Douglas Englebart’s mouse and requisite virtual re-mapping of gesture into cartesian space is an archaic form.

We are not embarrassed about nor pay much concern to the insistent persistence of the QWERTY keyboard, an interface devised originally to slow down the typist, as the mechanism of early typewriters would jam easily otherwise.

Rather, the iPad envisions a computing experience much closer to Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, where the models of elegant and direct manipulation have yet to be reborn in a contemporary system.

Revelation

The iPad is not cause to celebrate the device itself, but rather to announce the retirement of the 20th century GUI and OS. It has served us well for a few decades and profoundly transformed humanity. Instead, being reminded that Steve Jobs appropriated the innovations of window, menu and icon by Xerox PARC into the Macintosh OS, we revisit Mark Weiser’s (CTO of PARC) vision of the computer for the 21st century. His group’s vocabulary of tabs, pads and boards forms an invisibly cohesive infrastructure of ubiquitous computing as an attempt to deliberately abandon the monolithic totalitarianism of the personal computer.

For certain, Apple leads the industry in being able to amass mighty fortunes ($50 billion this year) to implement our lives with tabs (iPhones, iPods) and now pads (iPad). Of course, there are many more incremental steps to take on the path of computing ubiquity. It did not occur with the singular release of a product and it won’t ever happen at once. But each gradual step is a blip on the continuum, forming a kind of punctuated equilibrium that disrupts conventions sufficiently to shed the cruft and detritus of the regularizing activities of computer industry — feature driven bloatware, piling atop legacy code, reinforcing conservative modalities and affordances that some people “cling to like guns and religion.”¹

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work”.

It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.

via Fraser Speirs

There is an emancipatory promise in the new tablet computing model if it succeeds at eliminating labor involved with using and maintaining a PC. It’s a new kind of casual computing. A revered Mac developer sums it up:

For as frustrated as I was with the restrictions, those exact same restrictions made the New World device a high-performance, high-reliability, absolute workhorse of a machine that got out of my way and just let me get things accomplished.

The bet is roughly that the future of computing:

• has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
• completely hides the filesystem from the user
• favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
• favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
• lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps

The iPad as a particular device is not necessarily the future of computing. But as an ideology, I think it just might be.

via Steven Frank

Antithesis

Critics correctly point out that the iPad represents a future that biases media consumption over production while enforcing a strict corporate governance over software and hardware possibilities.

A Wolf in Sheep’s clothing:

Some go as a far as dismissing it as “crap futurism” framing the iPad as the anti-computer, more akin to the strip-mall-ification of personal computing. They cannot reconcile the hegemonic force of Apple Inc. as a primary capitalist enterprise bringing mass scale innovations to market.

Furthermore, we could equate the iPad with the re-enabling of an addiction to the corporate media establishment, at the expense of burgeoning peer-production by the free and open source geek-onomy.

Other voices denounce it as “unnovation” for living room leisure and superficial amusements to merely fill e-waste landfills without humanitarian credentials.

A howling Wolf:

These “doing it because we can” arguments also miss the point. A year from today, in 2011, iPad users will very likely enjoy a rich collection of creativity tools, provided by Adobe and numerous indy developers alike.

Developers cautiously reorient us to the creative potential:

Even Parsons students are apparently blind to the stunning potential of using tablet computing as a profound augmentation of the creative process because it lacks a camera.

Young Crows?

The PC will still be around for some time to come, of course. But when we start carrying tablets and employing them for ambient computing tasks related to both consumption and production throughout our professional and leisurely life, we will enjoy being more human, less dominated by the totalitarian tendencies enforced by using a laptop which demands our full and private attention and fails to afford partial and shared attention. We take for granted what the disembodied interaction of trackpad, pointer and 20th century operating system models forces us to endure. On the contrary, with tablet computing, we start to benefit from the fruits of the next phase of ubicomp where our Apple pads and tabs are at the ready to help us self-fashion ourselves into less-machined casual computing citizens. The tablet helps us return to a day when we were not stuck in front of computers, but instead we clutched notebooks, palettes, and sketchpads and focused on people and ideas, not “the computing administrative debris.”²

Regarding Flash

Rather than taking on this beast of a sub-topic (again and again and again and again), we will defer to others who are posting on this, and stay on-topic. Briefly:

Leave it to Beaver

Try building a player that runs a huge range of dynamic content written on a variety of tools (some of which you don’t control) by developers with massively varying skill levels. Now try making it compatible, consistent, and performant across dozens of OSes, browsers, platforms, and devices. And maintain backwards compatibility with the last 9 versions even while your target platforms change. And keep it under 5MB. And maintain it in parity with an OSS effort (Tamarin). And try to keep up with the demands of one of the most active and vocal developer communities.

via Grant Skinner

The reactions from these members of the Flash elite reflect a humility and respect for what that medium has been able to accomplish. The bombast from the anti-Flash clique, however, espouses open standards at all costs. Both viewpoints will need to reconcile how ubicomp will simplify and dissolve computing into the background. Against Adobe’s ability to conquer divergent hardware with convergent software, Apple is building a nascent ubicomp empire on unified hardware and software.

Comic Relief

A fellow named Neil Curtis chopped up the opening Apple keynote of 2010 to just include the adjectives. A somewhat hilarious synopsis of the keynote ensues.

Naturally, nothing could upstage Bishop Stephen Colbert unleashing the wünder tablet out of his suit pocket at the Grammy Awards to mesmerize and prime the purchasing audience. Tuning the zeitgeist.

Synthesis

It is remarkable how easily Apple can infiltrate cultural feeding grounds like this and inject its new product into our attention space to initiate a brilliant marketing campaign to regularize the iPad into existence. Consider how they deployed the iPod into the cultural discourse and how effectively normal it has become, a fully regular life condition, the way you listen to recorded music. Apple is big music.

The next massive regularization phase established the iPhone as an infiltration into everyday communications, primarily by wireless telephone and its bevy of sub-channels. Apple is at the heels of Nokia, the worlds largest mobile device maker. Apple is big telecom.

The iPad affords a new and novel kind of computing. The full adoption of its use in everyday living will reflect yet another stage of regularizing Apple into our lives. At this stage, Apple is ubiquitous to our daily life, always at hand.

Is Apple big ubicomp?

Footnotes

1. Barack Obama’s comments on the 2008 campaign trail. Via YouTube [↩]
2. See Edward Tufte’s early analysis of the impact of the iPhone on interaction design. [↩]

Informal notes from “Internet as Playground and Factory” #IPF09 Conference at The New School

Image from Constant’s New Babylon: the hyper-architecture of desire [google book] By Mark Wigley¹

Expanding upon a micro-thought from a panel discussion

“#IFP09 thankyou Thomas Malaby for showing me Constant’s New Babylon: a post-monetary configurable architectural mesh http://bit.ly/2Rv1Gr” – @aquarious

The tweet above implicates multiple layers of private property that mesh the various networked but self-fashioning aspects of a typical public realtime hypertext exchange these days. The layers of exchanged property include Twitter (messaging), Bit.ly (shortlink), Facebook (social web), Google Books (content publishing) and related software (browsers, apps, OS, etc.) to render social media towards public communications.

These private and corporate accumulations of virtual cultural capital derived from user contributed content add value well beyond their physical capital which comprises the workforce, server farms, bandwidth, energy and even brand identity, all subsumed as value commodities optimized for self-fashioning and auto-meshing. The notion of this hypertext broadcast evokes the antagonism between the private property of the communication transported by publishing tools and the public nature of the participants and their expressions. The binary boundaries of labor theory models have been blurred between distinctions of…

• public/private
• property/commons
• production/consumption
• exploit/contribute
• work/play
• oligarchy/democracy
• self/group
• asymmetrical/egalitarian
• physical/virtual

Indeed, new language is required to express the hybridity and mutation invoked by the social forces of emergent design technology.

History has presented us with examples of imaginary objects and structures that prefigured our contemporary conditions. In pondering Constant Niewunhuys’ New Babylon as the ultimate imaginary object of urban architectures, there is also Bush’s Memex as the ultimate imaginary object of knowledge consoles. These future-minded design studies arrive out of creative practice and military research disciplines, respectively. But they share a common perspective on the destiny of humankind as a networked and reciprocal society.

Indeed, the Memex already serves as a de facto historical artifact of a proto-hypertext pre-digital device to foreshadow the Internet. By synthesizing the virtual of knowledge networks towards a metaphorical or rhetorical architecture eventually built as the Internet, perhaps the digital memex, maybe the virtual New Babylon, a layer of self-fashioning protocols and exchanges emerged that sit between physical transit and everyday life. Vannevar Bush imagined his Memex microfilm knowledge console as the liberation from libraries, towards exchangeable and reconfigurable knowledge media. He extended self-enrichment through participatory scholarship with the promise of technology to overcome the limitations of physical media and the requisite bureaucracy to manage it. He imagined the basis for the internet before the digital computer and the network were fully conceived and implemented. Meanwhile, before the digital network engendered hyperconnectedness and hyperfragmentation as intrinsic structures and conditions of hypertext knowledge distribution systems, Constant Niewunhuys appears to have applied a parallel idea of hyperarchitecture to the basis of a futurist society built upon a “unitary urbanism.”

The post-monetary vision of Constant’s New Babylon envisages an architectural mesh of “infinitely reconfigurable spaces”² where a post-capitalist society of self-fashioning actors thrive beyond commodity exchange in the conventional sense. We wonder if the physical architecture of humans will eventually evolve into this rhizomatic, multi-layered, multi-dimensional, network of cellular or atomic structures that represent and disseminate information or embody and interconnect human habitats across the Earth in a uniformly neural network pattern. This pattern resembles the visual forms of the digital network, our understandings of neuroscience, biochemistry and atomic physics. Is it the eventual but wholly natural state of human society?³

The cellular design affords the infinite and reconfigurable mobility of capital and commodity exchange of all sorts across the boundaries of time and place. Humans may eventually construct a habitat that resembles a web of interconnected self-regulating, post-national, post-regional communities who thrive on unfettered commodity exchange, beyond scarcity, beyond the immaterial. Labor and value creation in this kind of a post-monetary urban planning concept depends on an individual’s accumulation of knowledge credentials, artifacts of cultural production and the distributed economics of emergent peer-to-peer micro-transactions — peer production.

“After rehearsing these few salient features of today’s art criticism, I must say on the contrary that for our situationist comrades, for Constant and myself, the three-dimensional explorations in question here can in no way be an object of enthusiasm, as they are but scattered elements on the path toward a future construction of ambiences, a unitary urbanism.” – Guy Debord⁴

Leave it to Guy Debord to take all the fun out of sci-fi fantasy.

Footnotes

1. via Google Books [↩]
2. Thomas Malaby at #IPF09, The New School [↩]
3. Think Powers of 10, by Charles and Ray Eames, which illustrates a repeating pattern of nature’s architecture from atom to cosmos. [↩]
4. Constant and the Path of Unitary Urbanism on Google Books [↩]

MEMEX TWO POINT OH

It only just dawned on me. These status-tweet-feed conflations I’ve been following and fueling — this is the MEMEX that I’ve been talking about on these pages. Maybe not MEMEX 1.0 — our trails comprise not only encyclopedic knowledge and book knowledge — they also encompass our communication and social context all wrapped up in knowledge. Social networking is contemporary knowledge machined into media trails.

Whatever “social networking” becomes, Twitter today, who knows tomorrow, we can still be sure that Vannevar Bush was one of the first to fantasize about the business of socially mediating knowledge through machines via exchangeable, reconfigurable machine-readable media (i.e. beyond books and paper).

The #IPF09 Internet as a Factory and Playground Conference at The New School, conferred by Trebor Scholz, discusses the notions of value creation in the networked wealth of a distributed and highly creative, productive, efficient human at work. Vannevar Bush has not been mentioned at the sessions I’ve attended, but a new discovery included Constant’s New Babylon project, perhaps the architectural parallel of the Memex.

Adobe Scores a Winning Run Against Apple

Today’s big announcements at Adobe MAX signal bold moves to strengthen the reach of the Flash Platform while simultaneously heading off Apple’s reluctance to offer the plugin in Mobile Safari. By allowing Flash Professional CS5 to export to native iPhone app code, Adobe wins big by giving its massive author base the means to get in on the App Store action. As a Flash developer myself who has made repeated but ultimately failed attempts to tackle Cocoa Objective-C this is very welcome news. When you’ve spent years in one language, the brain gets hardwired and is resistant to learning something so radically different. Plus, Flash developers invested so heavily in the platform, it’s a bitter pill to swallow and drop it all in favor of being locked into Apple’s ecosystem.

However, allowing Flash designers to bulld iPhone Apps means that we will see abuses of human interface guidelines and a deluge of submissions into the approval process. We can expect Apple to push back on this in whatever way they could to preserve the brand integrity of the iPhone experience.

In terms of expanding the Flash Platform into greater ubiquity, the announcements of RIM, Google and Palm joining the Open Screen Fund heralds an imminent reality where Flash content will run just about everywhere except in the iPhone Mobile Safari. By 2011, those blue question mark icons that appear where Flash browser plugin content is supposed to run will likely become a marketplace liability for Apple. Indeed, when customers can enjoy Flash enabled websites that work on every device except Apple’s, we finally imagine a scenario where not supporting Flash in Safari could actually affect sales. The demonstration of Flash Player 10.1 working very nicely on a Palm Pre underscored this notion.

Before today, I was thinking that the centrality of Flash as a de facto multimedia “standard” was in question. These thoughts were inspired by the advent of the App Store and improved web standards browser implementations such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and the CANVAS and VIDEO elements. However, after today, my confidence in Adobe’s ability to maintain strong support for the Flash platform is renewed by their clever responses to the shifting marketplace by resisting the force of fragmentation or at least channeling it into their advantage.

Flash haters like Gruber will remain skeptical and vaunt the merits of standards and Cocoa over Adobe’s assets. But the truth remains that there is a massive author base that knows Flash and an even larger consumer base that expects Flash content to run on their smartphones.

Video spoof of Mythbusters that Flash isn’t on the iPhone
FAQ for developers

Keep tabs on me

Make me an app that would auto-sync the URLs of all my currently open tabs to a shortened URL that I could syndicate at will.

For example

http://tabs.to/mercurious would redirect to the 11 browser tabs that I have open right now, in your browser.

I suppose it could be built as a Firefox plugin and companion website that syndicates vanity URLs and offers a social API to disseminate into other services.

It would contribute towards the notion of MEMEX, by putting the live trail of my research in front of a “camera” — a social feed, in actuality.

It would serve the function and purpose of this MEMEX accessory, illustrated in the figure: