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.

Editor’s Note: we are aware of how our Twitter embeds have failed due to dependency on a third-party. That’ll teach us to not simple screengrab the tweets and link to Twitter as a static image

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.

Steve Jobs “just says no” to Flash on iPhone. Well, on first glance, that’s just what he says now, and we all know, like a good episode of Lost, there’s always more to unpack and nothing is what it seems. Considering Adobe’s product line, the so-called “missing middle Flash product” suitable for the iPhone doesn’t yet exist. The middle product refers to something between Flash Player for the desktop and Flash Lite for mobile devices. But, considering the pipeline, it’s only a matter of time before Adobe AIR Mobile hits iPhone and just about every other mobile device, smack dab in the middle of the entire mainstream interactive media ecosystem.¹

Despite all the nay-saying, Adobe seems determined to get Flash on OS X Touch.

The brilliance of both Apple and Adobe waiting for Adobe AIR Mobile to launch is that it addresses all issues and pleases both parties politically:

• AIR Mobile is likely to be built upon AJAX, WebKit and Flash Player with the ActionScript 3.0 VM, as it is on the desktop, so it will be robust, efficient, modern and support both Apple’s and Adobe’s standards. It will please developers, designers, open standards proponents, lovers of proprietary goodness, and every other regular user who just wants everything to just work.
• AIR Mobile will solve the installation and distribution problem inherent in Flash Lite. Flash Player for the desktop has never been about standalone application installation. AIR on the desktop bridges this gap. It’s only a matter of time before Adobe sends AIR into the mobile device space and allows creators to put mobile app icons on standby screens with a few clicks. Just think Apple AppStore, or jailbreak AppTapp for Adobe Mobile AIR.
• AIR Mobile will bridge the fading distinction between web – desktop – mobile by allowing creators to write software in one environment (eg. Flex Builder) and distribute codebase to all three of these crucial platforms in a truly hybrid sense.
• It’s really no coincidence that Apple and Adobe are both investing heavily in products named “Air” — the notion of the data-cloud, cloud-sourcing, everyware, and webware is nascent. Narrow-minded jargon-lovers will call it Web 3.0, but intelligent folks will hopefully leave this lame version number moniker behind and use the appropriately visionary language espoused here.

Multi-touch API is the key

The central unresolved issue that remains is a multi-touch API. Any version of Flash for iPhone will need to have its intrinsic APIs updated for multi-touch and that will need to translate to a higher-level ActionScript object so that designers and developers can trap events related to multi-touch gestures. Without gestures like pinch, flick, zoom and others, it’s really pointless to put Flash on iPhone.

At the end of the day, talk about politics, performance and battery life are probably just the red-herrings that both Apple and Adobe need to work out the vexing issue of multi-touch APIs. In fact, it will probably take a few years before all platforms (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and iPhone) all reckon with multi-touch on all levels of hardware and software.

The alleged YouTube Mobile Safari plugin in OS X Touch 2.0 beta is probably all the beehive needs to chill out and give Apple and Adobe the breathing room they need to get multi-touch worked out, and deploy Mobile AIR on a dizzying and divergent array of devices, platforms and crotchety carriers.

Previously:

• YouTube plugin for Mobile Safari Suggests No Flash in iPhone 2.0←
• Will iPhone Ever Run Flash?←

Footnotes

1. This is based only pure postulation and not informed by any confidential Adobe insight.

Specula-palooza Rocks On

The latest in Flash and iPhone rumor-mongering suggests a YouTube plug-in for Mobile Safari will accompany this summer’s Touch OS 2.0 update. An uncorroborated claim indicates that this plug-in is contained within the recently seeded developer iPhone SDK 2.0 beta firmware.

This would theoretically enable embedded YouTube movies to work on the billions of pages that currently flaunt the dreaded blue question mark icon. Presumably, a page with an embedded YouTube SWF player might show a thumbnail with a play icon that when tapped would load the clip in the native YouTube player or some embedded player within Mobile Safari. This would be similar to what happens when you load an embedded MP4 video file via the native QuickTime player within the iPod function.

In technical terms, Mobile Safari may parse the OBJECT and EMBED tags that point to the YouTube SWF player and redirect the path to the video into its own native player.

It’s important to note that not all YouTube videos would work. In fact, numerous clips not encoded to MP4 H.264 remain only available in the Flash codecs Sorenson Spark and On2 and therefore would not play in the Mobile Safari YouTube plugin. Although, Apple and Google seem to be colluding to convert the vast user-generated video library over into the H.263 format. It’s truly doubtful that OS X Touch 2.0 contains additional video codecs beyond H.263.

However, rather than subscribing to comment stream appearing below rumor sites, this YouTube Mobile Safari plugin is very likely not a clue towards a Flash player for iPhone. In fact, this could be the kiss of death for the chances of seeing it soon.

This kind of Mobile Safari plug-in access is precisely what Apple is shielding from Adobe (and other third-party developers, thanks to the sandbox intrinsic to the SDK). In many ways, a YouTube plugin acts as a trojan horse to usurp dominance from Flash in favor of WebKit and open standards. For most people who crave a Flash Player for iPhone, it’s the frequent dead-end to embedded YouTube clips that has them most irked. Once that kink is worked out, will users really miss Flash?

The other crucial importance of a Mobile Safari YouTube plugin is that it bypasses the main sticking point: how to implement multi-touch via an ActionScript API in the Flash Player!

We’re not suggesting Flash Player won’t ever appear on OS X Touch, but if a native YouTube plugin appears for Mobile Safari this summer, it has big implications for Adobe’s mobile strategy, and concerns the long-term viability of Flash as a de-facto standard if the mobile medium cannot be captured.

We’d love to see Flash on OS X Touch. There is a vast designer and developer community out there fluent in ActionScript that would thrive in a Touch world. It’s all about a multi-touch API from here on out. We’ve tinkered with both Mobile Safari web application design with WebKit and AJAX and also attempted to pick apart Cocoa Touch. There is no middle ground yet, and the Touch application market is nascent and fractured as a result. You’ve either got really crappy web applications or sketchy jailbreak apps. Yes, this summer’s launch of the AppStore will change the game forever. But, until the vast Adobe-enabled developer community is employed to create, the market will be constricted by limitations and learning curves.

Previously: Will iPhone Ever Run Flash? ←

Despite furious speculation, Jobs releases incremental product improvements, rather than fundamental game-changing gear

Apple announced four new products today in San Francisco:

1. Time Capsule, wireless base station and network storage device
2. iPhone and iPod Touch firmware updates
3. Apple TV 2.0 and iTunes Video Rentals
4. MacBook Air ultra-thin notebook
5. One more thing… There is NO “one more thing!”

Interestingly, these announcements merely validate earlier predictions, mostly based on patent-filings, clues embedded deep within application strings, and the usual rumoring that surrounds Apple product design. In fact, the first three announcements represent the fulfillment of promised features more than anything else.

Time Capsule simply makes good on the promise of Leopard’s Time Machine feature to work usably on portable computers. The notion of a network storage appliance is nothing new.

The iPhone and Touch firmware updates, free for phone owners and a $20 upgrade for Touch owners, merely respond to the deluge of feature requests that at times overshadowed the praise of these revolutionary devices. Indeed, text messaging to multiple recipients, locative services in Google Maps, lyrics and video chapter displays, and home screen customization capabilities seemed like no-brainers from the start. On the Touch side, owners must shell out to gain the applications that are standard on the iPhone, which motivated the Touch jailbreak movement to establish a feature parity across the products. At least Apple is focusing on listening carefully to the user-base chatter. The iPhone firmware 1.1.3 is already available. Will a new jailbreak method appear before the official SDK launch?

When considering the Apple TV free software update and reduced introductory pricing, here is another example of Apple merely updating the software and business platforms to add serious value to existing owners. In many ways, today’s announcements are the biggest news for existing customers, especially owners of iPhones and Apple TVs, who in two weeks will be graciously rewarded with significant feature upgrades for free. No wonder all other companies envy Apple’s relationship with its customers.

The MacBook Air, however, is a mixed bag of excitements and disappointments. Certainly, the barely-there form factor is what will attract attention. But it’s the multi-touch trackpad and the planned obsolescence of the optical disc that represent the most significant futurist shifts. But $3100 for the solid state drive version is really, really, really expensive. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the new Air is its striking lack of a user replaceable battery!

Top 10 Expectations Unfulfilled

Indeed, wild speculation seemed to include every possible configuration and predictable product launch, and so, these were not announced today:

1. No tablet computer, basically an iPhone/Touch the size of a notebook, running OS X, not Mac OS X, 100% touch
2. No replacement for the Mac Mini, some kind of a screen-less, entry-level desktop
3. No 3G iPhone running on AT&T’s UMTS, nor a 16 GB storage upgrade
4. No AT&T wireless networking built into notebooks
5. No “copy & paste” for iPhone/Touch
6. No WiMax devices
7. No BluRay disc devices, especially on the Apple TV
8. No Speed bumps to product lines other than Pro towers, especially iMac, MacBooks and MacBook Pro
9. No Leopard Software Update 10.5.2
10. No iPhone SDK based application demonstrations

At this moment, Apple’s stock price is not surging, but then again, most of the market looks to be tanking. Not even Father Jobs can lure the US economy from a looming recession with his “halo effect” against the debt crisis and devalued dollar.

It was a fun ride, and we certainly garnered a small portion of the incredible Google search term traffic related to iPhone hype in 2006. I’m afraid we’ll be waiting out the dark period until February 2008, when the official SDK is released and a new generation of extensibility emerges for Touch applications. We also anticipate a significant iPhone firmware update at MacWorld 2008 in January to tide us over. Not to mention all the brouhaha that will sound out when the 3G version hits the streets.

In short, the jailbreak process became too arduous and the reliability of some common applications became dubious. Naturally, this is no surprise, given the fact that Apple had no reasons to support these endeavors. Indeed, the post-SDK era will involve mediation through digital signatures, and the indy iPhone developer market will writhe in pain. But, if it means that applications will be sturdy, well designed, and accountable to performance and efficiency standards, we have to admit that it’s probably worth it, having learned the hard way. When it comes to a mobile phone, the basic functions are more crucial than on a desktop or laptop computer. Things like basic communications capabilities really do, just have to work.

With an 1.1.3 update rumored to be hitting the servers this week sporting voice recording and disk mode storage, the jailbreak process promises only to get more arcane.

It’s never been easier to install custom applications

You can now jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch to install third-party applications with extraordinary ease. Visit the URL pictured above with your Mobile Safari and in an instant your device’s file system will be opened and the AppTapp Installer will appear on your Springboard after a restart.

Via Erica Sadun at TUAW — Instant Jailbreak for iPhone and iPod Touch

If you’re new to all of this, check out Erica’s advice for where to go from here.

This method supersedes all previous methods, including our own process← that we document in meticulous detail, now deprecated in favor of using AppSnapp. Interestingly, this method uses the TIFF Exploit of Mobile Safari to open up the lockdown of the system, and then does Apple the favor of patching the security hole!

Mobile Touch Screen WordPress Theme In The Works

In response to the proliferating importance of portable touch-screen interfaces, we have started the design and development of a WordPress theme for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The theme will make your WordPress site look and behave like a native application, taking advantage of the special requirements of a touch-screen, flick-and-slide scroll interface minimizing zoom-pinching, all using Joe Hewitt’s iUI JavaScript and CSS library.

The project is currently in a pre-alpha release state. We have released an early alpha, with a distant dream publish it to the official WordPress theme site. Anyone who is interested in helping to test and develop the concept should contact us by email. Let it be known that we are not the first to attempt a WordPress iUI theme, although we are working a more comprehensive implementation than what Justin Barkhuff has already achieved while on his year-long honeymoon!

» Try WordPress Touch pre-alpha on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

If the Touch theme does not appear right away, keep trying, by refreshing or revisiting this link. For some reason, the cookie that tells WordPress to use this theme isn’t registering correctly.

Release Notes

• You can simulate the experience by viewing the Touch theme without an iPhone or iPod Touch by using Safari 3.1 or the Webkit nightly build, the iPhoney simulator, or the official iPhone simulator as part of the SDK.
• Viewing this theme in other browsers will probably yield unpredictable and undesirable results.
• Your browser will remember your theme choice in a cookie. To reset back to the standard theme, choose Preferences > Theme > Desktop within the Touch theme main menu.
• As stated above, if you don’t succeed in triggering the WordPress Touch theme to appear, be persistent. This is an known issue to be resolved. It has something to do with the theme switcher plugin I’m using.

Design Goals

• Optimize WordPress consumption for the WebKit touchscreen user-interface model — in progress
• Focus on mobile use-cases, to allow a quick consume, easy lookups — in progress
• Employ best practices for iPhone and iPod Touch interface design conventions — in progress
• Allow options for auto-detection, user-selection and return to standard desktop views — in progess
• Introduce glossy icons for menus, with preference to disable — to do
• Introduce auto-resizing thumbnail management and disabling LightBox photo gallery features — to do

Update – August 21, 2007

iPhone 1.0.2 has just been released through iTunes, again, apparently just a bug fix maintenance release. The enthusiast community is scrambling to determine if any new features have appeared. Indeed, it is recommended that you restore your iPhone back to its factory state if you’ve applied any mods, as the update may fail otherwise. No word yet on compatibility with mods. Perhaps this update is an attempt by Apple to throttle the modification scene?

Update – August 3, 2007

iPhone 1.0.1 addresses the Audi Bluetooth connection problem as well as resolve the dealer installed iPod connector integration issues both reported here←. Now the phone remains reliably connected to the car system, plugged in or wireless. Furthermore, the audio signal now properly flows into the factory head unit, rather than through the iPhone’s speakers, when plugged in. Bravo Apple for fixing these crucial bugs first.

Update – August 2, 2007

Now that iPhone users have had a day or two to report on the undisclosed updates included in 1.0.1, according to AppleInsider→, this update does include some important fixes and improvements including:

• Call volume adjustment, making calls slightly louder
• Battery charge indicator graphic now properly indicates a fully charged battery
• Safari feels more stable, especially while listening to music in the background
• IMAP email accounts display subfolders
• Passcode lock limits increased
• VPN client improvements

So this update wasn’t as insignificant as we thought. Now, why doesn’t Apple just disclose these features rather than leave it up to the enthusiast community to painstakingly discover them?

Update – August 1, 2007

Indeed, a free software update emerged, iPhone 1.0.1, which is only a security patch and bug fix. The version numbering system is very consistent with Apple’s system of differentiating maintainance and security releases from feature updates. The only reported “feature” included in 1.0.1 seems to be the ability to automatically Bcc: oneself on outgoing mail. I’ve never understood why people do this. Because of this high-priority 1.0.1 update, we’re more cautiously expecting a 1.1 feature update in early Fall, to coincide with the release of Leopard. }

Original Post – July 31, 2007

According to Apple’s VP of iPod Product Marketing, Greg Joswiak, via AppleInsider→, the first free software update for the iPhone should be available shortly. Analyst Mike Abramsky of RBC Capital Markets speculates that the update will include the following features (our further speculations in parenthesis):

1. Chat (iChat?)
2. Picture Messaging (MMS support!)
3. Social Networking (Bluetooth local-area connectivity? MySpace or Facebook applications? SMS-based social tools?)
4. Location-based services (More Google applications?)
5. Home Networking (AirTunes or Apple TV support?)
6. OS X Leopard Integration (More flexible sync services? Disk mode? Dock remote?)

In addition, the predictions continue to express skepticism that 3G network services will arrive anytime soon, with the GSM/EDGE capabilities targeted towards the European launch of the device, despite the far greater prevalence of wireless broadband services and features across the pond. Battery life and form factor issues are cited for the implementation delay. Indeed, Apple is loathe to do anything less than perfectly, as the iPhone itself epitomizes: better to wait and shock the market with product excellence rather than peddle to the mediocracy.

Most notably absent from this prediction is an announcement of a Flash Player for the iPhone’s Safari browser. As any user who frequently browses the web can attest, there is simply too much Flash content out there to consider iPhone a complete web device until the Flash Player arrives.