The Future Beyond the iPad

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grace678
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Mar 12, 2010 12:29 am

The Future Beyond the iPad

Post by grace678 »

The pad proposition is simple: take a desktop computer, throw out the keyboard, make the screen touch-sensitive. What can it do?
Exactly what any desktop computer can do. If you switch your mouse for a joystick, some things get easier, others harder. Obviously the iPad is a more dramatic change of input-device than that, but the story is the same.abigalegg allisonlp angelahlp amykkpo amberghj

When a Pad becomes the standard desktop screen, you’ll buy a desktop computer and grab the screen whenever you happen to need a Pad. Which, in the long run, is never — except as a remote control for an entirely different sort of computer.

The iPad (though it’s beautifully designed and lots of fun) is transitional, like vinyl LPs (but likely to be much shorter lived), for two reasons.
First: in the future you’ll have a small computer to take with you and a large-screen computer to leave in one place. The iPad is neither. (In the car, you’ll mainly rely on a computer whose selling point is not a touch screen but no screen — not exactly a hard prediction for anyone who actually knows how to drive.) Second: future touch-screens will be designed to show you a slice of time, not (like the iPad) an old-fashioned slice of space.

Your electronic life will live in the “cloud” and only make quick visits to whatever machine you’re using at the moment, so there’s no reason to rely on a portable device like a notebook or iPad as your “main” computer. You won’t need a main computer.

Portable computers will either be pocket- or purse-sized, or wearable. At home and at work, one of the most important form-factor changes in design history has yet to happen: the re-design of indoor work space to center on computers instead of desks.

The re-design will be based on the “large screen computers” that I’ve been writing about for years; today they’re a routine matter of assembling the right parts. The screen (any modern high-def TV) is six or seven feet away from the user; you lean back in a comfortable chair with the keyboard in your lap. The change is important, because eye strain is a problem when your eyes focus on something nearby; putting the screen farther away is a significant improvement.byabbie allisonllanniebkamandakklmangelacc

Large-screen computers (LSCs) are good for bottom strain too. They will create a revolution in office interiors and architecture, as office space is designed around LSC-modules that are smaller than today’s typical private office, but also more comfortable. A Pad will be useful as an LSC remote control: it happens to be roughly the size of a classical mouse-pad, which is convenient.

The iPad is mainly an Internet device, and we’re still seeing the Internet the wrong way. The ongoing proliferation of lifestreams (in the form of event streams, feeds, RSS updates, Twitter streams and so on) makes it clear that the Internet is mainly for telling us what’s happening now, what just happened, what’s about to happen and so on.

The classical Web site is static but a lifestream flows, at the speed of time. New material arrives constantly. Nowadays lifestreams are mainly displayed in the form of lists.

But when Eric Freeman and I invented lifestreams in the mid-’90s, we designed a 3D display in which the past flowed into the depths of the screen; the future hovered in front of the screen. The plane of the screen itself showed you now.

This sort of display makes efficient use of screen-space by using a foreshortened perspective view, and by making the screen a transparent viewport you look through, instead of an opaque surface to look at.aimeell anniebhui hannahlpo amandapoi amberty

The iPad is designed as a traditional opaque surface. Touch-screens will be useful for stream-handling, but they’ll be optimized to a different set of finger-motions.
neimad
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2011 5:15 am

Re: The Future Beyond the iPad

Post by neimad »

Well I think it goes far far beyond the iPad if we try to look forward say 6 years from now - the technology increases and develops incredibly fast and every day new changes are made or new advantages are being designed and we still can't see a near end or a sudden death row to technology deveoping and moving further. But I think the iPad was just a little hint on what Mac/Apple is about to bring on the market - I think they have a lot of hidden technology they are going to shoot out in the next couple of years that we never imagined to be existing.
Kibodeaux
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Jun 02, 2011 9:37 pm

Re: The Future Beyond the iPad

Post by Kibodeaux »

neimad wrote:Well I think it goes far far beyond the iPad if we try to look forward say 6 years from now - the technology increases and develops incredibly fast and every day new changes are made or new advantages are being designed and we still can't see a near end or a sudden death row to technology deveoping and moving further. But I think the iPad was just a little hint on what Mac/Apple is about to bring on the market - I think they have a lot of hidden technology they are going to shoot out in the next couple of years that we never imagined to be existing.

The iPad is mainly an Internet device, and we’re still seeing the Internet the wrong way. The ongoing proliferation of lifestreams (in the form of event streams, feeds, RSS updates, Twitter streams and so on) makes it clear that the Internet is mainly for telling us what’s happening now, what just happened, what’s about to happen and so on.
onlineradios
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Jul 16, 2009 2:34 am
Location: United States

Re: The Future Beyond the iPad

Post by onlineradios »

yes that is true
broadcastcat
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2011 2:52 pm

Re: The Future Beyond the iPad

Post by broadcastcat »

i think everything is going to be downsized in to phones...eventually the ipad and iphone will probably combine in to one device...
broadcastcat
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue Aug 02, 2011 2:52 pm

Re: The Future Beyond the iPad

Post by broadcastcat »

I also keep seeing in the media "projection screens", so who knows what the deep future really holds. Technology never ends the amazement of possibilities.
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