Tablet as chameleon

I hear ya and understand where you're coming from. But I'm not sure it will be like that when the "tablet" finally shows up. It all depends on the hardware design I think. Yes, it will be clean and all. But I'm not sure if apps will take over the device in the same way as with the iphone/ipod touch.
If the rumors are true. And if Apple is really delaying the launch into late 2010 because they are waiting for certain components to be ready, then perhaps the experience would be like if your holding a digital magazine in your hand as opposed to a "tablet" computer running an application. Know what I mean?

Basically all that you said in that big post could have been summed up like this: Do you think apps will run fullscreen or in windows?

I think fullscreen, but they may also be able to be docked while running. Given the nature of the screen size (around 10") and its touch user interface, I think it would make most sense to make the apps run in fullscreen mode. An obvious example being an Air Hockey game, etc.

Mac touch FTW!

Explain?


Clarify.

He doesn't need to explain. You already demonstrated you understood by mentioning that the question could be summed up by asking whether the device will run apps full screened or windowed.

In fact, I appreciate that you simplified the question for us. I think now that there will be a choice as to which way you want to run the app....full screened or windowed. But I think the "windowed" method of running the apps would not be like how you would picture a notebook or desktop UI displaying a windowed app.
The "tablet" will probably take a different approach with that. How? I'm not sure. But it won't look like a desktop UI.
Some apps will have to be full screened (like games). But some apps will have to be "windowed" especially for multitasking.

Yup, 2010 is going to be very interesting in terms of tech. Even though there won't be any anti-gravity cars and devices. At least, there won't be any for the public.

This whole post pretty much read my mind.

me too

Sounds about right to me. Expect some GUI that uses iPhone OS with bits of Mac OS X. A...pic and mix approach that suits the tablet. Possibly a few new party pieces like an enhances gesture libary of multi-touch goodness. As good as Mac Os X is...how far removed is it from Mac Os 1984?

The iPhone OS on the other hand clearly points an OS in another direction, especially for the device at hand. And with the 'rumoured' device being a tablet I'd be surprised if it looked like Leopard as standard. Apple always think of new ways of interfacing that are true to the object at hand. See iPod and iPhone. They had interfaces and an OS appropriate to what those products do. I'd expect a new paradigm for the slate. It's the perfect opportunity to do so.

However, I'd be quite happy with iPhone OS on it. There's 100K plus apps, lots of games, music and videos that work from the get go (they're not going to not use that!) and a slate would be big enough to 'dock' as a 'netbook' and use Mac apps like iWorks. I'm guessing the slate will be a giant iPhone that adds some light Mac computing to bridge the gap between the Mac and the iPhone.

It's 'X' at the end of the day. It seems highly modular with the transition from PPC to intel and to 'intel only' and to mobile computing. And bridging the two platforms is a natural evolution to me.

Lemon Bon Bon.

Think Steve jobs keynote when he intro'd iphone. He prick teased the audience about 3 devices before declaring they were one device.

Chamelion indeed...the new device will be the same and more as an iPhone.

Lemon Bon Bon.

Not sure if Apps will take over the device?

Here this: if it were not for the runaway success of the App Store, there would not be any Apple Tablet released this year.

Link?

common sense

Edit: nevermind, i should learn to read properly.

Indeed!

Either way, I think the Gizmodo article is on the right track. Or at least, they're on MY track. That is exactly the kind of thing I want the tablet to do and I think it's how I'd get the most use out of it.

I'd like it to be an iPhone OS-derived system with expanded and tailored capabilities. Apple has the resources and CAN manage these multiple iterations of the system and it would create the best usability scenario.

The software side feature i'm nervous about is typing. The software keyboard on the iPhone works great but presumably the screen on the tablet will be too big for two-thumb typing and I really think it will be an 'in your hands' device. If you have to set it on your lap and look straight down at it, that's going to get uncomfortable real quick. I know some people have mentioned a kick out stand, but that seems very un-Apple. I could see a desk-based dock/stand, but the tablet is a tablet because you DON'T use it at a desk.

As a designer, I'm hoping for drawing tablet functionality.
But this is more in line with what I expect to actually come about:
http://bit.ly/8Fu5yf

Don't you mean this article?

http://gizmodo.com/5461767/the-two-w...-make-a-tablet


So you want all the image files, the app preference files, the Word files, the mp3 files, the movie files to somehow transform into database entities that you don't have to think about? Yeah, that's not going to happen.

Databases are more or less Excel-like tables of information that aren't well suited to storing large binary data elements. They will pretty much always be stored on a filesystem directly and need to be sorted somehow.

You could of course dump them in a pile and just organize them through a metadata index but that's pretty much what a hierarchical filesystem is with the key element that every file is given a unique identifier so that it's clear to the user what file they are using.

The hidden filesystem pile is probably the best compromise for application data sharing as well as hiding whatever assumed complexity there is in a hierarchical list of items from the user. But it will get messy after a while when you start deleting apps that deal with files of a given type that nothing else recognizes. Then the user starts wondering why they are running out of space and has no control over it but I guess that's when the geeks come in again to try and explain everything and we wouldn't want that so we leave it as app-centric so that users have to do a couple of extra syncs every time they try to use the same file with 2 apps.

In short, there is no perfect solution but the desktop one is the best we have (and why almost everyone uses it without a problem).

The desktop filesystem could be simplified under the assumption that a mobile user won't have many files and have a Finder Lite that has limited categories of files:

audio, images, movies, documents, miscellaneous - similar to how the ipod categorizes things

This way all your purchased ebooks go into documents and you can read them in whatever app you want. We do have to assume that computer users can read labels though, I'm not sure if that's expecting too much of them.


Desktops are like this too though. When I full-screen a movie, it's a TV. When I full-screen a game, it's a console. When I full-screen Photoshop and hook up my Wacom, it's a sketchpad, when I full-screen Word, it's a word processor. This concept isn't new in any way. The only reason it seems significant on the iphone/iPad is because the complexity of mobile apps is so limited that the developers put emphasis on the UI. Games developers have done this for years though because their UIs are all done in OpenGL. Check out the Dirt 2 menu system:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLaaNxnW_-I

Games are a perfect example of the inventiveness of UI designers because they have a complete virtual 3D canvas to draw whatever they want. Desktop apps share services though and rely on muscle memory for productivity so they rely on common OS frameworks to maintain the consistency. Sometimes iphone apps are more confusing - typically a desktop app configuration is in the main app menu > preferences. iphone apps can be in the global settings pane (which inconveniently you have to access by quitting the app and then going back in to see the change you made) or it could be a little letter/symbol hidden somewhere that you can only see by touching somewhere on screen (*cough* hierarchical menu systems).

I think there's too much desperation to try and justify the iPad as a revolutionary device when it clearly isn't. The iphone was the revolution in the context of mobile devices and most of that revolution was simply doing touch interaction how it should have been done. The morphing appliance computing was just an element we hadn't seen in a phone because they weren't fast enough to do anything useful - at least not graphically. We'd only seen it on a computer but nobody had done touch properly before on a computer. Add the two concepts together and boom, revolution.

Tack on a big screen and all you've really done is tack on a big screen. The revolution was already done. The holy grail is to merge it with the productive experience that drives our homes and businesses every day and nobody has done it yet. Like Gizmodo says, there needs to be a 3rd way - a desktop OS with a custom-built UI.