That’s more or less what we are doing in our design programs. Walking on a line is not hard, but doing it while looking through a mirror becomes challenging. You know, the one where you look in a mirror and try to walk along a curvy line. Think about the carnival game you might have played as a kid. The more indirection when doing something, the more difficult the task becomes. In the real world, when you want to do something, you just do it with your hands (or with tools - more about that later). You don’t need to “tell” the computer anything.

It gives the illusion of dealing with the content directly. The iPad is all about eliminating the computer from the experience. Without reflection, you don’t realize how significant this point really is.Ĭlassic computing has all been about making it easier to communicate with the computer what you want to do.

Instead of telling the computer to move the view down, you grab the content and move it up. We’re so used to this idea that we don’t even question it. Why do mice scroll down a web page to display lower content? Because what’s really going on is you are telling the computer “move my view down”. You tell the computer to interact with them. You don’t interact with things on the computer. There’s a level of indirection built in to the very interface. Wacoms are nice, but the interaction with computers has been by definition clumsy. But, the basic way we interact with computers has not changed much since Apple popularized mice. The capabilities today were not imaginable then. It’s a concept that transforms the essence of what computers are and will be in the future.Ĭomputers have advanced tremendously in the last twenty years. What the iPad really represents is a concept much larger than itself. What is truly valuable is the iPad as a platform. In fact the whole iPad on its own does not have a lot of value in my eyes. Of course the scroll direction is not that significant in it of itself. What was I missing that everyone else seemed to get? The Scroll Direction “What do you mean? It’s great! The kids love it! You have pictures, videos…” I just didn’t get it. He showed me his iPad and I asked him what’s so great about it. I remember talking to my friend David Blatner at the CS Developer conference in Seattle last year soon after the iPad came out.

It was cool, but it didn’t do anything special. My initial reaction was different than most people. After holding out a year and a half, I just bought my first iPad.

Intools 5 tablet