[access-uk] Re: Accessibilty and the iPad: First Impressions | ATMac
- From: "Barry Toner" <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 13:28:27 -0000
James a very well written blog. Have to agree I probably would be on that
persons side most if nto all the way through it.
Would you have the source URL handy?
thanks,
Barry.
-----Original Message-----
From: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
James & Nash
Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 2010 12:17 PM
To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [access-uk] Re: Accessibilty and the iPad: First Impressions |
ATMac
That is very interesting and refers bak to another post I made earlier in
this threat. Also, I am going to paste a long blog post at the bottom of
this message as I don't have a link for it talking about this sort of thing.
TC
James, Lyn, Nash & Twinny
This is not my blog post.
I need to talk to you about computers. I've been on a veritable
roller-coaster of "how I feel" about the iPad announcement, and trying not
to write about it until I had at least an inkling of what was at the root of
that.
Before we begin, a reminder: On this blog, I speak only for myself, not for
my company or my co-workers.
The thing is, to talk about specific hardware (like the iPad or iPhone or
Nexus One or Droid) is to miss entirely the point I'm about to try to make.
This is more important than USB ports, GPS modules, or front-facing cameras.
Gigabytes, gigahertz, megapixels, screen resolution, physical dimensions,
form factors, in fact hardware in general - these are all irrelevant to the
following discussion. So, I'm going to try to completely avoid talking about
those sorts of things.
Let's instead establish some new terminology: Old World and New World
computing.
Introduction
Personal computing - having a computer in your house (or your pocket) - as a
whole is young. As we know it today, it's less than a half-century old. It's
younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes,
younger than quite a few living people in fact.
In that really incredibly short space of time we've gone from
punchcards-and-printers to interactive terminals with command lines to
window-and-mouse interfaces, each a paradigm shift unto themselves. A lot of
thoughtful people, many of whom are bloggers, look at this history and say,
"Look at this march of progress! Surely the desktop + windows + mouse
interface can't be the end of the road? What's next?"
Then "next" arrived and it was so unrecognizable to most of them (myself
included) that we looked at it said, "What in the shit is this?"
The Old World
In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They
can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same
time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we
feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation,
viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much
anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change.
Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.
The New World
In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing
the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed,
then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the
moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners,
their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have
lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of
use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction.
They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the
80% of the famous 80/20 rule.
Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing's ever simply black or
white.
Floppy Disks
An anecdote: When the iMac came out, Apple drew a line in the sand. They
said: we are no longer going to ship a computer with a floppy disk drive.
The entire industry shit its pants so loudly and forcefully that you
probably could have heard it from outer space.
Are you insane? I spent all this money on a floppy drive! All my software is
on floppy disks! You've committed brand suicide! Nobody will stand for this!
Fast-forward to today. I can't think of a single useful thing to do with a
floppy disk. I can go to the supermarket and buy a CD, DVD, or flash drive
that is faster, smaller, and stores 1,000 times as much data for typically
less than a box of floppies used to cost. Or better still, we can just toss
things to each other over the network.
To get there, yes, we had to throw away some of our investment in hardware.
We had to re-think how we did things. It required adjustment. A bit of
sacrifice. The end result, I think we can all agree regardless of what
platform we use, is orders of magnitude more convenient, easier to use, and
in line with today's storage requirements.
Staying with floppies would have spared us the inconvenience of that
transition but at what long-term cost?
Nothing is ever simply black or white. There was a cost to making the
transition. But there was a benefit to doing so.
To change was not all good. To stay put was not all bad. But there was a
ratio of goodness-to-badness that, in the long run, was quite favorable for
everyone involved. However in the short term it seemed so insurmountable, so
ludicrous, that it beggared the belief of a large number of otherwise very
intelligent people.
For a species so famous for being adaptable to its environment, we certainly
abhor change. Especially a change that involves any amount of money being
spent.
Cars
John Gruber used car transmissions for his analogy, and it's apt. When I
learned to drive, my dad insisted that I learn on a manual transmission so I
would be able to drive any car. I think this was a wise and valuable thing
to do.
But even having learned it, these days I drive an automatic. Nothing is
black and white - I sacrifice maybe a tiny amount of fuel efficiency and a
certain amount of control over my car in adverse situations that I generally
never encounter. In exchange, my brain is freed up to focus on the the road
ahead, getting where I'm going, and avoiding obstacles (strategy), not the
minutiae of choosing the best possible gear ratio (tactics).
Is a stick shift better than an automatic? No. Is an automatic better than a
stick? No. This misses the point. A better question: Is a road full of
drivers not distracted by the arcane inner workings of their vehicle safer?
It's likely. And that has a value. Possibly a value that outweighs the value
offered by a stick shift if we aggregate it across everyone in the world who
drives.
Changing of the Guard
When I think about the age ranges of people who fall into the Old World of
computing, it is roughly bell-curved with Generation X (hello) approximately
in the center. That, to me, is fascinating - Old World users are sandwiched
between New World users who are both younger and older than them.
Some elder family members of mine recently got New World cell phones. I
watched as they loaded dozens of apps willy-nilly onto them which, on any
other phone, would have turned it into a sluggish, crash-prone
battery-vampire. But it didn't happen. I no longer get summoned for phone
help, because it is self-evident how to use it, and things just generally
don't go wrong like they used to on their Old World devices.
New Worlders have no reason to be gun-shy about loading up their device with
apps. Why would that break anything? Old Worlders on the other hand have
been browbeaten to the point of expecting such behavior to lead to problems.
We're genuinely surprised when it doesn't.
But the New World scares the living hell out of a lot of the Old Worlders.
Why is that?
The Needs of the Few
When the iPhone came out, I was immediately in love, but frustrated by the
lack of an SDK. When an SDK came out, I was overjoyed, but frustrated by
Apple's process. As some high-profile problems began to pile up, I
infamously railed against the whole idea right here on this very blog. I
announced I was beginning a boycott of iPhone-based devices until changes
were made, and I certainly, certainly was not going to buy any future
iPhone-based products. I switched to various other devices that were a bit
more friendly to Old Worlders.
It lasted all of a month.
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.
Nothing is simply black or white.
Old Worlders are particularly sensitive to certain things that are simply
non-issues to New Worlders. We learned about computers from the inside out.
Many of us became interested in computers because they were hackable, open,
and without restrictions. We worry that these New World devices are stifling
the next generation of programmers. But can anyone point to evidence that
that's really happening? I don't know about you, but I see more people
carrying handheld computers than at any point in history. If even a small
percentage of them are interested in "what makes this thing tick?" then
we've got quite a few new programmers in the pipeline.
The reason I'm starting to think the Old World is ultimately doomed is
because we are bracketed on both sides by the New World, and those people
being born today, post-iPhone and post-iPad, will never know (and probably
not care) about how things used to work. Just as nobody today cares about
floppies, and nobody has to care about manual transmissions if they don't
want to.
If you total up everyone older than the beginning of the Old World, and
every person yet to be born, you end up with a much greater number of people
than there are in the Old World.
And to that dramatically greater number of people, what do you think is more
important? An easy-to-use, crash-proof device? Or a massively complex tangle
of toolbars, menus, and windows because that's what props up an entrenched
software oligarchy?
Fellow Old Worlders, I hate to tell you this: we are a minority. The
question is not "will the desktop metaphor go away?" The question is "why
has it taken this long for the desktop metaphor to go away?"
But, But I'm a Professional!
This is a great toy for newbies, but how am I supposed to get any SERIOUS
work done with it? After all, I'm a PRO EXPERT MEGA USER! I MUST HAVE
TOOLBARS, WINDOWS, AND.
OK, stop for a second.
First, I would put the birth of New World computing at 2007, with the
introduction of the iPhone. You could even arguably stretch it a bit further
back to the birth of "Web 2.0" applications in the early 2000s. But it's
brand new. If computers in general are young, New World computing is fresh
out of the womb, covered in blood and screaming.
It's got a bit of development to go.
I encourage you to look at this argument in terms of what you are really
trying to achieve rather than the way you are used to going about it.
Let's pick a ridiculous example and say I work in digital video, and I need
to encode huge amounts of video data into some advanced format, and send
that off to a server somewhere. I could never do that on an iPad! Right?
Well, no, today, probably not. But could you do it on a future New World
computer in the general sense?
Remember, the hardware is a non-issue: Flash storage will grow to terabytes
in size. CPUs will continue to multiply in power as they always have.
Displays, batteries, everything will improve given enough time.
As I see it, many of these "BUT I'M AN EXPERT" situations can be resolved by
making just a few key modifications:
1. A managed way of putting processes in the background. New
Worlders are benefiting already from the improved performance and battery
life provided by the inability to run a task in the background. Meanwhile,
Old Worlders are tearing their hair out. I CAN'T MULTITASK, right? It seems
like there has to be a reasonable middle ground. Maybe processes can
petition the OS for background time. Maybe a user can "opt-in" to background
processes. I don't know. But it seems like there must be an in-between that
doesn't sacrifice what we've gained for some of the flexibility we're used
to.
2. A way of sharing data with other devices. New World devices
are easy to learn and highly usable because they do not expose the
filesystem to users and they are "data islands". We are no longer working
with "files" but we are still working with data blobs that it would be
valuable to be able to exchange with each other. Perhaps the network wins
here. Perhaps flash drives that we never see the contents of. The Newton
was, to my knowledge, the first generally available device where you could
just say "put this app and all data I've created with it on this removable
card" without ever once seeing a file or a folder. Its sizable Achilles'
Heel was that only other Newtons understood the data format.
3. A way of sharing data between applications. Something like
the clipboard, but bigger. This is not a filesystem, but a way of saying
"bring this data object from this app to this app". I've made this painting
in my painting app, and now I want to bring it over here to crop it and
apply filters.
By just addressing those three things (and I admit they are not simple
feats), I think all but the absolutely most specialized of computer tasks
become quite feasible on a New World device.
A Bet on the Future
Apple is calling the iPad a "third category" between phones and laptops. I
am increasingly convinced that this is just to make it palatable to you
while everything shifts to New World ideology over the next 10-20 years.
Just like with floppy disks, the rest of the industry is quite content to
let Apple be the ones to stick their necks out on this. It's a gamble to be
sure. But if Apple wins the gamble (so far it's going well), they are going
to be years and years ahead of their competition. If Apple loses the gamble,
well, they have no debt and are sitting on a Fort Knox-like pile of cash.
It's not going to sink them.
The bet is roughly that the future of computing:
1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute
flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or
other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and
universally available web apps
All in all, it sounds like a pretty feasible outcome, and really not a bad
one at that.
But we Old Worlders have to come to grips with the fact that a lot of things
we are used to are going away. Maybe not for a while, but they are.
Will the whole industry move to New World computing? Not unless Apple is
demonstrably successful with this approach. So I'd say you're unlikely to
see it universally applied to all computing devices within the next couple
of decades.
But Wednesday's keynote tells me this is where Apple is going. Plan
accordingly.
How long will it take to complete this Old World to New World shift? My
guess? The end is near when you can bootstrap a new iPad application on an
iPad. When you can comfortably do that without pining for a traditional
desktop, the days of Old World computing are officially numbered.
The iPad as a particular device is not necessarily the future of computing.
But as an ideology, I think it just might be. In hindsight, I think
arguments over "why would I buy this if I already have a phone and a
laptop?" are going to seem as silly as "why would I buy an iPod if it has
less space than a Nomad?"
---
On 2 Feb 2010, at 08:56, Gordon Keen wrote:
> Listening to Leo Leport on This week in tech podcast the ability to multi
task on smart phones is the single biggest reason for the phones freezing or
crashing and while he now prefers the Nexus-1 to his iphone he doesn't enjoy
the freezing up for forty five minutes he experienced last week of this
model.
>
> Cheers
>
> G
>
> From glorious Devon, England.
> On 1 Feb 2010, at 20:26, Steve Nutt wrote:
>
>> Hi James,
>>
>> But Nokia phones do multitask. You can remain connected to your Email
>> server while playing music for example. You can leave the web open and
use
>> Quick Office. You can't do any of that with an iPhone, as soon as you
hit
>> that magic Home button, the app you were using is closed and you are back
on
>> the home screen. You can't even task switch with the iPhone, but you can
>> with the N86 and other 3rd gen Nokia phones.
>>
>> So accessibility aside, for the amount you pay for an iPhone, the spec is
>> appalling.
>>
>> All the best
>>
>> Steve
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of
>> James & Nash
>> Sent: Sunday 31 January 2010 12:13
>> To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Subject: [access-uk] Re: Accessibilty and the iPad: First Impressions |
>> ATMac
>>
>> Hi Steve,
>>
>> The cost of the IPhone is certainly prohibitive, but to be fair, I
haven't
>> met a Nokia or other phone with Talks on yet that can multi-task.
Remember,
>> Nokia phones and the IPhone are not computers - they are phones that just
>> happen to provide access to the internet - they are not computer
>> replacements. So even though the idea of multi-tasking on a device like
>> IPhone is appealing, if it never happens, it doesn't really matter - at
>> least to me.
>>
>> I should also say that Grade 2 Braille is available as an option in the
OS.
>> However, people who want to install the OS in a language other than
English
>> have the option of using Grade 1. I don't know if you read French, but
take
>> it from me, it is not easy to read a foreign language in Grade 2 English
>> Braille, especially when that language contains accents. Yes, a word with
>> one accent would not pose a problem, but if you had a word with multiple
>> accents, then it gets very confusing - but I'm getting off the point.
>> Your comments about the marketing machine working well are well-made -
Apple
>> are extremely good at that - perhaps the best in the industry. They don't
>> make a big deal of accessibility in their marketing, because they believe
>> that it should be a given. In fact, since the early days, Mac OS has had
>> accessibility.
>>
>> In terms of "tech specs", whilst it might appear that on the face of it,
you
>> could buy a more powerful laptop say with 4GB of RAM for less than you
can
>> buy a MacBook or Mac Mini, it is in fact misinformation. The only reason
it
>> seems faster is because of how Windows uses that RAM. Because it doesn't
>> give the user complete access to the RAM, you need more to compensate for
>> the resource needs of Windows. Mac OS X on the other hand is much smarter
in
>> the way it operates and gives the user complete access to the RAM. If you
>> put a Mac and a PC side-by-side both with the same RAM you would soon see
>> which was faster. Also, in terms of processor speed - the processors on
Mac
>> are more efficient even though they both use Intel. Finally, I'm sure
you've
>> noticed, that if you leave Windows running for an extended period of time
>> (despite doing maintenance), the degradation in its performance is very
>> noticeable. This is not true on Mac due I think to it's UNIX
underpinnings.
>>
>> Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Windows, I just think Mac is better and
I
>> will do everything I can to inform Blind and Visually Impaired people
that
>> their is an alternative to Microsoft.
>>
>> Also, it is nice to see Tony Sales from RNC pushing Linux, which is
another
>> alternative, but I can't really speak for all of its benefits as I've not
>> spent much time with it although I can use it to some extent, and it is
>> something that I am interested in learning more about.
>>
>> TC
>> James, Lyn, Nash & Twinny
>>
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