“Nothing about the iPad is obviously revolutionary, but it didn’t need to be: the iPhone OS and iPhone hardware are already revolutionary.

Apple already reinvented John’s mobile computing and my input mechanics and novice usability in 2007 with the iPhone. We’ve had the truly magical and revolutionary product this entire time, but we take it for granted now, and we’ve forgotten how awesome it already is.”
- Marco Arment from Tumblr and Instapaper

“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?’”
- Steven Frank from Panic

Not exactly filling the void with an iPad post, particularly one that’s two weeks late to the party and starts with what smarter people have already said. I blame Things for not being more insistent.

I agree that Apple’s iPad is the next step in computing: simplified computing. Yes, it has its shortcomings (inherent to a 1.0 release, which the iPhone had only three years ago), but it keeps with the design decisions that made the iPhone/iPod Touch ridiculously popular.

To illustrate the need, let me tell you about the “Check disc” incident. Over Christmas, my Dad subscribed to the New York Times Crossword Puzzle. The NYT doesn’t have an online puzzle component, so he had to download Across Lite, a third party Windows app. He called me after using it for a couple days about a “disc” issue. Whenever he tried to save the day’s puzzle, the app displayed, “Cannot write to file. Check disc.” It was such a weird error that I wanted to see it for myself. With VMWare Fusion on my Mac, I installed Across Lite and got the same error within a minute. I didn’t actually figure out what the problem was (read-only directory?); instead, I simply told my Dad how to use the “Save As…” option to save the puzzle to the Desktop. Problem solved.

But the larger problem is not solved. The incident is a perfect example of the abstraction problems that current computing environments have. They want to deal in apps and documents and photos, but they still break these abstractions daily. Windows gives me app shortcuts available from the Start menu, but those are a mediocre hack to abstract away the monstrous Program Files folder. Mac apps are nicely treated as atomic objects (even though they are folders), but people still run them out of read-only DMGs, leading to equally confusing error messages. All these semi-porous abstractions lead to a lot of unnecessary confusion.

The iPhone OS enforces the abstraction to a much better degree, and we’ve seen the results: over two billion apps downloaded on seventy million devices in eighteen months. All these little apps are islands of data, a per-app version of the Newton’s data soup platform. The iPad simply extends this OS to a larger surface.

I want one.

WPtouch is very simple to install and instantly turned my blog into an iPhone app on Mobile Safari. Check out the Photos screenshot. It uses the flickRSS plugin to generate a Photos page. Really neat. And, it’s free!

I’m pretty happy with the iteration.

Aaron Johnson posted a great analogy: “We need better distilleries, not better harvesters.” It’s simple to collect more information; we’ve gotten very good at that. The next step is distilling that information down into something easily consumable. That’s where companies like FriendFeed (for RSS feeds) and Xobni (for email) come in. They’re trying to solve the problem of filtering. How do we want email prioritized? How do we see the most important items first? While those guys refine their filtering systems, the best solution is to just ask yourself, “What do I actually care about?” and let the rest go. At least that’s what I tell myself when I stare at the 173 feeds in my Google Reader.

I spent five minutes with the woman behind the gas station register, going back and forth about what exactly I did. Finally, she looked at my receipt and looked at her printout of credit card charges. No match. The gas pump machine had given me a receipt, but it hadn’t actually charged my card. I had no idea those two processes weren’t an atomic transaction.