Early adopters M. and I are, so here I sit with Apple’s latest gewgaw on my lap. I have to say this little thing is something.
Now, me, I’ve gotten all sorts of portable devices over the years. I had Motorola clamshell phones that let you download weak, little Java or Brew applets. Chunky pixels of solitaire games or calculators that required a whole lot of clickity clicking.
The web, I’ve been surfing that thang for years and years. Normal folks don’t remember the magic of pairing an amber screen of text with a zippy 9600 baud modem and discovered words on bulletin board services that were left behind by other explorers. Usenet was a mystical land.
Gopher. I went down some Gopher holes and found treasures of information. I was a member in good standing with Delphi, and that neighborhood of oracles. I had mastered WAIS searches a year or so before I ended up sleeping with a guy responsible for some of the core code.
Yeah, I’m geek girl enough to sleep with a true geek guy. (In those days it also meant a house full of roommates who not only could code, but could gather up the binary files and make “Simpson” episodes and Grateful Dead and Phish bootlegs appear from data strings.)
Hell, I even rocked a Sidekick for long awhile.
But, this, the iPad, it’s not your grandma’s computer. Although, it probably should be.
I think the best thing about it is it doesn’t have much of that computer feeling to it. Not a lot of pesky menus or commands. Just words and pictures that humans might use.
Want a book? Hit the iBooks icon, which looks like a book, et voilà. Want to know what books you have? Tap on the library. Want to buy a new one? Tap on the store. Pretty much the same thing for loading up apps and email accounts and whatnot.
I know for sure if my mother were alive I would buy her one.
Now Pat wasn’t a dumb woman, or particularly fearful of trying something new and different and electronic. Among her computing accomplishments was to not only find on the web a bunch of images of Wyoming when my sister moved there, but to download them and print them up on good photo paper for a collage of framed art. However, AOL and her desktop set up were haunted by various gremlins.
A common call I might get, whilst sitting home alone some quiet evening, was “Help. There’s just a big line or thing on the screen and it won’t go away.” Or, “I click on that thing and it doesn’t make that sound.”
What that generally translated to was an errant mouse drag or two had made a menu bar stretch to half the screen obscuring the menus that could it back under control. Or, maybe in the days of modems, the familiar squeal of the phone line never connected. In later days of cable modems the email window wasn’t crying out “You’ve got mail.”
Hours of our relationship, which ended in one of us dying prematurely, could have been salvaged if Steve Jobs had been inspired sooner and technology had caught up to Pat’s fantasy of how “that damn computer” should have worked.
A lot of people hate the cult of Mac and the messiah that is Jobs. It is in the end a commercial enterprise, and he’s a very wealthy man.
However, I defend him and his products perhaps because of his personal interests and how they are found in his designs. It is the tech company where CEO Jobs stood in front of an image of intersecting street signs – Liberal Arts and Technology. It takes a guy who likes to read books himself to design something a book reader might like.
Mostly, I think computers are designed and made by geeks like me who enjoy clicking around and solving puzzles and don’t mind coded language. For them, and some of the time for me, it’s OK to have to click on and on through a series of Skinner-inspired conditioned responses.
Normal folks, though, and a good percentage of the time myself, don’t want to have to think that hard. In Jobs’ world the computer is a means that should be easy with the hard thinking part reserved for the actual task at hand.
We just want to click on the picture of a book to get there and have the reading be the main event. That the iPad does quite prettily.
