That Japanese Lady and the iPad

Part 1: Revolutions

This is my inaugural blog posting here. Since I signed up for Blogspot intending this to be a dumping ground for random musings, I might as well start with my current hobby, which is following the vehement iPad-hating that seems to have taken over most technology websites (ArsTechnica, SlashDot, Engadget, etc.).

Of course, the usual professional-Apple-naysayers have jumped all over the iPad as an already-certain flop (John C. Dvorak, whose perfect record of failure in analyzing Apple stuff—the original Mac, the iPod, the iPhone—doesn't dissuade him), and that idiot Rob Enderle (who is content with his Ferrari laptop, one supposes). I am not providing links to these guys, since you can find them as easily as I can.

The critics from among the dēmos, the comment-writers on articles published by technology blogs are more interesting, since they represent real people with real, not-payed-for, opinions, one presumes. I've read hundreds of their comments now, and I think I can sum them up: too big for what it does; no Flash; no slots/ports/pen/"real OS"/camera. This and a bunch of ad hominem about how the "fanboys" will "buy anything with an apple on it" because it is "shiny" and "fashionable" (remaining ignorant of the circular logic inherent in "the masses will buy anything that is fashionable").

There have been, of course, no end of responses to these arguments, the most thoughtful and well researched being those of Daniel Eran Dilger through his "Roughly Drafted" blog.

I think the iPad is going to solidify a Fourth Apple Revolution, for reasons that the haters have missed, and even the most inciteful supporters of the iPad have not articulated fully.

The point is "Applications" and therefore "Developers".

The figure of a sweaty Steve Ballmer from Microsoft jumping around like a Barbary Ape while shouting "Developers, developers!" amuses my days and haunts my dreams. So it is ironic that no one misses the point of the iPad more than him.

Apple has (for a fourth time) stolen a march on its competition by re-inventing how we think about applications.

The first Apple revolution in Apps was the Apple //, about which I have nothing to say, since my parents would never have considered buying me one, so they were apocryphal objects of remote adoration in my youth (I did have a C-64 that I bought with my own money, but no disk drive, so it sucked).

The second was, of course, the original Macintosh, for which (to me) the iconic image is not the cursive "hello" text, nor the "happy mac" icon, nor screenshots of the desktop, but the beautiful "Japanese Lady" drawing by the brilliant Susan Kare, used to show off MacPaint 1.0.

The original Mac got lots of press back in 1984, then languished for a while.

I bought a Mac Plus between my freshman and sophomore years of college. My choice of Mac over "IBM" (as we thought in those days) was informed by the fact that the Macintosh could do Greek, and I was newly enthralled by my study of Classics.

One of my fellow students--this was 1986/7--at my hippy liberal arts college supported himself as a graphic artist. I remember him asking me if I had a program called "Aldus PageMaker", which of course I didn't, nor had ever heard of. But PageMaker, combined with the "ecosystem" of the Mac's GUI, its demonstrated ability to do bitmapped (and vector) graphics, and Apple's original LaserWriter invented a whole new world of applications: Desktop Publishing, then Photoshop (timed to the release of the original Apple-branded scanner).

So the original Mac re-invented the world of "workflow'.

The third Apple revolution was the most subtle, since it happened in early 2000s, when the landscape of Windows/Mac/Linux was already complex, with lots of distractions. But this was Steve Jobs decision to keep the core Unix underpinnings when Apple released OS X. For the first time, there was a slick, integrated (sorry, Linux fans of the early 2000s), consumer OS that came with "emacs", "less", and "top" out of the box.

The Mac OS was a joke in the 1990s. I was at a conference in Rhode Island (perhaps in 1998?), and for some reason my personal laptop (a Wallstreet Powerbook G3... a lovely machine, thick as a Virginia ham, hampered by the crappy Mac OS 8.6, or 9, or whatever) was shanghaied to be the machine that everyone would use to presented their talks. Imagine my shame when some real computers-in-humanities guys got on my precious PowerBook and asked "Where's 'curl'?"

But while the popular press was freaking out because the OS X Public Beta didn't have a DVD Player app, a huge number of developers were noticing that it was a real UNIX OS and could could run Photoshop and gcc, Microsoft Office and perl. So now, when you look at pictures of a gathering of real technology geeks, the vast majority are using Apple laptops.

And this is why last week I was able to use Apple's Automator software to create, in about 5 minutes ('cause I'm slow) a double-clickable "app" that runs a complex series of "rsync" commands that back up all of my crap to a variety of locations, from plugged-in disks to remote servers.

So the first "app revolution" was "here are some apps you can use!". The second introduced the future, when editing of physical media yielded to editing in the digital realm. The third was a fusion of the two… the best apps of the Desktop World of the 80s and 90s, combined with the really useful little wirehead utilities, some of which dated back to the 1960s.

But those "best apps of the Desktop World of the 80s and 90s" are a problem. We all bitch about them. MS Word is bloated and slow; Photoshop is bloated and slow; Excel has a bunch of useless crap built in because secretaries use it to make lists; and so on. The only apps that people seem to like are the ones where the big software houses have had to start from scratch, such as Adobe Lightroom, or were really motivated to make fundamental changes looking to the future, such as Microsoft's Windows 7.

At the same time, the recurring meme among Apple-bashers was "there aren't any apps", which usually meant "MS Exchange" and games.

But with the introduction of the iTunes AppStore for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple has created an entirely new world of software development. This has more to do with the notion of "desktop accessories" that the brilliant Susan Kare was instrumental in including in the original Macintosh… small, focused applications with limited memory footprints that perform specifically useful functions.

That is what the iPad is all about. We can see the iPhone and iPod Touch (and "Dashboard even earlier") as forerunners, much as the Lisa was to the Macintosh.

Apple has bet that a significant number of people want a utility piece of hardware that can do specific things well, with a highly functional user-interface, and an appealing size, weight, and appearance. And Apple is betting that more people want this than want a does-everything-a-computer-does device that happens to be small, or lack a keyboard, or respond to fingers.

But the important part of this gamble is… 150,000 applications in the iTunes App Store. Sure, a bunch of them are crap, and you can't get purient-image-slideshows.

But where Ballmer of Microsoft chanted "Developers, developers", Jobs of Apple has gone off and rounded up about a hundred thousand of them, who know how to program for this thing, who know that their apps don't need to be Photoshop to be successfull, and who have a guaranteed market of enthusiastic consumers.

This universe of developers is entirely independent of any “traditional” operating systems. So the historical advantage enjoyed by the (bewildering multiplicity of) Windows operating systems has just vanished from this field of play.

I ordered an iPad.

I will use its Apple-supplied apps to organize personal photos, navigate foreign towns, watch movies, listen to music, and read books. I'll buy iWork apps to edit documents and do kick-ass presentations in Keynote for my students. I'll use my already-purchased iPhone apps to drive my digital camera when it is mounted on a copystand, tune my guitar, calculate data for hand-loaded rifle ammunition, look up words in the Oxford Greek-English lexiction and Latin-English dictionary. And I'll look forward to what happens as developers of iPhone apps explore the new landscape of the iPad.

Oh, and surf the web. With the iPad announcement, I finally understood why Apple never released a successor to the lovely 12" Powerbook G4, which (until April 4) is still my preferred couch-top portal to the World Wide Web.

Part 2: Freedom

Yes, I know that the iTunes App store is a "walled garden", anathema to freedom-loving open-source software users. As someone who relies on OSS for his professional work, I have a lot of sympathy for this. But OSS has thrived in a world dominated by proprietary operating systems, and will continue to thrive, since it provides tools that people need.

On a daily basis, I use Tomcat, Apache2, tcsh, ant, rsync, and dozens of other OSS apps on my MacBook Pro. I see no signs of hostility on Apple's part toward this functionality.

All that lovely Unix stuff survived the 1980s and 1990s, because it was really useful. Because it was so useful it was brought forward, or replicated, as open sourced Linux stuff. Gradually, even the big guns of proprietary software are being replicated: The GIMP, Open Office, not to mention the phenomenally successful Firefox (and, dare I say it, WebKit).

PageMaker and Photoshop eventually ran as well, if not better, on Windows as on the Mac OS. Linux eventually caught up to, and exceeded, UNIX as an enterprise-quality operating system (sorry, SCO scumbags). There will come a day when the iPad of 2010 and 2011 seems quaint and restrictive compared to Open Source alternative solutions.

My 24-megapizel photographs lovingly post-processed in Aperture put Susan Kare's "Japanese Lady" to shame, except that they don't, because Ms. Kare is a true artist and I am a techno-hack whose only advantage is a quarter-century of technological progress.

Which is entirely the point. Apple's innovations—which consist of integrating existing hardware and software into systems with human beings at the center—are supposed to empower losers like me to produce work that approaches that of real artists.

And so it will be with the iPad. As ever, it will be Apple that lays the groundwork. Apple will define how normal people interact with a digital media appliance: what kinds of apps work well; what kind of UI works well; what sorts of features does it need; what features does it not need. (Hint: Flash is the .bmp of the 20xxs.)

By the time that the iPad of 2010 seems dated, the efforts of HP and Microsoft to cram a full-fledged desktop/laptop OS into a tablet, when compared to the iPad, will seem as quaint as a Kaypro Portable compared to a PowerBook 140.

I'm already running Ubuntu Linux on my MacBook Pro about 20% of the time, and admiring its polish, speed, and efficiency. I can see myself in 2015 experimenting with an OSS finger-based tablet with the same pleasure and admiration.

But for the time being, I'll use my "real" computers for those tasks for which they are well suited, and look forward to grabbing my iPad when it is time to play the guitar, surf the web on the couch, work up some new .30-'06 loads for my Garands, or present the first twenty lines of the Iliad to a class of Greek students.