The Old World and the New World

posté le 31 janvier 2010 à 16h00 dans la catégorie ComputerGeek .

I didn’t want to talk about the iPad just for the simple reason that there are an absurdly, insanely, unbelievably, fucking huge number of posts and articles about the new device from Apple. In fact, I could write this entire post with each word linking to an opinion of some pundit throughout the world. That would make this page a sickening orangy piece of art.

But someone opened my eyes and suddenly I had to add my little orange dot on the digital wall of the internet. This person is Steven Frank, one of the co-founder of Panic, the Mac software company that brought us Transmit, Unison and Coda. He’s written a piece about computers. Please, go there, read it and come back afterwards. One could say it is a bit long, but it’s worth a read. I’ll wait for you, promise.

When I saw the announcement I was, like the majority of us geeks, going meh. On some part it is very nice, on others it lacks some stuff that I consider a must. I toyed with the idea to have one. It would have been a nice device to use at home and certainly a better and more versatile one that the Kindle I was eyeing at. But in the end, the one thing that bugged me the most was that I wouldn’t own the iPad. Apple would. And because I was not on total control of it, that I could download Chrome and installs it, at the end I lost any interest I had for it.

This is the only thing that Steven did not really touched upon. But it can be easily dismissed: the Web. Indeed, if you want to have an app that is not Apple sanctioned, the cloud is the answer. Of course, you won’t have access to all the APIs, but with html5, you still can go a long way.

But the main point, and the gist of the post of Mr Frank, is that this device is not for us geeks, but for Mr Anybody, for my Mom, for all the people we let down and offered only some piece of junk that is prone to error, to virus and to a cornucopia of small and totally overwhelming implementation details and unintuitive interfaces. This is the future of computing and it will be heaven for my Mom compare to the present hell.

There will still be computer as we know it today, as open and error prone. You’ll be able to do (mostly) whatever you want with it. And that is perfect. We’ll have the perfect world, where anyone can have the perfect device based on his needs. My Mom will surf the web, will read and write emails, will look at the photos of her two beautiful grand children and will listen to her music. All of this without hassle or frustration. And on the other side, I will have whatever geek toy will be hot at that time and I will install python 3.7 and Apache 3.0 and MySQL 6.2 and I will torn this baby apart and learn and use all the cool stuff I want. And the Old World (me) and the New World (Dear Mum) will all be happy.

I will end up like a grumpy Old Worlder and tinkerer. But, at least, I known this and I will be able to be a part of it. Just like everyone else.

PS: While redacting this article, and searching for my orange wall paint, I stumble up this post, from Fraser Speirs. Please read it as well, it’s a stunning gem.

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