A few months ago you would have noticed my gushing posts about the iOS style of UI, and tablets as a from of personal device, being the future of computing. While I still believe that, I must grudgingly concede that it’s going to take a long time before I can shelve my hefty laptop. I’ve really tried to pull together Keynote decks and Pages documents and concept wireframes on my iPad, but anything that requires a little finesse is just impossible. The tools for moving and editing shapes in Keynote are incredibly awkward. It’s like FPS games used to be on games consoles, where it took years for them to figure out the right way to use a thumbstick to control your viewpoint. Shifting drag handles or objects around on the iPad is painful, but I’m pretty sure they’ll eventually figure it out.
Siri may be the thing to really watch, however. While the simplicity of pulling up a contact and making a call on iPhone was a revelation a few years ago, the total effortlessness of asking Siri to call a contact is completely revolutionary. If tasks like moving objects around on screen can be done without even touching a UI, my agonizing about drag handles will be just plain irrelevant. It’s related to the search boxes that have appeared in iOS: I don’t have to think about where to find a program of file if I can just type it’s name in the search at the top right; I don’t have to remember where the menu item is if I can just type it into the search box under Help. The importance of those little thoughtless moments can’t be underestimated.
I’m going to predict that when people look back from 2020, they’ll say the real revolution was ditching GUIs and letting the devices figure it out for us. On the other hand, tablets will just seem like a different shape of computer.
