Flash Forward?

What’s Hulu going to do? Sit there and wait? Whine about the blue boxes? Or do the practical thing and write software that delivers video to iPhone OS? The answer is obvious. Hulu doesn’t care about what’s good for Adobe. They care about what’s good for Hulu. Hulu isn’t a Flash site, it’s a video site. Developers go where the users are.

via daringfireball.net

I know we (in higher ed) rely on Flash for lots of stuff. Are we ready to pay attention to the shifts happening under our feet?

Progress is Hard

First, I would put the birth of New World computing at 2007, with the introduction of the iPhone. You could even arguably stretch it a bit further back to the birth of “Web 2.0” applications in the early 2000s. But it’s brand new. If computers in general are young, New World computing is fresh out of the womb, covered in blood and screaming.

via stevenf.tumblr.com

This is how things change. The iMac killed the floppy and all the other legacy ports we *had to have* only to introduce a brand new way of thinking about connectivity. The iPhone destroyed my own notion of what I needed in a platform and the iPad is currently destroying (that is in the present progressive tense for a reason) the idea of the "desktop metaphor." I am daring people to say it isn't the right direction.

Alan Kay and the Dynabook

“This note speculates about the emergence of personal, portable information manipulators and their effects when used by both children and adults. Although it should be read as science fiction, current trends almost guarantee that many of the notions discussed will actually happen in the near future.” — Alan C. Kay, 1972

If you are interested in how the future is made, this is a worthwhile read. I’m betting at least few people at Apple did.

Craziness

It seems no matter where I travel I notice two things that blow my mind … the first is that every single house has a play set in the backyard that no one is ever playing on. The second is that no matter where I fire up my laptop I see at least a half dozen or so wireless signals. You’d think at some point we’d all figure out it is cool to let the neighbors play together.

Simple

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people's perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn't a price worth paying to have a computer that isn't frightening anymore.

via speirs.org

In my mind, Fraser Speirs nails it. At the end of the day all the people outside of tech that I've talked to claim to want an iPad. Why? Pure simplicity.

Old School TV

I know you remember this — and if you don’t you really probably should. I discovered this on hulu, but decided to embed it from YouTube so my friends in Canada can see this classic Sesame Street clip. It just flat out made me smile. Not even sure if there is Sesame Street in Canada?

Office on iPad?

I know this seems like a really stupid question, but does anyone think Microsoft would ever make iPad apps of the individual Office tools? At first I thought there’d be no way — Microsoft has a competing mobile OS, why would they want to enable that? Then I remembered they also have a competing desktop OS and they deliver to that. With Apple releasing iWork apps for $10.00 each for the iPad I wonder if Microsoft will be inspired to create somewhat lighter weight versions of Word, PPT, and Excel? Perhaps one of the motivations Apple had for doing the iPad versions of iWork was to press Microsoft into playing?

The really funny thing for me is that I don’t care. I stopped using Office for anything of any sort a long time ago. If you send me a Word doc it is instantly converted to a Google Doc — and I know that’ll continue to work on the iPad. I just wonder if Microsoft will be willing to let money just sit out there in the cloud? Sorry, I was just thinking out loud.

Imagine shamelessly stolen from Apple.

Adding it Up

Gadgets potentially replaced by iPad:

• Digital Picture Frame: $150.00
• iPod Touch: $200.00
• Portable Movie Player: $100.00
• Kindle DX: $490.00
• MacBook: $1,000.00 (assuming a home computer)

That’s almost $2,000.00 worth of stuff that could be replaced — essentially 4 iPads, one for every member of my family. I struggled with throwing the MacBook in that list as it is a full fledged computer, but I was thinking about who in my house would be happy with a MacBook and the only one two I came up with are my 8 year old daughter and 3 year old son. Watching the way each of them use Macs leads me to believe that either would be very satisfied with an iPad (until they hit a site that required Flash). Even without the MacBook, the fact of the matter is that this thing may end being seen everywhere at only $500.00.