Just a little of that human touch

I don’t own an iPad and have no plans to get one, but that doesn’t mean I don’t secretly lust after one.

At the present time, it just doesn’t make sense for me. For all its strengths, the iPad’s biggest weakness (well, one of two, alongside restrictions on customization) is that its text input tools are weak. As nice as the virtual keyboard implementation is, with present technology it just doesn’t compare to a real keyboard. For many people, that’s not an issue. But it’s a deal-killer for me for two reasons: between writing and instant messaging, I spend a large percentage of my time on the computer inputting text – and I do so at a fast rate of speed, maxing out over 100 words per minute. If you’re a slow typer, the virtual keyboard might not make much of a difference. But a keyboard that increases the error rate (as a virtual keyboard does) wreaks correspondingly greater havoc on a fast type.

But as the iPad software continues to develop, I’m reminded of my reaction when I first saw the device introduced: within a decade, this is how most of our computing will be done.

Two articles I saw today underline that. The first, via Jason Kottke, was a look at iPad apps for toddlers. Apparently the touch interface of the iPad is amazingly intuitive for small children – unlike the mouse-and-keyboard input and “desktop” metaphor file structure of traditional computer operating systems. I don’t have a toddler and won’t have kids for years at best (though I do want them, eventually), but it’s exciting to me to read about an interface system that’s so intuitive 1-year-olds can use it. Current computer operating systems – even my beloved Mac OS – are a challenge to learn, and even as someone who’s perhaps more comfortable than most people at navigating them, that’s a self-evident fact.

On a more practical level, there was this Wired article about three new Adobe Photoshop apps. The point of the apps seems to be to turn the iPad into an input device for a computer running Photoshop – and the things you can do, and even more importantly the way you do it, seems like science fiction. My favorite part, in a finger-painting app:

Plop down five fingers and a control appears at the tip of each. Move the appropriate finger to adjust color, opacity, settings and brush size. flicking your thumb left or right will undo or redo.

The closest thing we’ve seen to this is the gesture-based computer input in the “Minority Report” movie.

It’d be nice if I had the money floating around to buy expensive toys I won’t fully utilize – the situation an iPad holds for me today. But for now, I’ll just wait until either they improve the text input on an iPad, or until my needs change to make it a more worthwhile purchase. (I’m thinking it’d be much more useful as a shared “family” computer if I lived with a partner than it would be in my current solitary living arrangements.)

But when a piece of technology is revolutionizing user interfaces for everyone from infants to professional graphic designers, it’s got something going for it.