or how i learned to love no desktop

as some of you already know i’m not the most adaptable guy in the world. I carry with me a collection of psychological idiosyncrasies and a variety of physical ailments and sensitivities that to some extent have molded my computer experience.

in an effort to kill the desktop i’ve tried:

• moving my computer to the couch. monitor on coffee table
• routing my computer through the tv
• switching to laptops
• switching to macs
• switching to mac laptops

and each failed for various reasons of either physical discomfort ( early arthritis in the shoulders ) or just a general ability to modify my mindset to using new devices in a regular way.

enter the ipad.

first lets review the main functions my computer serves for me:

• programming and web application development + server administration
• photo editing ( lightroom )
• social interactions (email, blogging, twitter, facebook, flickr, chat )
• online reading ( blogs, technical reading, photo browsing, research, videos )
• playing music
• watching video ( yes, it’s mostly porn—i port real video to my xbox )

with that now mapped out lets review the typical start to a morning:

• review + respond to emails
• get updated on facebook, add witty comments to otherwise boring streams
• review twitter 
• use netvibes to catch up on the 150 or so sites i follow via rss feeds

while all this is going on there is a constant play of either reviewing related content such as related web pages or videos and the subsequent web spiral of focus that goes on as one link leads to another, etc, and folding new found content back into any of the possible outlets like facebook, twitter or blogging.

i’m also almost always listening to music. which is coming under questions as i read ( on my ipad, thanks kobo ) “In pursuit of silence”.

this entire process, depending on the quality of inward data flow, and the urgency of work can take anywhere from 10 mins to 2 hours. it’s also repeated in mini-form throughout the day as new data flows in and new opportunities to mock @doug_springer become available.

because i’m a geek, and an information addict ( my daughter calls me ruzzipedia ) my information consumption may be higher and more fluid than yours. results vary but i think a safe estimate is to say at least 3 hours a day is spend consuming, ordering, sharing, exploring and digesting information of some sort. that may be work related, or it may be learning about a new type of bug, or following the moment by moment changes to #nodejs. but it’s spent principally upfront at the start of the day—then in small bursts throughout the day.

i have no problems with this amount of time being spent. I enjoy information and knowledge, and following trending ideas is part of what keeps me employable. the bulk of my life is a digital life. i have no qualms about that. you spend your life how you want, and i will tweet. fair?

since i lost my main text buddy recently the largest part of my interaction with friends now occurs through facebook, twitter, and gchat. some people congregate and consume alcohol then stumble home, i prefer to share 140chars and move on.

i get my kicks above the waistline, baby.

back to the entrance of the ipad though. When I purchased it i had no expectation it might change my day in any meaningful way. i thought it would be a fun gadget that would serve mainly the following purposes:

• allow me to convert to electronic books. i have about 600 paper books and it grows by 75-100 a year. becoming a serious space hog and don’t even get me started on moving
• serve as a couch-side way of reviewing a lot of more indepth online reading that i never get to on the desktop
• serve as a couch-side browser for real time lookups of stuff as im watching movies or tv, or playing xbox.
• serve as a couch-side way to tweet, facebook, browse the web
• serve as a couch-side way to browse my photos, etc.

that’s principally what i expected from it and with the addition of a few key tools it’s doing all those things:

• ReadItLater (for bookmarking on the PC, reading on iPad)
• twitterific
• wikipanion
• imdb
• kobo ereader (i want to write a seperate post about the ipad ebook situation so check back on that)
• reeder (for my news feeds, but didn’t expect to use it much)

As i explored the terrain of ipad applications my ideas of how to use it for things i hadn’t considered started popping up everywhere

• as a digital sketchpad (Autodesk Sketchpad Pro is like crack)
• for mocking up applications for work (iMockup)
• for finding/making recipes (epicurious)
• for editing photos! (tiffen photo efex ultra, shakeitiphoto, etc)
• as a digital note pad (penultimate) 
• to read comics and online magazines
• to watch video anywhere i feel like plunking my ass
• as an application planner and planner in general

the exciting ones are sketchpad and editing photos, obviously. but more valuable to me is the cohesiveness of using a touch device to interact with media and the readability of the ipad. these two things change the mental focus and effort required to mine massive information streams and filter then use (distribute) them.

readability

reading anything on the ipad is much more enjoyable than a computer screen. i’m not sure if its a contrast issue, or size, or format. but i’ve found i no longer dread longer documents in the same way. i find less eye strain, less internal friction to the media and that means more focus and clarity.

cohesion and mental clarity

I saw a lot of complaining about how the ipad can only do one thing at a time. i heard everyone go on about how this constraint made it somehow a less interesting device but i’d like you to consider how most developers have responded to that. by creating deep delving apps that handle different data types while staying inside a single application.

take any example you like for localized app data on the desktop, like tweetdeck, or a news reader and you find you’re spawning browser tabs all over the place. each tab breaks the cohesion of the data flow. each tab is a huge distraction from the flow you were following.

apps like tweetdeck for the PC do have built in handlers for things like photos or websites, but i find them very slow, and the implementation visually is painful. you feel like you’re boxed into a secondary app inside a tweet app.

on the ipad, in my reader (reeder) for example, i can quickly click a link from a feed and it just opens to the page with controls to do something with that page in context to reading a feed, i can share it with every service available in one or two taps then quickly return to exactly where i was in my reading.

this cohesion means more sharing, less distraction and reduces the cost of following links, following thoughts to next to nothing. back in the early days of windows there were many times users would get so many windows open they couldnt figure out where they began, or where they were. I believe this model translated to the tabbed browser. you’d get so many tabs open you’d get lost. not lost in relation to a start point, but lost in relation to a stream of focus.

if you delve deeply into web reading on some level you may build up an internal resistance to clicking that link at a certain point. you can have open in your mind only so many useful nodes before the next one scatters everything.

this is where link garbage collection comes into play and sites like delicious or ReadItLater find their customers. open a tab, mark it somehow, close it and promise yourself some sunday you will get back to it. it almost never happens and you find yourself with an impossible list of links that you no longer remember context for.

readability, cohesion + breaking the tether

improved readability causes less eye and mental strain. cohesion causes less mental strain and less reluctance to information as the cost of exploring is very low. breaking the tether from the office chair + desktop means potentially more physical comfort while doing all of the above.

readability, cohesion, breaking the tether + touch

lets just accept that human beings are touch focused. there’s little need to go into how on some primal level we are all comfortable with touching things as a means to interact. swiping pages, tapping, etc, these are all muscle memory activities. great athletes in any field will tell you the more of your game you can commit to muscle memory the more focus is free for precision and “flow”.

it’s impossible to commit mouse actions into muscle memory because it’s always more or less the same action with a different visual context. because of that it requires visual focus to determine the correct muscle actions. this reduces focus. focus and attention are spent deciding what actions to perform rather than performing actions from memory.

readability, cohesion, breaking the tether, touch as salve

anyone who’s experience is primarily digital knows there is a residual effect of long term digital interaction on mental focus. clarity is reduced as exposure is increased and i’m going to assert this reduction in clarity becomes ingrained and expressed as a sort of non-specific resistance to new information or new data. 

this non specific resistance manifests itself in mental fatigue, burn out, information overload, disorder, and a general malaise towards the vast array of learning opportunities available at all times through the internet.

combining the above features seems to act as a bulwark of some type. a salve for a constantly stimulated mind in fine degrees of improvement.

and now the downside

 the primary downside ironically is touch. you touch objects. you touch things. and our digital world is primarily not objects or things. it’s words. and words mean we’ve only half escaped the existing model of computing.

we escaped the mouse through touch. as an interactive tool the mouse was focused but grossly limited. a device which expressed nothing in the terms of how humans think about things, and i think this is why touch is so immensely popular.

but we have yet to escape the keyboard. and i see no time in the near future when we do. and so we are now wedged half-birthed into a new world of computing. and this is where the downside comes to front.

while the virtual keyboard on the ipad is very usable, and functional for short bursts of writing i cannot see myself writing something this length with it. i’d be more inclined to write it with my micro-keyboard on my blackberry.

it seems a great irony that they did away with one limited input device (the mouse) and took away one expressive one (the keyboard) at the same time, replacing it with a non tactile simulacrum. i gained touch for navigation and flow, and lost tactile touch for the single most important part of computing. translating my thought to some digital form.

what next?

it seems very unlikely to me through a confluence of failure on the part of man to lift us out of the text editor as programming tool that i will be developing any sort of meaningful application using anything but a desktop computer. this means, while some part of my day is radically changed, the largest part remains the same.

it seems fascinating to me that the tools we use to build the most modern applications in the world (touch based apps galore) are written using words. we’ve created an object oriented development world but it’s only oriented. it’s an abstraction in the mind. there are no physical objects to interact with. it’s words pretending to be objects.

perhaps the breakthrough in touch focused devices will herald in a new generation of touch driven visionaries that can lift us from modeling code in text and bring us to modeling with touch. maybe the nascent field of touch will set off an explosion of imagination.

they say it’s turtles all the way down but in truth, it’s text. and until we can add a layer between the compiler and the display that understands real physical objects in 3D or even 2D space we’re writing novels not crafting sculpture.

and since we are writing novels we require keyboards as our primary method of input. which makes this only part one of what’s to come.

having said all that, part one is pretty fantastic.

bone, heart, womb (c) 2004-2010 i.im. ruzz