I just finished reading David Meyer’s analysis
of the latest reorganization within Apple on ZDNet. His prediction at iOS and
OS X will merge into a single operating system with a common user interface
strikes me as a reasonably good educated guess. Furthermore, the promotion of Jony
Ive from product design to the broader responsibility of human interfaces across
all Apple products is a sign that this unification will be seen at the
interface level, as well as the infrastructure. I would also agree with Meyer
that these changes recognize a potential threat arising from Microsoft’s new
commitment to touch-based products.
Still, I have to wonder just who will benefit from those
changes that are potentially in the works. I have already written about the
fact that those of us who still take “an
analytic approach to both reading (as in long reports that often require
multiple open windows to support fact-checking, testing, and related queries)
and writing (as in responding to such reports with a comprehensive analysis)”
are likely to be the losers in this mobile-based world of the future that has
seized the attention of both Apple and Microsoft. I would also suggest that,
beyond the basic acts of reading and writing, there are also basic issues of
content management (once called file management), that have always been
fundamental to any operating system. Whether the content is on your own device
or off in some cloud, you still have to worry about both saving it and
retrieving it; and interfaces should be designed to make those worries less
bothersome. Finally, there is an even more fundamental issue of operating
system design, which is the idea of managing multiple active processes for
those “multiple open windows.” If I am trying to read anything of substance
from a computer screen, I am likely to be writing at the same time. That is why
I am such an advocate of the support for note-taking
provided by Acrobat; but the notes I write usually require that I am
running a Web browser (and probably also a tool for searching documents on my
hard drive) at the same time. The notes I take may involve both pasting content
from other sources or inserting useful hyperlinks. Such multitasking is not
currently supported by iOS, nor would I want to do that kind of reading on a
telephone. However, the corollary is that I cannot do it on an iPad either.
My fear is that we face a highly consumer-based approach to
the next generation of technologies. This obviously plays well for the
marketing folks, who can then dream up any number of scenarios of happy
consumers for television commercials. However, it pushes those of us who have
to do something other than consume, not only those of us who desperately cling
to writing as a legitimate form of work but also all of those trying to run
businesses confronted with day-to-day decision-making challenges that require
hard-and-fast analytic thinking, into a distant background. It will be E.
M. Forster’s world in which the machine satisfies all consumption needs but
in which no one knows how the keep the machine running effectively; and it
seems as if it is no longer in the interests of either Apple or Microsoft to
consider the implications of such a future.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
New Interfaces for Whom?
Labels:
analysis,
consequences,
consumer,
decision,
deliberation,
literature,
marketing,
propaganda,
reading,
technology,
work,
writing
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