If you’re on your home computer while reading this, glance down at your mouse, your trackball or your trackpad on your laptop. Since the Mac first rolled out in 1984, this has been the standard way to interface with your computer. You move your pointing device, and the pointer on the screen moves at the same time.
Once upon a time, this metaphor for working on a real desktop was needed. Until the mouse, the most-used method of interacting with computers was through a keyboard and arcane text commands. Mice took the computer and the way we used it to a much higher level. Suddenly, normal people who didn’t speak UNIX could interact with computers. The Web became popular, and you know the rest.
But when you watch science fiction, that’s not how people interact with technology in our dreams. In our imaginations, we touch screens. Or, as in “Minority Report” with Tom Cruise, we touch screens that almost seem to be thin air. In Star Trek, we talk to the computers. “Computer, on screen.”
The mouse was a much-needed crutch, but now it’s days are numbered. In the future, we will touch actual files and folders and computers will recognize what we say and do what we tell them in conversational English (or Spanish, French, etc.). This technology already exists in many basic forms. Look at the iPhone, the iPad and almost all new smartphones. And voice recognition also has come a long way. Dragon dictation software is on my iPhone. If I speak relatively slowly, it makes almost no mistakes in recognizing everything I tell it, down to the names in my contacts list.
A report has surfaced that Apple may be looking at installing touch screens on Macs.
This excites me. Not because I think it will be that useful – at first. But because it signals to me that we may soon be ready to take that next step in the evolution of technology.
Recently, Bill Gates denigrated the iPad, saying the future was more i the form-factor of a netbook for things like digital reading. Has he even tried to read something on a netbook or a laptop with a full-sized keyboard? I’ve tried to do that while laying down on my bed, and I either had to have the thing sitting on my lap – a long way from my eyes – or I had to balance it on my chest or stomach. It’s just unwieldy. The iPad/Kindle form-factor is much friendlier for casually interfacing with technology. It’s like holding a book. Only it does so much more. And if you notice, in most science fiction, that’s how imaginations hope we will use computers.
The clock began ticking on the traditional PC almost the minute it was designed. The end may not be tomorrow – or even next year. But in another 10 years, I guarantee we’ll look at today’s standard desktop PC in almost the same way we look at typewriters today.
written by admin
The launch of Apple’s iPad has been successful. Possibly too successful. The first signs that something was wrong came late last month, when Apple began pushing the shipping date for iPads ordered online to middle April.
