What next for your computer?
Looking through the first wave of iPad app screenshots that have been hitting the likes of TUAW and Gizmodo over the last few days got me to thinking: is the way we connect to and view online information on the verge of a paradigm shift? Is the very concept of viewing the internet through a web browser an outdated idea that is about to go the way of the dinosaur? Maybe the signs are not blindingly obvious at this point in time, but make no mistake: it is happening and it’s happening before our very eyes. Perhaps unwittingly, Apple has sparked a revolution in the way that we view and consume online media with the launch and success of the iPhone OS and the respective devices it encompasses, and the iPad could be the protagonist of even bigger change.
I say unwittingly, because at the launch of the iPhone with version 1.0 of its OS, Apple gave us a phone with a handful of apps and a web browser. They imagined us using the iPhone’s Safari browser to visit the same sites we already visit at home or at work, and that we would be happy to simply have the ability to view sites in their original format on a mobile device. In their eyes, the iPhone was a revolution in form factor and UI, but not necessarily content, because the content the phone was built to consume already existed out there on the interwebs.
But users wanted more. Having seen the device in action and having embraced the finger-friendly UI already present in the built-in apps such as Maps, ‘traditional’ websites weren’t quite cutting it any more. Suddenly, pinching and zooming to view websites that were designed for a much larger screen and trying to tap tiny links designed for mouse pointers changed from being just a minor annoyance and a small price to pay for being able to access them on-the-go for the first time, to being a bugbear that people wanted a solution to.
A 'jailbroken' iPhone
In a shady corner of the internet, a group of users had taken it upon themselves to hack the iPhone OS open, allowing them to run third-party applications. Some of them were basic and nothing more than proof-of-concept, but others were elaborately coded, beautiful in execution and like nothing people had seen before on a mobile device. As the process to hack (or ‘jailbreak’) the iPhone became easier and less risky, it entered the mainstream and before long even the least tech-savvy iPhone and iPod touch owners were happily rooting their new devices to Apple’s horror in order to add new functions and free it from the crippling restraints that Apple had placed upon it.
Perhaps naively, Apple tried to counter the demands of the user-base (who by now were practically hammering the doors of Apple HQ down demanding that they allow the installation of third-party apps) by launching ‘web-apps’. Web-apps were (are!) essentially iPhone-optimised websites that were accessed by simply visiting a site on the iPhone’s Safari browser, which were then neatly catalogued together on the Apple website. With creative use of HTML, mini applications became possible inside the browser and for the first time, websites were being re-imagined for finger-friendly access that mimicked the look and feel of the native iPhone apps the user-base so desperately wanted more of. But it’s easy to underestimate the quiet yet powerful revolution that the launch of Web-apps provoked.
The Yahoo!Xtra Web-app
Popular sites like Facebook, Yahoo! and Amazon.com underwent the surgeon’s knife to transform themselves into iPhone-optimised sites that made for far more intuitive touch-screen access, yet at the same time they only served to highlight the shackles of being bound to a browser by giving people a taste of what was possible, but not the whole nine yards. Suddenly, familiar and accepted browser conventions like the Safari address bar felt intrusive and the familiar sight of a web-page loading picture-by-picture which were accepted behaviours on our desktop computers felt clumsy and frustrating. So when iPhone OS 3.0 unleashed the App Store and native, third-party apps for the first time, a strange new breed of services was introduced: standalone apps to replace web-apps. Interfaces to existing websites that lived outside of a browser with rich and immersive user interfaces, slick animations, transitions and intuitive design started to emerge. Apps like Facebook, Twitter and even the staples of browser-delivered services like Google were starting to leave their web-based existence on the desktop and deliver much more engaging experiences on the iPhone than anything that could be done with just HTML.
And until recently, despite these iPhone apps being arguably better designed and certainly more visually appealing than any of the websites they are based on, we have been happy to accept both app and website as separate experiences where never-the-twain shall meet. After all, one is on a tiny mobile screen and would look silly scaled-up to full monitor size, and vice-versa. But then enter the iPad with its large 1024×768 screen, and suddenly these two separate eco-systems seem to clash.
Yahoo! app for iPad (click to enlarge)
What do I mean? Well, let’s look at the Yahoo! app for iPad, recently revealed at 9to5Mac.com (pictured above). There’s no doubt about it, it looks gorgeous. Those buttons, those fonts, it’s all very slick and this is from Yahoo! – hardly the leaders in style! And you know that it will all glide effortlessly and that tapping the little settings icon is going to trigger some slick little transition animation that just can’t be done in your desktop browser. Just head over to yahoo.com and see the difference for yourself.
And that’s my point: we’re not dealing with a little mobile phone any more, this is a large screen with a resolution that comes close to an iMac or a MacBook. So I’m looking at Yahoo! on my iMac and I’m thinking: Hang on! Why can’t I view this on my machine? The iPad is meant to be the ‘in-betweener’ – the Mac’s little brother. Usually this would suggest a less capable machine based on compromise and trade-offs, but in the case of these apps we have the exact opposite situation. I look at Facebook and realise that the iPhone version is so much easier to cope with than its full-blown web portal, and I look at Google and find myself wishing I could just speak my search term into it like the Google App. For the first time, the little ‘spin-off’ machine is doing more than it’s desktop counterpart and with it everything has been turned on its head.
No longer tolerated: Awful HTML
There is no doubt that as market penetration of these devices increases, expectations on aesthetics will soar and the limitations of HTML just won’t be tolerated like it is now. So what is the solution? Will we see apps creep into Mac OSX or Windows? Will we be launching beautiful, standalone programs that interface with the likes of Facebook rather than visiting the website? Will future versions of iTunes allow us to run the apps we’ve bought from the App Store on our computers?
If Apple were to enable this function for the Mac, it would be yet another powerful proposition to help lure more would-be switchers into making the move for good. The App Store has a massive library of utilities and games that could (for the most part) easily make as much sense in a desktop environment as it does on a mobile device. So can we expect to see this in the future?
Only time will tell what happens from here, but one thing is for certain: expectations have already been altered and mindsets about how we interact with our machines and the content we consume have already been changed. The pressure is now going to be on for Apple and Microsoft to take these new ideas and incorporate them into their desktop environments and I for one can’t wait to see the results.
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