You are quite incorrect. Just because it has not happened yet. Does not mean it won’t happen in the future. There are several poor assumptions here.

1) That any interface created so far is intuitive to the user, and/or created properly. They are not. Simply do to the fact that no one has done it yet, and there is a huge space that is a miss and hit, between the developer and the user. This is true of ANY interface design. Especially one that has not been discovered yet.

2) The fact that the screen has ALWAYS been two dimensional is a non intuitive restriction of technology. Have you ever seen an old person try to use a mouse. They simply do not have the coordination, and it often takes them longer to achieve dexterity with a mouse, where as, young people get it in minutes if not seconds.

3) Is the world you live in two dimensional. No. It is actual 3.5 dimensions with .5 being time which we only observe.

4) Companies like Motorola et al… have used 3D process planing, and user training for manufacturing purposes for some time. Simply because the technology is not pervasive, it does not mean it is not good, or will not at some point be pervasive.

I remember a time when people said the same thing about a computer, you are saying in your article here, and we know what happened after that.

It’s easy to flame those who try and fail, harder still to try and fail.

I am not a power-user, just a typical “on the computer eight hours or more daily” pedestrian. I would not trade my netbook for an iPad if you paid me to do it. The netbook is so portable I can put it in my purse and barely notice it. I use it for productivity every day, as I work on the road and in other people’s offices frequently. I need the office productivity, but I also need the web (for research and entertainment), social networking (for instant contact with friends and colleagues), email apps (for contact), and definitely, definitely, definitely, FLASH (for, oh, I dunno, everything?)

Much of my work is keyboard-intensive. I cannot get a handle on the iPad keyboard. You have to lay it down on a flat surface so you can keyboard two-handed, and thus you lose the critical eye-screen angle that reduces both eye and neck fatigue. Or, you hold it up with one hand and keyboard with the other – another ergonomic nightmare. Or, you can hold it with two hands and keyboard with your thumbs. On a full-size keyboard. Ouch.

In fact, the much-touted iPad keyboard is one of the killing factors for me. Even if the iPad did have flash, and multi-tasking, and better portability, the lack of a functional keyboard is just a deal-breaker for me. OK, the others are deal-breakers too.

I am very curious to see how this toy does in actual sales.

The Kindle’s screen and battery life simply cannot be touched by a device with an active screen and a battery life measured in hours. It just can’t.

I use a computer all day long and have for decades, so staring at an active screen for many, many, MANY hours on end is not a problem for me. Yet when I want to read a book, I can tell you from experience that reading a book for five to six hours straight on an active screen is NOT a good experience. /Using/ a device with an active screen is a much different experience because it’s a two-way process of inflow and outflow of information and interactions. Reading books is almost strictly an inflow activity and active screens are terrible at that job for many, many hours on end. You are effectively staring into a light bulb for hours on end. Passing off an active screen as a serious book reader is a joke. Anyone who has owned an e-ink device and used it for serious reading (more than just a quick trip around the block “to see how they like it”) can tell you that.

The battery life of a Kindle is amazing. On a four-hour charge, I can use my Kindle for weeks. Again, that’s weeks, not hours. Weeks! This means that I can lay on the couch on a weekend and read for literally /the entire day/ and not have even an iota of mental nag of, “Hmmm… I should put it back on the charger before I go to bed.” No, I can just lay it on the coffee table and know that I still have another good week’s worth of reading out of it. I can’t describe what that does to the experience of making it feel more like a “book”, rather than a “device that lets me read books”. (And as much of a geek that I am, I still love books more than devices.)

Netbooks are far from the “underpowered” machines you compare the iPad to. I use my netbook for blood and I can tell you that yes, they are underpowered compared to a full-size laptop, but they are far from underpowered for doing serious work. They run the Office suite (2007) just fine. They can also do serious work in a portable form factor. I frequently use my netbook for doing actual, serious application development (using Eclipse and Visual Studio). I also use it for web development and hobby electronics development (Arduino and so forth). No, it’s not /as fast/ as my regular laptop, but it’s /good enough/. There is no way the iPad would be a suitable device for doing easy (but serious), portable development when I’m out and about. The keyboard alone would make that experience terrible.

And there are also the use cases where you have someone who is using their netbook for productivity apps (like Office) and just want to alt-tab over and check Facebook or Gmail or watch a YouTube video someone just IM’ed them about, and then quickly alt-tab back into Office. That’s just not an experience you can have on an iPad, but it’s commonplace on netbooks–just like on regular laptops.

You might shrug off my claims because I’m a “developer/power user/not-your-average-user” and that the iPad is for the “living room” and not people like me, but to do so you would also have to concede that the iPad won’t crush the netbook market. Netbooks are not just the too-small, underpowered, wanna-be laptops you seem to think they are. They have a real use and a real market and the iPad is providing a totally different experience that’s not going to replace those uses, and thus not that market. I think it will capture a small portion of the netbook market that is made up of people who are /trying/ to use netbooks for the experience that the iPad will provide. And I think that’s good.

Should print publishing techniques be used online? I think they should be *adapted* for online audience, especially with all these interaction with video, blogs, twitter, etc. It would be irresponsible for the designer not to leverage new media (working together with the developer and back-end engineers – I salute your hard work), yet we shouldn’t forget the fundamental principles in design when we need new columns to be created on the go if the user decides to fully use his widescreen 1600×1200 monitor or condense it to iPhone display size without requiring him to use a magnifying tool. CSS can do all that and more, but it’s so counter-intuitive for the designer to use and there’s no headway to make CSS approachable, and by that I mean a new program or software to make web designing intuitive and fast. Even with Dreamweaver, I consider it to be an overglorified text-editor (yes I know, it’s an Adobe product which I mention in the first paragraph).

I’m frustrated because CSS promised so much and when it’s time to implement, it delivered so little or required expert hacks which I have little time to commit (have other dayjobs in this economy), nor the resources to pay a web dev. to code a series of static pages. However, my biggest frustration is that I use spend more time wrestling with CSS than actually designing layouts for prospective clients, but it’s a necessary evil. All the while the CSS standards committee and zealots just toil away with standardizing features with arbitrary priorities, always listening to the coder and little regards to the designer. After all, wasn’t CSS – with its middle acronym standing for *style* – invented for the purpose of the designer? What happened to that?

Will CSS make code leaner? Load faster? At ESPN.com their CSS code is bloating at 225KB, but granted it’s only loaded once while the new html holds content on diff. pages (main index page is 100kB, so for a total of 325kB, no images or JS). Point is, if we’re willing to make a website 300KB-800KB on initial load these days (Feb. 2010), I predict we can go even fatter in the future as more and more people have fast internet, leaving the dial-up geezers to bite the dust along with their IE6 (and older) browsers. Plus, with storage space and bandwidth costs falling per-GB, I’d venture a wild guess and say, it’s inversely proportional to content size for a 0 net effect on latency for the end-user. People are used to the load times of a bloated Word document, say 100KB vs. a super efficient Latex doc at 8KB – which is still less then 1 second for either documents, especially when the world is operating at minimum 800mhz CPU (again, another fact pulled out from my ass). We’re at a tipping point where we can sacrifice efficiency for better design and online features.

But I do want to learn and I’m still learning CSS whenever I can because I admit I suck at it, and because some random jerk online said I just didn’t get it and that I should read a book. Unfortunately, the more I learn (and actually understand it), the angrier I get at web in general. If tables is throwing back developers back to the 90’s, CSS is throwing designers back 400 years requiring us to forge and install every individual letter on the press machine. So long typography, so long bezier curves and opacity layering; hack away image corners with photoshop and frankenstein it together with a div container of similar background-color and border, or good luck making z-index position the same everywhere (but this is more of a browser rant than CSS). I only wish the CSS community would meet the designers somewhere in the middle and hear us for standardization and features, instead of being dismissive with, “you just don’t get it,” or “go read a book.” Even painters go out and just buy the paints they need instead of making their own from scratch. I go out there and buy a CSS book and it turns out it’s even less than a cookbook – it’s a book telling you how to raise your own hens and ferment your own cheese to make Omelette du Fromage. I mean, seriously? It’s been 10 years since CSS came out and we’re still at that stage? I remember 10 years ago just being in awe watching CNET streaming video on realmedia at some awful less-than-webcam resolution, and these days we can watch entire movies in 480p on Hulu. Last time I played with CSS was in 2006, and it’s still the same build-a-loghouse-with-an-awl approach as today. I just can’t get my head around the fact that the Web/ HTML is here, and CSS is also somewhat here, and there’s not a single desktop publishing software to allow designers to concentrate on the aspect of *designing*, instead of writing “efficient” code or researching obscure hacks for basic layout. This, I predict, will be the holy grail of web design: when regular artists can tame CSS with simple and intuitive tools. And there are many artists out there, the ones formally trained in art at 4-year Universities, who are equally frustrated at CSS. I haven’t seen or met many developers coming from the graphic design/ art side, but an overwhelming majoring coming from coding or CS majors. Yes, they eat CSS for breakfast, but only few are talented and vice-versa. And between coders/developers/programmers vs. artists, both camps have too large of egos to admit their own shortcomings into each other’s areas.

I’ll just leave it with this, from Seth Godin:

Evolution of every medium

1. Technicians who invented it, run it
2. Technicians with taste, leverage it
3. Artists take over from the technicians
4. MBAs take over from the artists
5. Bureaucrats drive the medium to banality

(I’m afraid it’ll take another 10 years just to reach step 3, or better/worse, it’s already been skipped.)

Design. What is design? Why did I buy expensive wide monitor to have a narrow long vertical band of text on a red background? And scroll like crazy all the time down so that my finger hurts. Why I just cannot read the text and see photos on the normal wide page?

Is it design?

I could use a 10” monitor to read this page.

Do I want to be forced into lowercasing all filenames and directories? No, not at all, but it’s the easiest way to deal with this ridiculous OS “feature” (read: handicap)

When I test in Windoze and OSX, no problem, can have /ExampleDir and code files as EasyToReadClassName.ext

Squinting to read through a directory with all lcased class files is a pain, but c’est la vie, ‘nix is free after all.

Anders idea of mounting the file system case sensitive is a good one.