Welcome to the newly updated DannyStewart.com. In the sprit of the new year, not to mention the new Doctor, I’ve decided that it’s time for a bit of a change for the various facets of my online persona. That means a new look for DannyStewart.com, a new theme for my Twitter profile, and a new avatar across all of my various accounts. I hope you like the new design. As always, comments are welcome.Happy new year!
So, Apple’s tablet has finally been unveiled in the form of the iPad. John Gruber made a post over at Daring Fireball that got me thinking. You should read his post before you read mine.There are some things he said that resonated with me; more than anything, that “the iPad is what they’ve been building toward all along” and how they’ve invented a totally new UI paradigm with the iWork apps.Someone on Twitter said the other day that “this is the end of the desktop OS.” When I read it, I thought it was overdramatized, but after thinking about it, I see what they’re saying and I agree with it. This truly marks the beginning of a change in times. Not long from now, the mouse will die off, to be replaced by a keyboard/touch interface. The iPad is the start of that, and I think it’s a pretty big deal.I always hear people asking what will happen when Mac OS X runs out of version numbers after 10.9. Will we hit Mac OS XI? I don’t think so. I think Mac OS X will be dead before such a need arises. I’ve heard people refer to Snow Leopard as a “fresh start” for the Mac OS, but Snow Leopard is just a stall tactic, getting people used to the idea of scaling back. The iPhone OS (and by extension the iPad OS) is really the “fresh start” here. Apple is pushing the world into uncharted territory, and it’s up to those of us at the forefront of the technological world to keep up so we’ll be ready with a new vision when the rest of the world joins us after the paradigm shift.As Gruber said, iWork on the iPad is a huge deal. They have essentially proven that we can throw out existing UI standards and invent something totally new that works better. It won’t be long before the rest of our digital lives get ported to the iPad as well, and even the content creators will be able to get through the day without sitting at their desktop. Imagine iLife for the iPad, with finger scrubbing in iMovie and a playable on-screen piano keyboard in GarageBand. After seeing what Apple did with iWork, it doesn’t seem so far off, does it? This is what Apple is good at, because they’re not afraid of change.Change is in the air; the future of computing is happening now.
