Shift
The secret sauce of the iPad was completely ignored or quickly dismissed by most of the tech bloggers covering the Apple event on the 27th. It was demonstrated by Phil Schiller during his segment of the presentation. He showed fully-functioning, complete applications of iWork that were completely self-contained. When you open Pages, you’re presented with the documents you’ve created in that application. No more desktop, no more file structure. Just open an app and the correlating documents are shown. If other application developers were to embrace this new paradigm and develop complete applications for the iPad, the shift from the desktop and windowing paradigm would begin. It would completely change the face of computer-interaction.
If developers don’t embrace this and continue to make baby versions of their apps, thinking it’s just a bigger iPhone, then the shift won’t happen. It’s one of those things that kind of hangs in the balance, it could be a fundamental change in how we use computers or it could just be a mickey-mouse app store filled with slightly useful, but not very useful apps.
I can see the potential and it’s a revelation. I don’t know if that was their goal in building a full version of iWork for the iPad but it sure seems like a possibility. Or I could just be hoping for unicorns and leprechauns.
