Il seguente Post è stato copiato con il suo permesso dal Blog di Joe Hewitt e secondo me è perfetto per descrivere l'ultima meraviglia di Steve Jobs: l'ho riportato per intero, se volete saperne di più su Joe Hewitt lo potete trovare nel suo Blog:
http://joehewitt.com/post/ipad/
iPad
Mostof the iPad reactions I've read have been negative, but I have beencompletely satisfied with what Apple announced. iPad is exactly theproduct I've been wishing forever since I wrapped my mind around the iPhone and its constraints.While the rumor mill was churning with all kinds of crazy possibilitiesfor the Apple tablet, I mostly rolled my eyes, because I felt stronglythat all Apple needed to do to revolutionize computing was simply tomake an iPhone with a large screen. Anyone who feels underwhelmed bythat doesn't understand how much of the iPhone OS's potential is stilluntapped.
I spent a year and a half attempting to reduce a massive, complexsocial networking website into a handheld, touch-screen form factor. Mygoal was initially just to make a mobile companion for the facebook.commothership, but once I got comfortable with the platform I becameconvinced it was possible to create a version of Facebook that wasactually better than the website! Of all the platforms I've developedon in my career, from the desktop to the web, iPhone OS gave me thegreatest sense of empowerment, and had the highest ceiling for raisingthe art of UI design. Except there was one thing keeping me fromreaching that ceiling: the screen was too small.
At some point I came to the conclusion that Facebook on iPhone OScould not truly exceed the website until I could adapt it to a screensize closer to a laptop. It needed to support more than one column ofinformation at a time. I couldn't fit enough tools on the screen tosupport any kind of advanced creative work. Photos were too small toshow off to my far-sighted parents. The web required too much panningand zooming to enjoy reading. Beyond just Facebook, most of the apps Iused most on my iPhone also suffered from these limitations, likeGoogle Reader, Instapaper, and all image, video, and text editingtools. The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone canbecome full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget abouttheir desktop/laptop predecessors. We just have to invent them.
Opportunity
iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine everysingle category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, ifyou're a developer and you're not thinking about how your app couldwork better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get leftbehind.
True, iPad 1.0 has a lot of limitations which make it hard to becompared to a laptop today. We're not there yet, people, but does itreally take that much imagination to see how we will get there? Appleclearly wants to increase its investment in iPhone OS and reduce itsinvestment in Mac OS X. At some point in the near future, Apple willadapt iPhone OS to even larger screens, add multi-tasking, and releasesomething like a laptop or iMac with the OS. When it happens, it willmake perfect sense, because by then there will be orders of magnitudemore iPhone/iPad apps on the App Store than there ever were for Mac OSX and Windows.
A Closed Platform?
Given my concerns about the way Apple runs the App Store, you might expect me to jump on the bandwagon screaming about how Apple is evil and iPad is the death of open computing.Nonsense. My only problem with Apple is the fact that they insist onpre-approving every app on the App Store. The store may not be open,but the iPhone/iPad platform itself could hardly be more open totinkerers of all ages.
The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app "closed" is that itlives in a sandbox, which means it can't just read and writewilly-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere withother apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. Itmakes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed,and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-installthe OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps,but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.
As a developer, it's a bit sad losing the ability to come up withcrazy plugins and daemons and system-level utilities, but I believeit's a tradeoff worth making. What people are overlooking is that theInternet is an integral part of the iPhone OS, and it is the part ofthe OS you can tinker with to your heart's delight. If you want toinvent a new scripting language or background service or something,you're still totally free to do that, but you're going to have to runit on a web server. If you want total freedom on the client side, thenwrite a web app. You're simply no longer going to be able to temptusers into installing software that corrupts their computer.
So, in the end, what it comes down to is that iPad offers newmetaphors that will let users engage with their computers withdramatically less friction. That gives me, as a developer, a sense ofpower and potency and creativity like no other. It makes the softwaremarket feel wide open again, like no one's hegemony is safe. How anyonecan feel underwhelmed by that is beyond me.
Cosa ne pensate?
.... es por eso que no escribo mi CV. De todas formas èste soy yo:
