On Mar 19, 2009, at 1:28 PM, Marta Edie wrote:
I love all the new tech, can't keep up with it all, though, but there are longings for stuff that is plain, functions in one dimension only and has some beauty for the eye to rest on, yes, to rest on.
Think about when cars were first made. Walking through the Henry Ford museum, you can see the early cars steered with a stick and hand levers instead of pedals. The early ones look like a carriage with a motor and steering thrown on as an afterthought. It took several decades, but by the 1920s anyone could get into any car and pretty much know how to drive it because it had a steering wheel and familiar pedals. In fact, except for the automatic transmission, it hasn't changed much in the last 80 years.
The same happened with computers. Starting in 1984, with the introduction of the first Macintosh, the now familiar desktop paradigm of icons and windows has become standard across the industry.
I expect the same to happen with these new-fangled reading devices. The user interface will be perfected. (A touch and tap screen is probably what will win.) The presentation of the content will be modified. (Why is the "page" paradigm necessary?) The devices will get smarter: able to anticipate reader demands with on-the-fly intelligent hyper-linking becoming the norm. In fact, with robot translators off in the cloud, languages won't even be a barrier. (I'm willing to admit that some translations will still require an artist's touch.)
Children born after 2030 or so probably won't ever think of the Web; they'll just take ubiquitous connectivity for granted.
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