Snippet: Lifting the Mouse ☇

Matt Gemmell has been moving to an iPad-only workflow. The whole series is well-worth checking out:

I think it’s also about the perceived adaptability of the device. I’m not having to adapt to it quite so much; instead, it adapts to me, rotating into a new orientation, showing or hiding the on-screen keyboard, and — in the case of the iPad Pro — actually adjusting its screen colour and speaker balance based on where and how I’m using it. Our gadgets should do that, shouldn’t they? They should respond to a direct touch, rather than this bizarre thing where we use a glass pad several inches away from the screen, mounted at ninety degrees, that vaguely maps to some portion of the display depending on where a little pointer happens to be. It’s so familiar that we forget how crazy it is. How rooted in the hardware limitations of the past. We’ve accepted it and internalised it, and now it’s not just normal but proper. Which is crap. It’s still normal, but it’s not proper at all. It’s old, and no matter how effective, it’s still cognitively wacky.

He also throws this bit of wisdom in, which I’m feeling more and more towards “computers” as a whole:

Tear it all down. Throw away the rule book, and come at the whole thing from the other end. iPad software, to me, looks like software for people who are so tired of software’s crap. So fed up with design-by-geek, and function keys, and installers, and anti-virus, and… I don’t know; printer drivers? Are they still a thing? Probably.