Today marks the birthday of one of my favourite authors of all time, Douglas Adams. Although perhaps these days remembered only for his sci-fi writing, Adams was also a well known, and incredibly eloquent, Mac evangelist, even being one of the ‘Apple Masters’. Sadly, in 2001 Adams past away suddenly at the age of 49, leaving behind shocked friends and fans, but also – through his articles for MacUser and others – hints of his visions for the future of Apple and his computing life in general. An article written in 1989 for MacUser titled ‘Frank the Vandal’ talks about what Adams wanted from the 90’s, closing with the statement:
“There is no problem so complicated that you can’t find a very simple answer to it if you look at it the right way.” Or, to put it another way, “The future of computer power is pure simplicity”.
Some would say we’re there already, let’s have an example. I buy a CD from my local shop, bring it home and put it into my computer. Within minutes iTunes has automatically ripped the CD to neatly organised folders on my hard disk, tagged them properly, synched with my iPod and ejected the CD again with a satisfying bleep. It would be difficult to get any easier there, and tricky to think of anything about that process I don’t like. Simplicity with my music has happened for the better I think.
A major concern of many a sore head is having to crawl beneath desks plugging in cables and matching plugs with sockets. Apple saves us again however, back in 2002: “Apple was the first to build in Ethernet, one of the first to build in USB, the first to build in FireWire, and the first to build in 802.11 wireless networking,” said Steve Jobs, “Now we’re offering a Bluetooth solution that actually works and is easy to use.”
It might have some way to go before everything you want to do with your pocketful of technology happens quite as automatically as your music CD, if only because of security issues, but simplicity is winning out, gone are the days of spending entire afternoons persuading a printer that, yes, it did want to work, and maybe even in colour too. I’m hopeful that it won’t be long before all my electronic devices work seamlessly together.
In the world of OSes and general working though, things aren’t quite so nice. Although many people advocate Mac OS X and Apple software as the simple future, as with any OS or piece of software it takes a very long time to learn how to use it efficiently. And no, I wouldn’t like to read the manual, I just want it to work. I manage to get into my trousers without written instructions, I should be able to use my computer that way. As unreasonable as this viewpoint may seem I think that someone in Apple has realised that this is what people should, and deep down want, to be thinking. I don’t know about you, but the videos and patents of touch screens really fired my imagination. I hope that the future of user interfaces is that simple, and that we’re heading towards the birth of a UI that actually works. And works in the right way. I think that the ability to interact with an application using ten fingers rather than one mouse is going to let us start doing what we should have been doing for years. Leave the complicated ‘technology’ behind, and start working with a computer that comes close to having a human understanding of what you want to do when you prod that picture in a particular way. Interface designers have the opportunity to change the way people see computers forever over the next few years, and I hope that they won’t waste it by being too stuck in current ways of thinking to be innovative.
17 years ago Douglas Adams put his thoughts about the 90’s onto paper. In 2006 we’ve almost got to what he saw, but it’s going to take a while before we can undo people’s acceptance that computers need to be complicated. Apple’s always stood for power and simplicity in the past, and the more you look at the current state of technology and innovation, the more it looks like Apple’s the one to take us to the future.
