8 ms·

If you look at the biomechanics, it does seem like a keyboard + mouse + >=20" screen is the optimal setup for doing actual work. A keyboard is simply the most e

If you look at the biomechanics, it does seem like a keyboard + mouse + >=20" screen is the optimal setup for doing actual work. A keyboard is simply the most efficient way to get information into a computer (the exception is that some graphics editors work might work better with a multitouch screen, it will be interesting to see if someone builds a touch-first photoshop killer). That said, there might be a convergence where mobile devices learn to run desktop software, and can be docked to a mouse/keyboard/monitor. But we are still a long ways from that point, and there is no great incentive to build office suites for mobile devices that are efficient for power/work users. Mobile is great for 1) consuming content 2) interacting with your extended environment when you are not grounded to a computer (summoning an Uber, paying with an app, etc.) The money in content consumption will go to either the content creators or the digital sharecroppers (Facebook). So the question is, are there large untapped areas where a phone could be used to interact with ones environment? What kind of day-to-day things could be enhanced with internet connected software?

fidotron 12y ago
Right, and on your last point, that's almost exactly what the NFC industry has been trying to do for years. Most successful mobile ticketing deployments seem to use the barcode-a-like on a screen approach thanks to NFC not really getting very far. It will be curious to see if Apple manage to get any traction here. Obviously flesh blood is a good thing, however, this problem space has been thoroughly explored. The real unexplored area is that few people have noticed just how insanely powerful the GPUs in these devices are, but again the problem is in working out what they might be useful for, especially given the trend is for mobile "apps" to really be trivial front ends for web services.
- cageface 12y ago
  especially given the trend is for mobile "apps" to really be trivial front ends for web services. Yep. After doing mobile for a while you start to notice that most apps are just listviews hitting REST endpoints. Not exactly earth-shattering technology.
marknutter 12y ago
> That said, there might be a convergence where mobile devices learn to run desktop software, and can be docked to a mouse/keyboard/monitor. I never understand this prediction. That's a bit like saying I don't need a car because I could just dock my bicycle into some sort of enclosure with four wheels. Tablets, smartphones, and laptops/desktops were all built for different purposes and cannot be full replacements for each other, just like a bicycle can't fully replace a car without some serious sacrifices.
- skolor 12y ago
  Even if I had a full scale performance in a cell phone with great docking capabilities, I probably would rather have a separate desktop computer for working. Just being able to compartmentalize "social stuff" on my phone, and "work stuff" on a desktop tends to vastly improve my performance.
  - pbreit 12y ago
    Isn't that easily solved with logins?
    - JetSpiegel 12y ago
      It's a psychological thing, not a technical problem.
      - skolor 12y ago
        To expand on it, its also a security thing. Having my phone with a network of personal contacts and my computer with more work related data means a separate of attack surface. At this point, if you have anything worth securing, its probably a good bet that your device will get compromised in the next 5 years. Compartmentalized devices helps with that significantly, since it means only partial compromises.
- pbreit 12y ago
  That strikes me as a lousy comparison. I could easily see a notebook with a detachable touchscreen and the proper OS (OSes?) being a useful machine (easier to see since a reasonably selling device actually exists). What if an iPad Air could simple attach to a MB Air chassis and only serve as the display when attached?
e12e 12y ago
Agreed. Except I think proper styluses/digitizers, like what I gather one gets with the Surface Pro, and I enjoy on my Samsung Note 3 hold much better potential than multi-touch (there's a reason why artists and designers have been using digitizers for a long time). Keyboard for text entry coding, digitizers for design/art/photo-work and possibly (multi)touch for richer, Smalltalk-like UIs. I've always thought three-button mouse weren't such a great idea (ergonomically) -- but a lot of the same things that work well with them (Smalltalk, ACME), should work fine with multi-touch -- as long as we evolve the GUIs a bit to take proper advantage.
jonnathanson 12y ago
"So the question is, are there large untapped areas where a phone could be used to interact with ones environment? What kind of day-to-day things could be enhanced with internet connected software?" This is why I find machine learning and optimization such fascinating areas to watch. At a certain point, we may reach the practical limits of what human gestures, commands, and requests can tap into or do. The machine (or rather, the distributed ecosystem of machines) becomes more and more important in automating X, suggesting Y, and predicting Z. I enjoy the prospects of VR and AR, especially in an omniconnected world. Those always seem like interesting use cases for a smart(er) phone. But I'm a lot more excited about the non-UI advances that the "internet of things" can bring us. When we free ourselves from the limitations of human comprehension, human attention span, and human neurological heuristics, we can do so much more. To me, the "large untapped areas" are all the things we won't have to tap to access (terrible pun intended). Before we can get there, of course, we'll have to connect all the devices. At the risk of sounding hokey, naive, or unapologetically futurist, I look forward to the day when kids will say, "Wow. When you were my age, you actually had to touch things to make them work?"
- pfitzsimmons 12y ago
  Gestures are much less efficient than using a mouse or touchscreen, gestures require more muscles and movement and are less precise. Voice commands beyond the very simple stuff is an AI complete problem. True AI is much further away than we think. And when it comes it will be so deeply weird and also mind-blowing that asking it to buy us plane tickets via voice command or whatever will be the last thing that we would be worried about.
  - majgr 12y ago
    How about eye?
erikpukinskis 12y ago
Your assumption, which I think is wrong, is that WPM (or maybe APM) is the bottleneck for most work. I suspect reading/comprehension, problem solving, planning, usability, and access to the right tool, discovery of tools, responsiveness of tools, teamwork... These things are much more likely to be the bottleneck. As a programmer, I suspect I could probably type the entirity of a days work into the computer in a half hour.
- danielbarla 12y ago
  I suspect that this is highly related to the task being done, and the context. Some days, I'd totally agree with you; I'm not really sure of the next step(s), and have to give myself lots of time to think about things. This tends to apply when I'm entering unknown territory, and my tasks are relatively fuzzy and uncertain. On the other hand, some tasks are extremely straight-forward (repetitive / memory-based), and more or less completely WPM and flow-bound. Even working with relatively efficient editors (using shortcuts, macros, VI bindings, etc), it's hard to type out (or otherwise input) much more than 2000 lines of code in a day. These types of tasks certainly require efficient input, and could be greatly enhanced by even better human-to-machine interfaces. (I'm also a programmer, and these do come from my own experiences)
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I can't even read a phone screen without reading glasses on, I absolutely loathe reading more than a paragraph of text on one and I really couldn't imagine getting any significant amount of work done on a mobile platform. If we count tablets as mobile too (they're wireless after all and plenty of them come with SIM slots) then the consumption part gets a bit better, in landscape mode you can read PDFs on them but the part of work that requires significant input would - for me - not be an option.
- Dewie 12y ago
  > Your assumption, which I think is wrong, is that WPM (or maybe APM) is the bottleneck for most work. I don't care if it's a bottle neck. I want an efficient means of typing, so that I can keep my focus on other stuff. Maybe I could do a lot of my typing using a terrible interface like my phone, but it would be very aggravating.
AJ007 12y ago
Clip Studio Paint has a really good touch UI. It doesn't replace Photoshop for photographers, but for illustrators it certainly acts as a replacement. I have had an iPad since the first version. I also have had various touchscreen "tablet" PCs prior. The problem is not the hardware now its the software -- and the software has gotten so, so, so much better. I can do real work from a tablet and a phone. The best practices devs first discovered and now proliferating more widely. That takes time but we are seeing the results now.

fidotron 12y ago

Right, and on your last point, that's almost exactly what the NFC industry has been trying to do for years. Most successful mobile ticketing deployments seem to use the barcode-a-like on a screen approach thanks to NFC not really getting very far. It will be curious to see if Apple manage to get any traction here. Obviously flesh blood is a good thing, however, this problem space has been thoroughly explored. The real unexplored area is that few people have noticed just how insanely powerful the GPUs in these devices are, but again the problem is in working out what they might be useful for, especially given the trend is for mobile "apps" to really be trivial front ends for web services.

cageface 12y ago
especially given the trend is for mobile "apps" to really be trivial front ends for web services. Yep. After doing mobile for a while you start to notice that most apps are just listviews hitting REST endpoints. Not exactly earth-shattering technology.

marknutter 12y ago

> That said, there might be a convergence where mobile devices learn to run desktop software, and can be docked to a mouse/keyboard/monitor. I never understand this prediction. That's a bit like saying I don't need a car because I could just dock my bicycle into some sort of enclosure with four wheels. Tablets, smartphones, and laptops/desktops were all built for different purposes and cannot be full replacements for each other, just like a bicycle can't fully replace a car without some serious sacrifices.

skolor 12y ago
Even if I had a full scale performance in a cell phone with great docking capabilities, I probably would rather have a separate desktop computer for working. Just being able to compartmentalize "social stuff" on my phone, and "work stuff" on a desktop tends to vastly improve my performance.
- pbreit 12y ago
  Isn't that easily solved with logins?
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    It's a psychological thing, not a technical problem.
    - skolor 12y ago
      To expand on it, its also a security thing. Having my phone with a network of personal contacts and my computer with more work related data means a separate of attack surface. At this point, if you have anything worth securing, its probably a good bet that your device will get compromised in the next 5 years. Compartmentalized devices helps with that significantly, since it means only partial compromises.
pbreit 12y ago
That strikes me as a lousy comparison. I could easily see a notebook with a detachable touchscreen and the proper OS (OSes?) being a useful machine (easier to see since a reasonably selling device actually exists). What if an iPad Air could simple attach to a MB Air chassis and only serve as the display when attached?

e12e 12y ago

Agreed. Except I think proper styluses/digitizers, like what I gather one gets with the Surface Pro, and I enjoy on my Samsung Note 3 hold much better potential than multi-touch (there's a reason why artists and designers have been using digitizers for a long time). Keyboard for text entry coding, digitizers for design/art/photo-work and possibly (multi)touch for richer, Smalltalk-like UIs. I've always thought three-button mouse weren't such a great idea (ergonomically) -- but a lot of the same things that work well with them (Smalltalk, ACME), should work fine with multi-touch -- as long as we evolve the GUIs a bit to take proper advantage.

jonnathanson 12y ago

"So the question is, are there large untapped areas where a phone could be used to interact with ones environment? What kind of day-to-day things could be enhanced with internet connected software?" This is why I find machine learning and optimization such fascinating areas to watch. At a certain point, we may reach the practical limits of what human gestures, commands, and requests can tap into or do. The machine (or rather, the distributed ecosystem of machines) becomes more and more important in automating X, suggesting Y, and predicting Z. I enjoy the prospects of VR and AR, especially in an omniconnected world. Those always seem like interesting use cases for a smart(er) phone. But I'm a lot more excited about the non-UI advances that the "internet of things" can bring us. When we free ourselves from the limitations of human comprehension, human attention span, and human neurological heuristics, we can do so much more. To me, the "large untapped areas" are all the things we won't have to tap to access (terrible pun intended). Before we can get there, of course, we'll have to connect all the devices. At the risk of sounding hokey, naive, or unapologetically futurist, I look forward to the day when kids will say, "Wow. When you were my age, you actually had to touch things to make them work?"

pfitzsimmons 12y ago
Gestures are much less efficient than using a mouse or touchscreen, gestures require more muscles and movement and are less precise. Voice commands beyond the very simple stuff is an AI complete problem. True AI is much further away than we think. And when it comes it will be so deeply weird and also mind-blowing that asking it to buy us plane tickets via voice command or whatever will be the last thing that we would be worried about.
- majgr 12y ago
  How about eye?

erikpukinskis 12y ago

Your assumption, which I think is wrong, is that WPM (or maybe APM) is the bottleneck for most work. I suspect reading/comprehension, problem solving, planning, usability, and access to the right tool, discovery of tools, responsiveness of tools, teamwork... These things are much more likely to be the bottleneck. As a programmer, I suspect I could probably type the entirity of a days work into the computer in a half hour.

danielbarla 12y ago
I suspect that this is highly related to the task being done, and the context. Some days, I'd totally agree with you; I'm not really sure of the next step(s), and have to give myself lots of time to think about things. This tends to apply when I'm entering unknown territory, and my tasks are relatively fuzzy and uncertain. On the other hand, some tasks are extremely straight-forward (repetitive / memory-based), and more or less completely WPM and flow-bound. Even working with relatively efficient editors (using shortcuts, macros, VI bindings, etc), it's hard to type out (or otherwise input) much more than 2000 lines of code in a day. These types of tasks certainly require efficient input, and could be greatly enhanced by even better human-to-machine interfaces. (I'm also a programmer, and these do come from my own experiences)
jacquesm 12y ago
I can't even read a phone screen without reading glasses on, I absolutely loathe reading more than a paragraph of text on one and I really couldn't imagine getting any significant amount of work done on a mobile platform. If we count tablets as mobile too (they're wireless after all and plenty of them come with SIM slots) then the consumption part gets a bit better, in landscape mode you can read PDFs on them but the part of work that requires significant input would - for me - not be an option.
Dewie 12y ago
> Your assumption, which I think is wrong, is that WPM (or maybe APM) is the bottleneck for most work. I don't care if it's a bottle neck. I want an efficient means of typing, so that I can keep my focus on other stuff. Maybe I could do a lot of my typing using a terrible interface like my phone, but it would be very aggravating.

AJ007 12y ago

Clip Studio Paint has a really good touch UI. It doesn't replace Photoshop for photographers, but for illustrators it certainly acts as a replacement. I have had an iPad since the first version. I also have had various touchscreen "tablet" PCs prior. The problem is not the hardware now its the software -- and the software has gotten so, so, so much better. I can do real work from a tablet and a phone. The best practices devs first discovered and now proliferating more widely. That takes time but we are seeing the results now.