Notes from the Design Stud(io)

I’m not the first to say this, but add my voice to those who are predicting that Amazon will be the first to offer an iPad alternative that really gains popular traction.

I don’t think it has Apple too worried — it won’t be a direct competitor to the iPad, as much as a different way to make use of the tablet form factor. Amazon understands a few things that all of Apple’s competitors have so far missed: simplicity, value and a complete ecosystem (read: iTunes Store) are what people want in a tablet.

Imagine: a Kindle for movies/TV/music, as well as books. If Amazon can follow through and produce, say, a lightly-subsidized $199 tablet that performs a few media-consumption-related functions very well, makes media purchasing easy, and is actually complete upon release… It will fly off the shelves. (And Amazon will finally get a finger into Apple’s media-sales pie.)

Interestingly, this will position the iPad and its app ecosystem (which the cram-an-entire-PC-into-a-Tablet crowd views as hopelessly limited) as the *high* end of the popular tablet market. The Amazon device will suddenly fit the popular “but it’s only good for media consumption” mantra that keeps being leveled at the iPad; which will make the iPad look like a productivity workhorse in comparison.

[Nigel Dessau, Chief marketing Officer of AMD] is similarly skeptical about Ultrabook as a separate category, but acknowledges AMD will be working with customers to build ultra-then portables. “We are all going that way,” he said.

— WSJ Blog

I’m sure it would suit Apple just fine if AMD created ultra-then portables.

Matt Neuburg’s post expressing frustration at OS X Lion’s Automatic Termination (John Siracusa explains) is well-reasoned, and correct. Lion is behaving badly.

I’m honestly not sure what to think about Lion’s Machiavellian Automatic Transmission push these days. But just to play devil’s advocate for a moment:

What if Lion’s problem is actually that it  hasn’t enforced its dictatorship enough?

I agree that Lion’s decision to take the reigns, terminate TextEdit unasked (though only kind’ve), and remove it from the alt-tab UI and dock is over-reaching… But maybe instead of throwing the whole idea out, Apple needs to push the UI farther.

Ever since it was introduced by Windows 3.0, alt-tab has been used to cycle through open applications. iOS’ version of a task switcher flipped the script, instead showing us recently-used applications, open or not. It seems to me that if the command-tab interface were updated to show those applications that were recently used, it wouldn’t matter to the user whether Lion in fact had them in memory at the moment. Command-tabbing to TextEdit would simply ‘re-open’ the program, lickety-split — with everything as it was when it was terminated. It would feel as though the user had ‘switched’ back.

(Of course, this introduces new questions: What trigger, aside from a manual Quit command, would remove an application from the alt-tab interface? At what point, if ever, would a hibernating application disappear from Mission Control?)

Lion is a transitional OS, firmly planted between Apple’s past and its future. We see this in other awkward Lion moments: pages in Safari move with the user’s gesture, while system preferences panes are still navigable using in the old “Leftward Swipe Mean Backwards” abstraction.

Could this be a similarly half-baked implementation that will make better sense as Apple more firmly asserts its unibody aluminum fist?