iPad, Letters.app and Nerd Myopia

As any­one read­ing this blog is almost cer­tainly aware, Apple announced the long-awaited iPad last week; and the tech world col­lec­tively lost their fuck­ing minds. As I’ve already opined, I think that Fraser Speirs has writ­ten the best analy­sis of the col­lec­tive pants-shitting and I would highly rec­om­mend read­ing Fraser’s arti­cle if you haven’t already. Flying some­what under the radar dur­ing all this bab­ble was another phe­nom­e­non which I think pro­vides an inter­est­ing par­al­lel to some of the ideas that Fraser artic­u­lates so well.

If you fol­low me on Twitter, you may have noticed ref­er­ences to some­thing called “Letters.app.” For those unaware, here is some back­ground. Earlier this month devel­oper Brent Simmons put out a call-to-arms for the devel­op­ment of a new email client to fit the needs of “devel­op­ers and power-users.” The argu­ment being that all extant instances of email clients (specif­i­cally for the Mac OS, but pre­sum­ably for all plat­forms) are lack­ing in some way that makes them unsuit­able for “devel­op­ers and power-users.” The goal of the project, soon dubbed Letters.app was to har­ness the skills and cre­ativ­ity of the indie Mac devel­op­ment com­mu­nity to build the per­fect beast. Shortly after­wards, the project com­pletely and very pub­licly imploded.

At this point I need to take an aside and clar­ify what I mean by “imploded,” as my asshole-sense can already detect the prep­ping of a thou­sand responses telling me that I am wrong. First of all, it is true that the Letters.app project is still under active devel­op­ment. Project pres­i­dent John Gruber (Daring Fireball) and project lead Gus Mueller (Flying Meat Software) con­tinue to make progress and I eagerly antic­i­pate see­ing the fruits of their labors. I con­sider myself an email power-user and hope that Letters.app might fit my needs.

However, I main­tain that a read of the archives of the (now closed) pub­lic dis­cus­sion email list proves my asser­tion. The mail­ing list dis­cus­sion is rife with con­tention, rigid-thinking, straw-man argu­ments and an over­whelm­ing dis­missal of the needs and require­ments of any­one who dis­agrees with a given poster. In almost every case those dis­missals are phrased some­thing like this: “Letters must/must not do X because it is meant only for ‘devel­op­ers and power-users’ and you don’t apply.” What is con­stantly missed, even in the face of it being pointed out, is that there are many peo­ple who are “power-users” of email who have never seen a line of code and who can barely reboot their com­puter. In one par­tic­u­larly ironic twist, at sev­eral points the prover­bial “non-power-user” is described as a “bored sec­re­tary.” This, more than any­thing, demon­strates the myopia of some of the “indie devel­oper” camp on the list. Having been a long-term denizen of the cor­po­rate world I can tell you, “sec­re­taries,” or “Administrative Assistants” as we call them in the enlight­ened post-1960’s are almost always the largest con­sumer /producer of email in an orga­ni­za­tion, and have the most need for power features.

So, the ques­tion is: “What does this have to do with the iPad?”

I would argue that the same myopic dis­missal of any­one who isn’t a devel­oper, and IT per­son or a tech­nol­ogy wonk as a “non-power-user” is as much respon­si­ble for the “future shock” that Fraser describes as it was the never-ending argu­ment on the Letters.app list. It is easy for us, and I include myself in this class on two of the three counts men­tioned before, to dis­miss the needs of non-technical power users. I’ve even seen some of this atti­tude in iPad defend­ers when they extol the virtue of the iPad as a device for their kids, or par­ents, or any­one who is pre­sum­ably “not good with com­put­ers.” Fortunately Apple isn’t so myopic.

Assuredly, the iPad will be a good fit for those users. I con­tend it will also be a good fit for cor­po­rate users who already have a pri­mary desk­top sys­tem and need a basic com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­tent cre­ation tool for lim­ited travel. I con­tend that, with the proper third party appli­ca­tions, the iPad will be a good tool for many artists who work in the field. My Angry Mac Bastards co-host Peter Cohen is excited about the pos­si­bil­ity of an “Aperture Touch” prod­uct in con­junc­tion with the iPad Camera Connection kit. I myself and excited about the pos­si­bil­ity of tak­ing my writ­ing on the road with­out the over­head of a full Mac OS lap­top. People I know in the edu­ca­tion seg­ment, from K-12 all the way though higher edu­ca­tion have expressed excite­ment over how the iPad may be inte­grated into their work­flows. Not to men­tion the plethora of ver­ti­cal mar­ket opportunities.

What the tech media tends to miss is that all of the user classes I’ve just men­tioned con­tain “power users.” They’re just not nec­es­sar­ily power users of com­puter devel­op­ment and admin­is­tra­tion tools. As Fraser points out, peo­ple want to do “Real Work.” And for the vast major­ity of the world “Real Work” is not main­tain­ing com­put­ers. Apple com­put­ers and oper­at­ing sys­tems have always been about enabling “the rest of us.” The iPad is just the next step towards that goal. I choose to embrace that future. The iPad may not be the device for you, but to deny that there is a vast mar­ket for it is to show the same myopia that led to inane sug­ges­tions for Letters.app such as requir­ing the user to run a mail server on their desk­top just to enable local stor­age of email; some­thing even most power-users would agree is just retarded.