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Comment by mrshoe | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad that iPhone OS is providing us an excuse to take personal computing a least a few steps down the path to where it should have gone years ago.

Users shouldn't have to launch and quit applications. They shouldn't have to save and open documents. State should just persist. Always.

If you pull the plug on your box you should be able to plug it back in and all state should be restored within seconds.

All applications should always be "running" and in the same state you last left them. You only need to switch focus between them as you perform your tasks.

Can modern OSes really not be made smart enough to manage our systems in this way? Why do users decide which applications get memory and CPU resources? Why do I need to manually start a bunch of applications and open documents after restarting my computer? None of this makes sense.

Hopefully iPhone OS can push us further down this path.

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I'm not so sure abstracting away document open is a good idea in the long run. You lose the ability to separate your valuable data from the application, and it encourages lock-in within each app.

Abstracting away document save is also probably not a good idea unless there's automatic versioning (at least up to a few versions) built in.

Also 1-dimensional lists (like the coverflow of docs in iPad's iWork) don't scale well. These problems are dealt with more effectively by hierarchical folder systems of today's desktop OSes than by the iPhone OS. They're not as foolproof, but there's real benefit in exchange for the complexity.

I agree with you about application start/stop though. Also, IMO infinitely adjustable/overlappable windows in desktop OSes don't add much value either. A simpler windowing model (maybe a little like webOS's cards; the iPad's is too extreme) would probably be better.

"You lose the ability to separate your valuable data from the application, and it encourages lock-in within each app."

Most users of MS Word will be familiar with this.

Only because RTF is not well-known among nontechnical users.

And because most moderately complex Word documents will not transfer 100% when you save them as RTF. Or said differently, RTF documents won't display the same in different applications if they contain enough complexity.

Document Open certainly didn't prevent proprietary document nightmares. Lock-in is only an issue inasmuch as users don't demand a sane export. Pages documents could be a proprietary, patent-protected nightmare internally and it wouldn't matter to me: when I want the document out, I export it back to myself in a standard format. (Sure, it'd be nice to have a mass-export, but these things will come with time.)

Automatic versioning is also just "one of those things that software should do". Ideally with some logarithmically scaled set of versions when space becomes an issue.

Folders don't scale either. People quickly wind up just using search. Search works pretty darn well everywhere beyond the trivial case. Of course, for search to work really well, what the iPhone OS needs is an interface to let device-wide search tap into third party data stores.

Also, I think "piles" a la albums in the photo app is going to become a more generalized solution to the 'folder' issue. It will fill the middle-ground where linear lists break down and tagging/foldering makes sense, but before tagging/foldering gets so complex that you just search anyway.

Yes proprietary formats encourage lock-in too and open standard doc formats are better. But the 'export' that you mention requires a document open (or 'import') on the other end.

I mostly agree with you on the rest.

And apps like Pages already have an import.

You mean, following down the path that Palm OS devices used since first released in 1996?

Or Newton OS devices from 1993. This isn't the first time that Apple has tried to build a computer with seamless state persistence and without a traditional exposed file system.

That said, neither Palm OS or Newton OS could multitask. Android and the iPhone OS seem to have found a very elegant approach to that particular problem without compromising the user experience.

Actually, both of them could, but just in very limited ways.

The Palm had 4 threads, only one of which was available to the developer. Another was used for comms and a third for graffiti processing. I don't think the last one was allocated.

The Newton had at least two threads -- comms in the background were needed even in those dark ages.

If you want to edit a document and then save it as a new document you have to make that choice before you start editing on the iPad. A lot of people are going to destroy a lot of documents that way. It could be a simple fix to still keep the same model but right now it's not very intuitive.

Well that's because we as users have been conditioned to make a copy of a document whenever an edit is required.

What should've been taught, from the very beginning, is that we really should be working on versions of the original document. Not that it's an easy problem in itself to solve... refer to various versioning systems as examples.

I agree. But versioning isn't implemented in the iPad and they may never implement it because it's too complicated for users to understand. Without it, though, any program that just saves your document (permanently) without asking is going to be annoying.

Would anyone be shocked if the iPad eventually featured some version of Time Machine and that versioning just happened automagically in the background?

I agree. I was showing my iPad to a friend the other day and she asked me how to save a Pages document. It took me a few seconds to figure out how to explain that there was no need to save documents. Documents are just always there.

I was actually thinking the same thing... It really doesn't seem like it would be too hard to do on a networked computer with access to backup on the cloud and fast uplink.

Task-oriented UI?

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