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Comment by alex_c | Hacker News Reader

I suspect we'll be seeing a more and more pronounced split in computing and, therefore, interfaces. On one side (the majority) will be "consumers": web, email, Facebook, maybe some light photo editing. On the other side will be the "producers": people who use Photoshop, or Matlab, or AutoCAD. Office falls somewhere in the middle... Office itself may eventually be divided along those lines, with a lightweight, tablet-friendly spinoff.

So in many cases I think you're actually talking about different users: the majority of people may eventually not need anything beyond a tablet. I also suspect the rest of us will be annoyed and inconvenienced by this trend, since it won't be aimed at us.

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I don't like these ideas Gruber and friends are repeating and repeating again. In the article, it is carved in marble: "the advantages that come from NOT allowing you to do so many [things]". The reasoning behind is that Steve Jobs or other said genius should be choosing for you what you are "allowed" to do.

It feels awfully 1984 for me.

I live in China and I can tell you it is painfull, sometime, when someone else chooses for you what you are allowed to do. I'm reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", and heck, this guy is right, you have those losers who fear and get used by technology, and the other guys who don't fear and use technology.

The cynic (borderline totalitarian) approach is to say that people should be divided between those clever hacker who have control and the rest, which should not be given "too much" control, because their are not clever enough, or don't need it, or what.

The humanist (democratic, cf "Enlightment") is the opposite: human being are clever, and should be given control on their life, on their tools, should be given choices, etc.

It seems to me that too many people have forgotten the we gather here, on HN, on the free, interesting and open parts of the Internet, because we like to control our shit, and ALSO we prefer the common people to be educated and control their shit. Especially when it come to so personal matters as their own files.

Sorry for the rant. I hope I'm mistaking, but from my recent reading of HN I feel there is a progressive shift toward more "Gruberness" which is questionable in its hypothesis and conclusions.

There's a pretty significant difference in kind between design constraints and political or economic constraints. The "freedom" to mistype a URL and then get phished, or to misconfigure a backup drive and then lose all of your data, or to save a file inside an arbitrary folder with an arbitrary name on an arbitrary drive and then be unable to find it again, is very different from the freedoms of the Enlightenment.

Computer owners who don't understand their computers do not feel free. They feel a constant sense of discomfort, even dread. They fear making mistakes, they worry that the box will break at any moment, and they're embarrassed that they have to ask techies -- often expensive techies -- for help.

There are equally as many people that run rough shod over everything because they'll just ask their techie friend/family member to fix whatever broke for them.

Whether one falls into this camp, or the camp that you're talking about is probably just up to personality types.

Inappropriately applied dichotomy, my brotha. "Figure it out yourself and lead" vs. "Manipulate someone else into doing it for me" ---- a lot of people would rather do it themselves if it were easy enough.

Maybe, but I was talking about the fear of screwing up that the parent was talking about. Some people have no fear of screwing up, even when doing things that probably should make them at least cautious, because they have the view that someone else will fix it for them.

If you cast the app universe as 'open' vs' 'closed' as some have tried to do or 'free' vs. 'controlled,' then yes, of course, open and free are better.

But there are a few other ways to look at it:

- Chaotic vs. orderly. - A pile of laundry vs. neatly folded - Unfiltered vs. filtered - Amateur vs. professional - Unedited vs. curated

Pick whichever way you want and your perspective might be different. It's really in how you define the context.

As far as I'm concerned the app store is a shopping mall and the proprietors have chosen to limit what kind of businesses can open shop there (no head shops or brothels). There are shoppers who are happy to go there and those who don't like the brand-name selections. There are businesses who are prospering happily and those who are struggling.

And then there are those who like to stand outside with pickets and complain that the management is squelching free speech.

Comparing it to dystopian nightmares and totalitarian regimes is quite a stretch.

I am ok with the idea that on a given app market, website, content provider, the proprietors can and should curate the content the way they decide.

What I am not ok with is that the makers of a machine I buy keep a too strict control on what I can do with this machine I bought. We are grownups, we should be allowed to use the things we buy in the way we please. As far as I know, if I do something illegal with a Porsche or an iPad, their respective makers are not responsible of that misbehavior, and therefore should not be entitled to forbid me from doing it.

> As far as I know, if I do something illegal with a Porsche or an iPad, their respective makers are not responsible of that misbehavior, and therefore should not be entitled to forbid me from doing it.

You are correct, but I am unclear as to what you could be referencing. You can add pirated MP3s, eBooks and movies to iOS devices, if you so choose. You can even jailbreak them to customise them even further, provided you don't also expect warranty service.

>You can even jailbreak them

Not if Apple had their way and were able to win that arms race.

>I am unclear as to what you could be referencing.

You're _playing_ the fool here I hope.

I put rockbox on my iPod classic, I love rockbox. Apple encrypted the device in a way to prevent aftermarket modifications and set development for that device back years while they worked to get around the restrictions apple put in.

That kind of practice is what he is referencing.

My understanding is that Apple is able to do whatever they want to their own products. They are under no obligation to support jailbreaks, Rockbox or other modifications. Encrypting the iPod has no noticeable downside for the average user, but for a hacker, it's a pain. But Apple is under no obligation to support an alternative firmware.

Making a product do something the standard setup will not allow is the whole point of the hacker space anyway, isn't it?

PS: I don't agree with Apple's decision to encrypt the standard (non-touch) iPod line. I wonder if it was part of their licensing terms with movie studios.

Yes, precisely.

It's kind of nutty to equate technological simplification and totalitarianism. Some people don't want to solder their own computers together or inspect their own meat.

We need, occasionally, to draw a line of abstraction over complicated stuff so we can build upwards. This is why we code in high level languages rather than toggling switches on front panels, even though it meant surrendering some "freedom".

Yes, layers of abstraction can be useful. I don't see how the iOS restrictions are a layer of abstraction, though.

And selling pre-built computers doesn't mean you have to glue the box shut. You just have to make sure people don't have to mess or even think about the internals unless they really want to.

Some iOS restrictions are obviously simply business driven, but fewer than you might think.

E.g. The "give us 30% and don't undercut" rule means that the user can buy from the app store without needing to price compare. The "no execution of outside code" rule means no platform subversion with the endless security issues this would bring.

If you stop thinking in terms of technical capabilities and start thinking in terms of the user's cognitive load, iOS is a huge step forward in terms of abstraction.

I don't like it either (hell, most of us here on HN won't like it... we love to tinker and break things and get under the hood), but that doesn't mean it's not the most likely direction.

You describe it as a struggle between totalitarian and democratic ideologies, with all the moral and ethical implications. I think it's really about a third, much more powerful force: giving people what they want.

This is tangential, but I think explains what I mean better than I could:

http://www.prosebeforehos.com/image-of-the-day/08/24/huxley-...

Thanks for the link. I am no historian but I have the impression that Human history would show that Orwell's fears are more grounded, as the totalitarian world he described has actually been implemented for real in many occurences, far away in the past (maybe under Pharaos? certainly under Qinshihuang) and closer (USSR, PRC). It is possible that Huxley's fears are a bit less likely to happen for real. Maybe Roman empire had a pinch of it (panem et circenses) but even then roman people (the free ones) had their freedom, and some used it to write books, create things, etc.

However I am extremely opposed to entertainment feeding, I don't watch TV, nor do I read magazines, so I agree with Huxley (and you?). But I don't think it is closely related to my impression that some people go too far in the "don't say yes to all" direction.

The good reason for tool creators to say no is not because they know better how the tool should be used, it is because they know that saying yes to request A would forbid the tool to be used in ways B and C, and other unprospected ways. Saying no is ok when it actually opens new doors.

>I think it's really about a third, much more powerful force: giving people what they want.

What people want depends, to a large degree, on their level of education, what they're exposed to, and what leaders and the media tell them they should want. It will be interesting seeing how pop computing and lock-down devices do globally in the long-term.

I'm not saying this is the case, but I think maybe the difficulty the tech crowd has with these new "easy" interfaces is exactly that, they are easy. If everybody can easily use a computer (tablet, phone etc), never looses their files, never picks up a nasty virus, then they don't need us any more.... We lose our exalted position of power as one of the enlightened who "know".

Don't get me wrong. I regularly drop back to the command prompt, and hate having the flexibility of a full system taken away from me. But I also hate that feeling I get when random relative calls up to ask for help with their latest tech disaster. I hate it that configuring operating systems so that they are reliable, robust and functional is almost impossible. I hate it that the operating systems still get in the way of just doing the job.

We're hackers, hobbyists and enthusiasts, we want the computer to be in our faces, that's what we do. The vast majority of users however, hate it when they have to put up with the crap we think is cool just to read an email, or write a document.

Can't remember who the quote is from but it goes something like this, Technology goes through three stages, simple with limited functionality, complex and unreliable, simple and reliable....

I have a feeling that we have started to reach the end of the second stage.

  > "the advantages that come from NOT allowing you
  > to do so many [things]".

I read this as referring to the examples he talks about later with regards to memory management and restricting the ability to background to preserve battery life. The idea being that tablets -- as devices -- a restricted in their resources, so the environment that the programs run in also have to be restrictive in allocating those resources. The bulk of current Windows programs are not designed to restrict their resource usage because they were never targeting such devices.

I don't think that the he was talking about a curated AppStore (with a 'totalitarian' gatekeeper), which seems to be what you're talking about.

I was more talking about a general trend in design and development that is, I think, based on a misunderstanding of Apple's success. The iPod was a success because it managed to break the constraints of a very small interface giving access to a hudge set of media files, and made something usable out of it. I don't own a Mac but I guess a fair part of MacOS success is owed to the BSD backend, and the terminal, which allowed to do real pro developpper work on it. Terminal, command line and scripting is hard for beginners, but it gives a lot of power.

Now we are told that iPad don't allow background process and that it is a good thing. If the only reason is battery life, then it is not good enough a reason for me (I have two spare Nexus batteries in my pocket, what is the problem?). Somewhere else we are told that we should not expect direct access to our own files because "files are so 1990", or because iTune will handle them. I don't agree with that view. There ARE files behind the pages or handles or icons I see on my screens, and they are MY files (pictures, docs, etc.) It is ok that the main use of this content is done through some cloudy vapored tool, but I need the possibility to grab the file, MY file, and make what I want with it (including, obviously, destroying it).

If you had final authority over the design of a consumer electronics device, and the engineers told you "we will have to ship this with a battery and two spares, and users will have to change batteries twice daily," would you say "That's good enough for GBOG Devices; start the factories"?

Constraints are important for innovation. By "not allowing" you do things, new ideas and solutions bubble up. And the market decides if/how much a particular product succeeds. Many devs on this board own both a full computer and an iPad. I do, and enjoy both! Glad to see Metro moving forward and competing with iOS.

I feel like if I was reading a Gruber article from 1995 he would tell me that I'd have to choose either a responsive, efficient system or a system capable of running with pre-emptive multitasking, but not both.

He is so incredibly apologetic to the corners that Apple engineers cut that I wonder if he really believes himself.

That seems to be in line with Steve Jobs' vision of the future, in which PCs become "trucks" while average people drive "cars." I do see early but pronounced signs of that split.

And Windows 8 is trying to be the SUV here.

Or a member of the more en vogue crossover family?

I own a crossover. And with the newness that is Metro, yours is a better analogy.

Thanks. Does a crossover give (most of) the benefits of an SUV without the bad gas mileage and environmentally unfriendly vibe?

I'm not power productivity suite user but I would have to believe close to all of Office's features can be implemented with the proper UI with the advanced features of the apps hidden away from the eyes of the average user.

If it's a question of specs or software maturity then it really is just a matter of time.

It is at this point that I feel obliged to point out that Apple already ships an office suite for the iPad and, bizarrely enough, even the iPhone: http://www.apple.com/apps/keynote/ - http://www.apple.com/apps/pages/ - http://www.apple.com/apps/numbers/

I enjoy these apps but they're certainly not on the level of Office or even iWork for the Mac. I think it's a good start of where we should be going and they've done well in creating a consistent UI across the iPad and iPhone.

I recently had to write a one-page letter on my iPhone and email it to somebody to print out, sign and hand to a third-party. It wasn't by choice, it was just an urgent request and I had nothing else with me.

Surprisingly, it wasn't nearly as painful as I expected. It didn't take me long to write the letter (the default templates helped a lot), making edits was fairly easy and I had no trouble being able to read over what I had written.

So for small edits to existing files and quick docs it's usable, though clearly not as good an experience as using the same suite on an iPad.

Good point. Still, this relies heavily on the use of palettes, which we haven't seen in Metro. Maybe they'll have some UI elements like that in Metro, I don't know.

>Office itself may eventually be divided along those lines, with a lightweight, tablet-friendly spinoff

It'd be interesting to see how such a thing would differ from Google Docs, and if it would justify the kind of prices MS likes to charge for Office. An Office app for lightly-spec'd computers makes sense, but you'd have to charge app prices for it and I don't see MS sacrificing their second biggest cash cow any time soon.

How about an offline version? That's something that Google doesn't really offer.

More and more these days I find a computer without Internet to be increasingly useless. Google Docs' value proposition is irrevocably tied to its online status. It offers features that a strictly offline office suite does not. For Microsoft to be able to sell an offline Office, on a mobile, 3g-integrated computer, for Office prices, would require some functionality that they haven't come close to implementing. You would have to make some argument as to why your offline Office Light (lite for you colonials who insist upon spelling that corresponds to pronunciation) is better than the free, connected office suite Google offers.

At the moment, Google Docs is Office Light. It offers a limited subset of Office's features, and doesn't do it particularly well. What it does do, extremely well, is make it easy to get the documents you create to your friends and co-workers. I can't see a limited-functionality, offline version of Office competing with that.

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