A Rain of Frogs

Just hours before Steve Jobs gets up on stage to announce what is widely expected to be an Apple table (either called the iSlate or iPad, according to the rumour mill), I want to say a couple things about it.

First, I think we are about to witness what the future will recognize as the beginning of the end of the desktop metaphor paradigm. This shift looks to be as big as the shift from CLI (Command Line Interface) to GUI (Graphic User Interface) pioneered on microcomputers by Apple in the early 1980s. The office/desktop metaphor has been with us for 26 years, and it’s likely time for the next step. That might be something like the iPhone/iPod Touch interface though I expect it will be a bit more refined and a lot more extended than the current iPhone 3.0 interface.

Second, I think we are about to witness a massive change in the way we consume media. In the past, we’ve had books, newspapers, magazines, radio, LPs/tapes/CDs, television, cinema and the web as primary sources of media. More recently, there has been a convergence of these media types into a single media interface, namely the computer. Books have been available in digital format accessible by computer for more than a decade, newspapers and magazines have been publishing on the web for even longer. Radio is available on our computers, in both traditional radio formats (Last.fm, for example) and more recently as podcasts. Music has probably been the most visible example, with the iTunes Music Store, driven by the wild success of the iPod, completely changing the way people buy and consume music. The iTMS has also been making similar inroads with television and movies.

But the face remains that the computer, in it’s current form, is not an ideal media interface. With its keyboard, mouse and familiar desktop interface, it has been far better suited to creating media.

I think this is what Apple, and more specifically Steve Jobs, are aiming to change this, by changing the paradigm – the very way people use computers. Instead of sitting at a desk (or setting on our laps a computer), clicking on the things with a mouse or trackpad, and typing on a keyboard, people will be ‘touching’ their media on the screen, able to manipulate it ‘directly’ rather than through a metaphor for a real-world experience. Coupling the touch screen with other technologies that Apple has been exploring, such as voice recognition on the iPhone, people will be able to speak to their media in addition to touching it.

While I think the hype surrounding this tablet announcement is rather extreme, I think this is in part because even non-techie people are glimpsing the potential that this device represents. It’s not the device itself, it’s the way in which it will fundamentally change our interactions with technology that is exciting people. Even the voices on the Jazz radio station that I listen to in the mornings were talking about it, and this is a station that is not generally up to speed on the latest technology, let alone the rumours surrounding it.

So I raise a glass to Steve Jobs, who may well be doing the ‘most important thing’ he has ever done by changing (again) the way we interact with technology. And I raise a glass to the new paradigm, which, like all new things, will be disruptive to existing paradigms, but open up massive new opportunities for those who are able to see past the actual hardware to the human interactions underneath.

Continuing the trend of anniversaries this month, I’m celebrating the fifth anniversary of this web site today.

When I first created the site, it was meant to be a safety valve for creativity. I was building a community site at the time, one which was very active at the time, and I needed somewhere to do something else, something other than the mindbending job of heavily modifying forum software to meet my needs.

That site eventually turned out well, though I no longer operate it. It’s in the hands of others now, though I can honestly say that site changed my life in ways I never could have imagined.

But A Rain of Frogs is still here, and still thriving. Thank you for reading. It’s been an adventure for the last five years, and I expect even greater things in the next five.

Our dining room – Toronto

I used to be a confirmed pack-a-day smoker. Sometimes more, if I were at a party or something. I started pretty young. But I always promised I’d quit before I turned thirty.

Seven years ago, just less than two months before my 30th birthday I smoked my last cigarette. I didn’t want to have a crappy birthday, so I gave myself a lot of time to get over the physical addiction. I gave up cold turkey.

Because every cell in the human body is replaced every seven years, it means that there is not a single cell in my body that was ever a smoker.

Sort of a benchmark, that.

At $7 a pack (and I know they’re more than that now), the 2558 days I haven’t smoked add up to $17,906 if I smoked a pack every day.

I find myself somewhat fascinated that as of today, I’ve been involved professionally in the web industry for fifteen years.

Back then, in 1995, I lived in the country, and while I had a 28k modem, the distance from the house to anything resembling good copper wiring meant I was lucky to get 14k speeds. Usually around 11k.

Not that that stopped me. No, not at all. I had spent voracious amounts of time on the ‘net, mostly using what I remember being Mosaic Netscape, though it was around then that it changed to Netscape Navigator (first 0.98b, then the amazingly stable version 1.1).

I spent most of my time online learning how to create web pages, learning what was, at the time, a very new idea and concept to me – HTML.

I just finished studying design in school, and my first son was a fresh little baby, and I was slaving away on my 68LC040 and 4MB RAM equipped Macintosh Centris 610 (running System 7.1), and saw some great potential for this web thing to change the way design worked.

And as everyone knows, I was right. Fifteen years later, that initial study of HTML has led me on a long, wonderful and interesting career in the web field, first as a designer, then (when Javascript first made it’s appearance) as a designer/developer, then in 1999 or so, to become a standards-compliant front-end web developer, and eventually to my current position as Director of Web Development at one of Canada’s largest media companies.

I’d like to thank everyone who’s ever had a hand in my career, from those who create the systems on which this wonderful Internet runs, to the guy who first hired me to be a web designer to my current development team – surely the best group of developers I’ve ever had the privilege to work with.