(so we can make our own personal apps)

the ipad had a debut where it experienced sales that were quite explosive — shocking people who had scoffed about “no demand” for the form-factor — and it showed sustained evidence of solid growth in the years that followed.

until this year, that is, when the growth started to show signs it had leveled.

the argument goes that laptops are getting lighter and lighter, while phones are getting bigger and “bigger than bigger”, so the ipad is getting squeezed.

i maintain that that is nonsense. indeed, given its performance/price ratio, the ipad is the best prizefighter across all the weight classes. the very best!

and it could be even better if apple would allow it to make phone-calls…

but there are other errors, even more serious, that apple is making as well.

specifically, apple is making two big mistakes, closely related to each other.

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1. apple fails to see the natural ipad niche.

even before there was an ipad, there was a group of people who i could see would be a can’t-resist-it niche of customers for a form-factor like the ipad.

i even named my imaginary form-factor after them: the clipboard computer.

that’s right. the natural niche for the ipad is people who carry clipboards. they are already carrying something, and are using it for some kind of data.

your first reaction might be that there are lots of people who use clipboards.

precisely my point.

the natural niche for the ipad is

people who carry clipboards

that’s why i believe these people are a large untapped market for the ipad... anybody who is carrying a clipboard might be more productive with an ipad.

so why is this niche “untapped”? that brings us to apple’s second big mistake.

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2. real people can’t “program” their ipads.

the issue is this: how do you program an ipad? how can you make an app?

because in order to get those clipboard-carriers to switch to an ipad instead, they’ve gotta be able to replace the clipboard with an app that works better. so, for this niche, the ability to program their ipad becomes a pure necessity.

i don’t wanna talk about all the twists and turns apple has made on the way, from the start when web-apps were pitched as the only way to code for ipad, up to today where apple largely controls what apps we can put on our ipads (except, in a strange twist of fate, the very web-apps where the story began).

the fact is that it’s hard to program a personal app you can run on your ipad.

and sure, you can, if you’re a programmer, and know html/css/javascript, but most real people out there in the world do not have that particular skill-set. (blimey, even some of the people who make web-apps aren’t very good at it.)

so let us cue up a story from the past.

once upon a time, there was a program, only on the mac, called “hypercard”.

hypercard was fun. hypercard was simple. hypercard was a brilliant program.

hypercard let you make a “card”, on which you could put text, pictures, etc. even working buttons that would perform an action when they were clicked. hypercard even handled audio and video; that was a very big deal back then.

so you could make a button that would play a fart noise when it was clicked; even kids would acknowledge it was juvenile, but it also made you somehow feel empowered to put buttons on a card that did whatever you told ’em to. (a few years down the line, those juveniles made big money on “fart apps”.)

you could also make a “stack” containing multiple cards. so you might place a button on each card, with the action of “go to the next card in this stack”. (the cursor-keys did that naturally, but you could create a button for it, too.)

further, one stack could call another stack. so you might have a button that would perform the action of “open the ‘address-book’ stack and find ‘leslie’”. (this was when we had modems, so it’d even dial your phone to call leslie!)

hypercard was fun.

hypercard was simple.

hypercard was a brilliant program.

a great many people got their introduction to programming from hypercard. they didn’t even know they were being “introduced”, it just kinda happened.

it happened because hypercard was easy (with a very gentle learning-curve), and fun, and you could get stuff done. silly stupid stuff at first, yes, but then often turning “interesting” shortly after and “downright useful” before long.

you didn’t have to be a programmer

to make something useful in hypercard

hypercard had a scripting language underneath, which is how people who’d just been “playing around” transformed to active, devoted “programmers”; they learned other computer languages, with some making careers out of it. apple eventually ditched hypercard, so it’s not so much true today, but there was a time (maybe a decade back) when 2 out of 3 computer people woulda told you that hypercard was the one thing out of many that got ’em started.

but let’s forget about that hypercard scripting capability for the time being, because what’s more important to the argument that i’m making here is that people could make useful hypercard “stacks” without doing much scripting.

you didn’t have to be a programmer to make something useful in hypercard.

real people could — and did! — make useful stuff in hypercard from the start, creations that those real people found to be useful in their real lives. really! to this day, it is likely there are businesses dependent on a hypercard stack.

and did i mention that hypercard made people creative too? it certainly did. there was a game called “myst”, huge in the early days of computer gaming, which was built in hypercard. but, ok, that was not built by “a real person”. the brain-power needed to build “myst” was genius, and not “a real person”. still, it’s really true that lotsa real people made useful things with hypercard.

anyway, sorry for waxing nostalgic, it just happens when i discuss hypercard.

but let me get to the point. people carry clipboards for forty million reasons. forty million different reasons. so those people all need different apps, and there’s no way we’re gonna find enough coders to program all of those apps. especially because, these days, people want perfect apps. which cost a dollar.

in order for apple to convert that niche of clipboard-carriers to ipad buyers, each person will need to have a tool for making the specific app they need. they need a program that helps non-programmers create programs. bingo. the tool must be fun!, and drag-n-drop easy, with enough functionality that there is no need for “programming”, per se, so people can help themselves.

the ipad today needs a hypercard-equivalent, updated for the 21st-century.

i’ve coded several hypercardish updates over the years, and i do believe that i’m going to make yet another one. and this time around, i am also sharing my thoughts with the world, because others might do it better, or different.

pay attention: i am not talking about turning real people into programmers, but gifting people with a fun ability to create personal tools without coding.

there’s no need to reproduce hypertalk, or any scripting ability whatsoever. indeed, i believe if you go in that direction, you won’t be nearly as effective, because you will make the tool less simple, plus offload your responsibility to incorporate needed functionality (via the excuse “they can script that”).

this probably separates me radically from most of the hypercard revivalists. but it is because they’ve forgotten the original value, which was simplicity. they crawled the learning-curve so long ago, they’ve forgotten that it exists, and they believe everybody should want to jump in the deep end with them.

plus the ipad has, inside itself, such inherent power that we can offer people the ability to do whatever they’ll need to do to accomplish their job at hand. and we can do it with the lure of “having fun”, versus “doing programming”.

today’s potential ipad users —

especially the clipboard” niche

— need a hypercard-equivalent,

updated for the 21st-century

the ipad has the capacity to handle audio and video (even their recording), deal with text and photos, pull resources from the web and push ’em back, create and utilize forms that would collect and analyze and spit back data, and, of course, the ability to “compute”; so it becomes entirely reasonable to think we can provide enough “general glue” so that our clipboard-people can cobble together tools with functionalities to e-upgrade their clipboards.

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sadly, this type of “make-your-own-programs” app might not get approval to appear in the apple store. so i’ll be coding my effort as a web-app instead. and it’ll be free, as a gift, to help jumpstart a culture based on gift-exchange. if you want to help create such a culture, and appreciate the gift of my tool, and want to reciprocate that gift, you’d be welcome to offer a gift in return. maybe a copy of that useful app you thought you’d created just for yourself? or a copy of that novel you wrote? or, you know… cash. cash is always good…

-bowerbird

bowerbird@aol.com (since 1995; told you i was old-school…)