the Informer

Give it a month or so, and you change your mind. Last month, I wrote that I was shaky on the iPad’s effect on the industry, but now you can add me to the list of the pundits who say Apple’s new flagship device will change mobile computing, for better or for worse.

The iPad, set to go on sale this weekend, has already sold out in presales, but the company is expected to have models of them in stores for purchase on Saturday.
The device will cause a radical and fundamental shift in the way people browse the Internet; more importantly it will cause a fundamental shift in how Web designers approach creating content for the Web.

The iPad will likely kill adoption of Adobe’s Flash framework by Web developers. If not kill, it will stifle Flash development heavily. Brightcove, a video distribution service that does work for the New York Times has announced it will begin to offer Web video in HTML5, a development framework that works with the iPad and offers a performance enhancement over Flash.

Web designer Jeffrey Zeldman in February declared, “Flash won’t die tomorrow, but plug-in technology is on its way out.”
Plug-ins, or add-ons to the browser, are exactly what hinder performance of a Web browser, and before Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard came out, the leading cause of browser crashes.

Flash is a flawed system, and slows down computers. I dream of a day, where, on my current computer (three-years-old, but still relatively fast) I can click the “full screen” button on my computer and it doesn’t freeze for a few seconds.

Ditching the plug-in system of Web browsers and using Web standards could solve the performance woes Flash unarguably causes.

That’s enough about the technical reasons why the Web will adapt to the iPad, so why will the iPad be successful for consumer adoption.

One reason: The promise of being able to do all of the (fun) stuff that one can do on a regular PC on an easy-to-use system.

It’s no accident that the iPad (and before, the iPhone) has just one button on the front of the device. And, in the case of the iPhone, it’s surprising that other phone manufacturers haven’t realized that, with a touch screen, how many other buttons do you need on the face of a device?

That one button is ticket to the main screen of the device, which lets users get to any part of the system. All of the internal workings—the task manager, the complexity of a desktop operating system—disappear for the user. While that’s a tough loss to take for a super user like me, it’s certainly appealing many end-users. The Apple mantra of “It just works” will be readily apparent to them—except when it just doesn’t work.

Apple has lots of kinks when it comes to first-generation hardware, I wouldn’t be surprised if they ran into hardware problems again.

The iPad is just another example of Apple being able to shift the market, not only by shunning a software maker in Adobe, but enticing the end-user with the usability of the iPhone and now iPad operating system.