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What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

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Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#131

Post by alankay »

gpdpocketer wrote: post #101
alankay wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very important question! I don't know the answer, but I think it would be something that included FPGAs -- Intel has been making interesting hybrid chips that combine an ARM variant with a lot of FPGA real estate, and that would likely be a good basis.

What are your thoughts on the home-grown effort to produce small, portable .. and open .. computing devices, as represented by such as the Pyra Handheld and so on? http://pyra-handheld.com/ Earlier iterations of the machines supported by this community utilized ARM-based CPU's that had smaller cores onboard that could be repurposed for other things .. audio and video codecs, 3d engines and so on.. maybe you have yet…

The physical nature of the device needs to match up to human abilities and needs: so I always ask questions about visual angle, resolution, pointing, drawing, typing, extensions of the hardware (especially via software), capacity, speeds that match to human nervous system, etc.

The software nature of the device also needs to match up to human abilities and needs: so I always ask questions about the GUI, how does it help in learning itself and other things, what kinds of things can I see and contrast and compare, what kinds of things can I do by programming, what kinds of things can kids do by programming.

And so forth. What do you think?

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#132

Post by eecc »

eitland wrote: post #99
eecc wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also books exist in few states, of which only one is useful: well preserved, wet, burnt, torn apart. That’s how entropy works folks! One advantage of books is that the information density is lower so the loss of one specimen isn’t that significant, unless it’s unique

This isn't entirely correct. A book can be usable even if it has a few loose pages. Also you can fix it. Disks break more often and when they break you are lucky if you get anything out of them without paying (or being) a specialist.

A disk will also survive some local data corruption or loss, even recover it and provide warnings sometimes. Catastrophic failure of a disk akin to total combustion of the book. Listen, can we stop this false analogy debate? It’s not advancing the discussion that much

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#133

Post by jaysonelliot »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #41
jaysonelliot wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPad that could rule the world hasn't been made yet. Once iOS and OS X completely merge, then we'll see. It's sized for creating things, but running the OS of a device made for consuming things.

It has been, it's called Microsoft Surface. It's sized for creating things and is running on the OS made for productive work. But it's expensive and made by a company that's not very much liked by people.

That's an excellent point. It's funny how Microsoft has a reputation for making poor copies of things, but that hasn't really been the case for 20 years. They're often the ones to innovate now. Sadly, they don't seem to be able to get the traction with their innovations that they once did with their copies.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#134

Post by bwbw223 »

eecc wrote: post #132
eitland wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't entirely correct. A book can be usable even if it has a few loose pages. Also you can fix it. Disks break more often and when they break you are lucky if you get anything out of them without paying (or being) a specialist.

A disk will also survive some local data corruption or loss, even recover it and provide warnings sometimes. Catastrophic failure of a disk akin to total combustion of the book. Listen, can we stop this false analogy debate? It’s not advancing the discussion that much

Although if you hit a book with a hammer, it’ll probably fare a bit better...

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#135

Post by mercer »

alankay wrote: post #124
0x445442 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your observations. I can't speak for Kay but I think his comment to Jobs about the size was based on the premis that the iPad would be a production device. The percentage of users that use computing devices primarily for something other than content consumption is pretty small. I actually think an argument could be made that phones are used more for productive tasks than tablets.

But the deep point of the inventions of personal computing and the Internet was not primarily to make old media more convenient, but to "augment human intellect" by making the next qualitative media after writing and the printing press. The commercialization of these went after the lowest simplest properties, and this hid from most people what the computer is really about. Computing has augmented human intellect, but…

> Computing has augmented human intellect, but right now almost exclusively for scientists, engineers, the medical profession, and other professionals. The real computer revolution will happen when the general public are able to boost their own intellects internally and to boost their reach externally with the help of computers.

Isn't this already well under way, considering people's day-to-day use of phones and tablets for google searches, wikipedia, calendars, maps, and various 'helper' apps (for meditation, productivity, project planning, etc.)?

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#136

Post by eitland »

eecc wrote: post #132
eitland wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't entirely correct. A book can be usable even if it has a few loose pages. Also you can fix it. Disks break more often and when they break you are lucky if you get anything out of them without paying (or being) a specialist.

A disk will also survive some local data corruption or loss, even recover it and provide warnings sometimes. Catastrophic failure of a disk akin to total combustion of the book. Listen, can we stop this false analogy debate? It’s not advancing the discussion that much

I try once more:

I have a big shelf of books.

It includes my mothers chemistry book from before I was born as well as a few books bought second hand.

I have maybe one disk from the time I was a teenager.

Yes, fire will destroy a book (although parts will often be recoverable using low tech methods).

The same fire will certainly destroy disks and make them unrecoverable for everyone but recovery labs (if they are recoverable at all.)

Summary: books fail slower than disks. When they fail they often fail gracefully and you can still use them and even repair them using low tech tools.

Disks fail more often. In fact you rarely see working disks from last decade. They fail for a number of reasons and other times seemingly for no reasons at all. When they fail they might have tried to warn you but often they just fail with no warning and unless you work in IT you'll rarely see those warnings anyway. Also after they've actually failed you more likely than not need a recovery lab to get anything back.

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#137

Post by endlessvoid94 »

alankay wrote: post #123
icc97 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where as both Steve Jobs and Alan Kay believed in the Dynabook, I find it interesting how starkly different their views are on the stylus. One of the first things Alan Kay had after seeing the iPad was try using a stylus [0], where as Steve Jobs was heavily anti the stylus [0]. So I can imagine a fairly interesting back and forth over the topic. But Alan has only ever mentioned the following two sentences: > And he s…

In another exchange, I pointed out to Steve that 2 year olds and 92 year olds use their fingers, but everyone else uses tools -- so it's crazy to only sell to fingers-usage just because the learning curve is lower.

What do you think of the apple pencil?

Re: What did Alan Kay and Steve Jobs talk about at the 2007 iPhone keynote?

#138

Post by alankay »

endlessvoid94 wrote: post #137
alankay wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another exchange, I pointed out to Steve that 2 year olds and 92 year olds use their fingers, but everyone else uses tools -- so it's crazy to only sell to fingers-usage just because the learning curve is lower.

What do you think of the apple pencil?

The Cintiq 13" with Autodesk Sketchbook app on a good Mac or PC is by far the best experience for people who are skilled at drawing (like me)
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