Summary: Some have accused Apple of copying the user experience of their competitors for the latest version of their mobile OS. Some are complaining that the changes are too drastic or have not gone far enough.The reality is that the future of computing has one ultimate and common goal, which is to eliminate the user interface altogether.
There's been a lot of talk about the visual and user experience changes in iOS 7, Apple's flagship mobile operating system that powers the iPhone, the iPod Touch and the iPad products.
My ZDNet colleague Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols refers to it as a "Mashup" of everyone else's mobile operating system, Android in particular.
Our resident mobile software consultant Matthew Baxter-Reynolds talks about this as an exercise of whether or not Apple should "Move the cheese" and how far they are willing to alienate their end-users with changes in order to advance their products.
And our Editor-in-Chief, Larry Dignan, would like us all to stop complaining about user interface changes and just move on.
Image: CBS Interactive/ZDNetWhat is the common thread in all of this? Clearly the nature of changing user interfaces and dealing with the issue of human-device interaction is not just an Apple problem. This is a problem that every single device manufacturer and software developer has to deal with now that we are moving into an age of ubiquitous computing.
And it's not so much as a "Post-PC" problem but a "Where do we go from here" problem.
As an industry we don't have a detailed plan of the steps that are required and what changes are needed to get us to the next phase in human to device interaction. But we have a very good idea of what the ultimate destination, or rather the desired destination is.
Look no further than the works of popular science fiction if there was any doubt about what that destination actually looks like.
For example, in Star Trek, human beings interact directly with computers and devices primarily without the use of user interfaces at all. For example, the "Communicator" has no UI, you simply speak to it as an extension of the Enterprise's main computer system.
In Star Trek, our favorite characters use voice recognition and work with artificial intelligences all the time to interact with information systems. Taken even further, there are beings (such as the "Borg") that interface directly with computers by linking them with their brains.
This is not just a theme within Star Trek but also a common theme in many other forms of SF literature, such as with William Gibson's Neuromancer series of novels published in the mid-1980s (and his stort stories that preceded it, such as Johnny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome) and one that was further popularized in movies like The Matrix.
If you want to go back even further than the 1980s there are endless examples in the works of the Grand Masters such as Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Silverberg, just to name a few.
The ultimate goal of directly interfacing with computers has also been termed the
There's been a lot of talk about the visual and user experience changes in iOS 7, Apple's flagship mobile operating system that powers the iPhone, the iPod Touch and the iPad products.
My ZDNet colleague Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols refers to it as a "Mashup" of everyone else's mobile operating system, Android in particular.
Our resident mobile software consultant Matthew Baxter-Reynolds talks about this as an exercise of whether or not Apple should "Move the cheese" and how far they are willing to alienate their end-users with changes in order to advance their products.
And our Editor-in-Chief, Larry Dignan, would like us all to stop complaining about user interface changes and just move on.
And it's not so much as a "Post-PC" problem but a "Where do we go from here" problem.
As an industry we don't have a detailed plan of the steps that are required and what changes are needed to get us to the next phase in human to device interaction. But we have a very good idea of what the ultimate destination, or rather the desired destination is.
Look no further than the works of popular science fiction if there was any doubt about what that destination actually looks like.
For example, in Star Trek, human beings interact directly with computers and devices primarily without the use of user interfaces at all. For example, the "Communicator" has no UI, you simply speak to it as an extension of the Enterprise's main computer system.
In Star Trek, our favorite characters use voice recognition and work with artificial intelligences all the time to interact with information systems. Taken even further, there are beings (such as the "Borg") that interface directly with computers by linking them with their brains.
This is not just a theme within Star Trek but also a common theme in many other forms of SF literature, such as with William Gibson's Neuromancer series of novels published in the mid-1980s (and his stort stories that preceded it, such as Johnny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome) and one that was further popularized in movies like The Matrix.
If you want to go back even further than the 1980s there are endless examples in the works of the Grand Masters such as Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Silverberg, just to name a few.
The ultimate goal of directly interfacing with computers has also been termed the