Okay, so really all technology is transitional in a sense, but the technology I’m thinking of now is that which opens up genuinely new possibilities and everyone is scrambling to figure out what to do with it. Look, for example, at the personal computer in the early 80s (when I was first discovering that I happened to be a kind of geek that just got created). For at least ten years from when I got my first computer (an Apple ][+ clone from Hong Kong), the central function of this device was to actively wonder what to do with it.

Fortunately it came well equipped for this. You could program the thing right away and if you felt like delving deeper, you could trivially enter memory data directly, programming the machine code in hexadecimal. You learn a lot that way. If you were even more curious, the machine came with documentation that included schematic diagrams of the whole circuitry and a complete commented listing of the code for the read-only memory.

A few years later my newer computers, Intel boxes for the most part, lacked the tools do wonder. I suppose by this time the manufacturers of such things felt they had done all the wondering that needed to be done and so they could now sell us the fruits of their wondering and we could just consume. Of course this was not sufficient (I bought them to wonder) and so tools became available (and whole operating systems) that let you wonder again. Linux, for example, came with a compiler and a tool chain again and so you were obviously invited.

Anyway, the personal computer is a General Purpose Computing device. It’s not for anything, really, but rather it’s capable of anything that can be programmed into it. As a result it’s in the thing’s nature to always be transitional — we will constantly be wondering what else we can make this thing do because it will constantly acquire more and new power. So I would argue that it always needs to come with wonder-enabling tools because that’s what it is for.

Now this iPad is a different beast but we still don’t know what it’s for. What is different, however, is that the class of people who are equipped to wonder about that are a little more elite. By elite I don’t mean better or smarter or richer, but rather only that they are a small subset of the usership. You need certain skills and certain investment in order to wonder about this thing in practical terms. That’s okay — this isn’t a rant about the loss of wonder. I’m in the elite (or at least I’m invited) — I could wonder if I wanted to. But the fact that most of the developers for the iPad are still wondering has led to an enormous feeling of transition when using the device and the surrounding technologies.

By surrounding technologies I don’t mean technologies that directly support the iPad. I mean technologies that are developing in other contexts but that the iPad is positioned to exploit. These are the places where many users of the device are scratching their heads and wondering (aha!) why the iPad doesn’t do this. For example, why can’t I edit Google Docs?

Okay wait, I know why. I know the technical reasons. I also know they will be surmounted soon enough. But really, this is why the iPad exists — remote storage of data for local manipulation at any arbitrary node (and the iPad is as local and arbitrary as it gets today) and Google Docs is the repository for such remote storage right now. So when I see word processors for the iPad and they do not support Google Docs, I immediately wonder WHAT THE FUCK?

On a more general level, consider Dropbox. Anything that stores any kind of data should be able to export it to Dropbox. If I make funky images with Granimator (and I do), I want to share them with other iPad users (because they make great wallpaper images) and Dropbox is a solid way to offload all that sharing logic to someone else rather than integrate it into an iPad app or, worse, the operating system.

But it’s in the nature of new technology to flounder for a while (a long while in some cases) before it finds niches where it sings. Here’s another example: electronic books. See, I can tell this is transitional because there are some I can only get through Kindle and there are others that I can only get in PDF and there are others still that are self-contained apps. All of these are viable ways to deliver textual content and we don’t have to settle on exactly one (which is good because they have diverse and only partially overlapping strengths and weaknesses) but the disordered management and access to these documents smell like a technology that has not figured it out yet. And it’s clearly not as simple as just integration (like Goodreader, say) but rather a deeper problem of needing a new technology to cope with new technology.

And then, as if it wasn’t enough that technology is changing, technology is clearly changing us too. Our expectations are different than they were twenty, ten, or even five years ago. We expect (reasonably!) to trivially share practically anything with people we have never seen or spoken to. Not just make it available, but genuinely share it — make them know it exists, allow them to get it, allow them to change it, and understand their changes. Solid collaboration is still the killer app that doesn’t quite exist yet and a lot of people are stabbing in the dark at it (and wondering) — wikis, Google Docs, Dropbox, Google Wave…all these things are trying to figure out real, distributed collaboration. None of them do it yet, though of them all at least Google Wave (still the least useful for this) is not just an old application elevated to the new shared space. It’s closer to a genuinely new idea, and we sure need one.

We are smart monkeys and so we always re-purpose any technology to make it do what we think it ought to do. As the technology becomes more powerful and as the interconnectedness of people and projects exceeds the point at which we can really analyze it, we will be pushing the human-technology hybrid animal into newer and newer places. The iPad is one of those things that makes this clear. It’s equally clear that it’s a prototype of what will be — it’s clumsy and scattered and poorly integrated. It does a whole bunch of things you already did but in a bigger and smaller package with better and worse graphics. But it is certainly the result of someone smart wondering really hard.

I can’t wait, then, to see where we are next year. Because this transition is more about software and about adoption and usage than hardware. And so, to all you iPad developers out there wondering your asses off for ninety-nine cents a download, my hat is off to you. And my wallet, frankly, open. Wonder over here where I can see it and fondle it and test it and make it do things you didn’t intend it to do. But make it play nice and play freely, because it’s this gestalt technology that is going to really blow us away.

–BMurray