Living on a Thin Line

Saturday night one of the fans in my laptop decided to throw a temper-tantrum and make some nasty noises so by Sunday afternoon it was in the hands of the 5th avenue Apple store for repairs.

Unfortunately, because of the high volume of Apple users in the New York City area, this repair is likely to take all week. I am now in my third full day (79 hours and 3 minutes) without my computer. To be honest, I thought this would be harder. For a device that typically only sleeps when I do, it seemed it's absence from my routine would be pretty disruptive. In fact, all its removal has proven is that I can and will engage in 90% of my normal computing activity on my iPhone--including drafting and publishing this entire rambling post.

There are a couple of things that this forced detention from my normal work surface has brought into sharp relief and are worth mentioning if you're a monumental computer geek:

Workflow: This is the first thing I noticed and the last thing I suspected would be a real issue when working at other computers. Just like sitting behind the wheel of someone else's car is unnerving and requires far more brain power than sitting behind your own wheel, sitting at a computer that has not been customized just the way you like it can be frustrating. More than just the keys on the keyboard being in the wrong place, whole programs and folder scripts are missing. Key combinations that invoke specific actions are no longer there. My desktops are not arranged as always and navigating them is a different set of muscles than my lizard brain is used to operating. I had no idea how far I had taken my user experience away from the default and into my own.

Outlook: I'm no big fan of Windows, but for the last few days I've been using an XP workstation at the office and it's reminded me that while's still ugly, convoluted, and has more pop-ups than a High School football team at a whorehouse, Windows is a pretty decent operating system. However, I have been using Outlook for the first time as a mail client, and it's making me want to weep tears of sorrow for the millions of people out there who suffer through this day in and day out. I never liked Mail, Apple's email client for OS X. I've long thought it could use some powerful features it lacks and improvements to the UI. Now that I've been using Outlook for 24 hours, Mail is the program I miss most. Everything about Outlook is an affront to good design, productivity, and humanity. It's as if someone designed a mail client based on the worst Geocities websites of the early 90s--everything is a button and most of the icons make little or no sense, if you squint long enough to see what they are. Contact's addresses don't autofill. There are three--THREE!!--search bars at the top. Sure, they all call out their seperate functions, presumably to avoid confusion, but why not consolidate them? Why can't I search for contacts, mail items, or help topics from the same box? It's not likely I'd need to do more than one of those things at a time! Weeping tears of sorrow for you. Honestly.

Dual Monitors: I'm used to having two working surfaces. I'd probably have three if it didn't mean yet another adapter and not being able to see anything past my desk. Having only one these last two days has convinced me that in the future we will make more and more surfaces available for the data and interfaces we use every minute of every day. As graphics processing and LCD screens and projectors become more refined and cheaper the need to consolidate information will decrease and the ability to make it viewable in locations other than your own private workspace will become the norm. Multi-purpose displays in the common spaces of homes and offices, networked to the computers of their inhabitants makes complete sense to me. Find a recipe? Throw it on the kitchen monitor. An article your coworker should read? Plaster it on the 42" flatscreen in the break room. Got a livestream of all the RFID tagged inventory passing in and out of your warehouse? You could put that up on the vertical displays in your shipping department, like a departures/arrivals kiosk at the airport. Sure these things would be expensive luxuries now, but I suspect that in the next decade or so we will see the concept of the single or even just dual video outputs on a computer dwindle and die away.

Comments

[Marcus]

Sorry about your laptop. At least you aren't forced to use Vista on the desktops. Mephisto is still an XP.