And yet that’s exactly what we’ve been told in much of the coverage surrounding last weekend’s launch of the iPad. Report after report, sporting quotes from media industry insiders about how this device might allow them to do exactly what they were doing before, albeit on an LCD. Recreate print layouts on screen. Reconstruct payment models of old.

While Steve Jobs & Company have given every indication their interest is in tinkering with a new computing platform, I’d say a solid two-thirds of the coverage I’ve seen/read/heard has instead focused on this other notion. That of the iPad as Old Media Savior, regardless of the fact that’s never been a talking point put forth by Apple. It’s a dead horse news outlets simply won’t stop flogging, and has crowded out a lot of smarter, more insightful coverage. Where’d this idea come from, and why is it getting so much play?

First, head on over to The Atlantic and check out Lane Wallace’s The Bias of Veteran Journalists. It’s a plainspoken exploration (that may or may not have been inspired by this particular news event). Then couple Wallace’s analysis with the industry backstory and you have something of an answer. It’s hardly satisfying, but there it is. The people charged with covering these events are the selfsame ones participating daily in an industry under withering fire. This informs their viewpoint before they even step into the room, and predisposes them to sometimes connecting the dots to where they don’t necessarily go—to solutions they themselves have been searching for, but no one else intended.

Yesterday, Wired’s Gadget Lab blog posted a speculative piece asserting that, in the wake of recent App Store takedowns, news organizations might want to take a cautionary approach when creating applications for the iPad, lest they unwittingly submit to potential censorship from Apple.

Trouble is, the post is shot through with the bizarro, “Tablets are the end of history!” assumptions that have gripped news organizations (and the publishing industry in general) since well before the iPad was even unveiled.

Where did we get this myopic assumption that in order to participate in the “iPad universe” newsrooms must author their own native applications? There’s already a phenomenal, censorship-free way to reach this new potential iPad audience: It’s called a website. (You know, that place where news venues already have millions upon millions of readers, most of whom they seem not to know what to do with.)

Beyond the haptic feedback bits, there is precious little in the iPad news app demos we’ve been seeing that can not be done in a Web browser, right now. Yes, really. But because this new gadget vaguely apes a form factor some folks are familiar with (“Hey, it’s shaped like a magazine now!”) the universe has suddenly been reinvented and all the rules have changed? Poppycock.

Don’t want Apple (or Amazon, or Sony, or whoever) controlling your delivery channel?

Then put some of that money into creating new and innovative features for your website, where it should have been all along.

Addendum

In a mildly amusing but important aside, I’ll mention that much of the Wired post is a complete non sequitur because news organizations have already been making apps for the App Store for some time now—for the iPhone—with nary a hint of the aforementioned censorship boogeyman. Just because the screen got bigger doesn’t mean the landscape shifted.

“Stand in line? What are you crazy? I’m not standing in line.”

Eight hours later, I was standing in line. (Oops.)

Not so much standing as strolling, actually. Morbid curiosity got the better of me by the time I left the office for the weekend, and I found myself walking up 5th Avenue to take a gander at all the hubbub. I was pretty stunned to arrive on the scene a few hours after launch to find a less-than-five-minute line. Five minutes to queue up and charge through the double-file gauntlet of Apple Store employees cheering folks on at the door. “Oh, hey, what the heck…”

Mere moments later I reemerged, clutching my quarry in it’s slick satin finish bag, palms sweaty like a bad prom date.

I’ll spare the nitty gritty product review details. Suffice it to say it’s tremendously damn good. Like, “lives up to the hype” good. In fact, after a full weekend of usage, I’ll go so far as to declare the iPhone the best consumer electronics device I’ve ever purchased. Hands down. Full stop. (Note to Ed Colligan: Apple didn’t just walk in—they broke down the door, punched you in the face and stole your girlfriend on the way out.)

Like it or not it’s going to have a noticeable influence on the market, so affected parties would do well to come to grips with that fact sooner rather than later.

A Call to Action

And that’s precisely where the Web design and development community comes in.

There’s been no shortage of gnashing of teeth and tearing of beards over the SDK issue. Want to write a “native app” for the iPhone, some Cocoa goodness all your own? Sorry kids, it’s closed. (For now at least.) Adam Greenfield even goes so far as to comment, “you cannot make culture with this device.” He’s got a point.

But this time the closed model is hugely asymptotic: The iPhone is a full-on consumer of standards in every regard. Web Standards, networking standards, file standards, you name it. The SDK is a non-SDK: Make solid websites using acknowledged best practices and the iPhone well love them up.

So here’s our chance, Webfolk. Home court advantage is officially ours. Apple just dropped the sexiest client imaginable right in our laps, complete with oodles of free publicity the likes of which presidential candidates and washed up child actors only dream about. It’s a gift. A beautiful, beautiful gift for people who make websites. This is an opportunity that needs to be grabbed with both hands.

It’s time to get to work.

Khoi Vinh’s recent post about finding a successor to Quicken has gotten me thinking.

Like him, I’ve been using Quicken way, way past what feels like its useful shelf life, grin-and-bearing-it through one weirdo quirk after another. It may sound hokey but Quicken is hands-down the most “un-Mac-like” of any of the apps I use. It’s not even a close contest. Much of the interface feels like a time warp back to the awkward age of the OS 9 to OS X transition. A veritable HIG calamity that I’ve simply grown accustomed to. (Would it be too much to ask that Intuit at least implement standard text fields?)

There are some alternatives, but some of the most intriguing offerings aren’t really mature yet. (I briefly flirted with using iBank back in its 1.5 incarnation and have recently returned to experimenting with the latest release. Only time will tell how well that works out.) I think the Web service route that Khoi mentions has some real potential, but that model probably has a huge psychological hurdle to vault in the form of “perception of security” before it can gain any real traction.

All of which leads me to ponder out loud, “Why doesn’t Apple make a personal finance application?”

Bear with me here. I know this can be deadly un-sexy stuff. But, boy oh boy, is this application category ever core to those, “Computers are here to make my life easier!” fantasies we’ve all had since the day someone first plopped an Apple II or PC XT on our desks.

The more I think about it, the more unbelievable I find it that Apple has kept away from this niche for all this time. Is it just me or would a personal finance app fit perfectly into iWork? Once Apple completes the “word processor-spreadsheet-presentation” app triumvirate I really hope this is the next stop on their development roadmap for the nascent office suite.

Phil Schiller (left), Apple’s senior marketing VP, talking with NewsWeek’s Steven Levy.

Thursday I got to tag along with BusinessWeek‘s Byte of the Apple columnist Arik Hesseldahl to photograph the Fifth Avenue Apple Store press event. You can see a slideshow of the highlights here.

The store is definitely one sweet bit of retail architecture, complete with a piston-driven platform elevator that runs up the center of a glass spiral staircase. Think the (patented) staircase from the SoHo store, but twirled around a (less tacky) Star Trek transporter bay. I tip my hat to the big glass cube design sitting atop it, which let Apple preserve public park space at the ground level above.

In between grabbing the shots, I got a few moments to check out the very cool new MacBook hands-on. I’ve been laptop-less for some time now, bouncing between dual G5s at the office and home. I would love a compact Mac laptop for “couch time” e-mail, Web surfing, etc. I’ve been holding off on getting anything though, waiting for Apple to spring an Intel-based replacement to the 12-inch PowerBook G4 that would fit the bill. And this laptop is definitely it. Kudos to Apple for not skimping on this one, including a dual core chip at a very competitive price and a beautiful matte black finish to boot. (The white models are still the iconic shiny iBook white.) Very little about the machine feels “budget”. Even the latch-less magnetic lid closes with a satisfying dampened thunk.

The new keyboard design, with each key sticking through its own cutout in the top of the laptop and surrounded by a small amount of space, is actually a plus in my book. I wasn’t sure looking at the pictures earlier in the week how it would hold up, but it’s firm with a nice short key travel distance. It’s probably the most solid Mac laptop keyboard I’ve used yet, aluminum PowerBooks included.

As for the glossy screen, the jury is still out. Using it in the Fifth Avenue store, which is flooded with natural light, I was able to view the screen comfortably though there definitely was glare. I don’t think I’d be doing hours of intense Photoshop work in front of this screen, but really, that’s not what this machine is for. (Though it can be hooked up to a 23-inch Cinema Display. “Lid closed” operation too. Again, Apple, thank you for not skimping.)

Either way, I think I’ll be getting in line to pick one of these new machines up.

I think there’s really something to this Classic thought. In order for Windows-on-Mac to become the new Classic though there has to be some significant downside or differentiation. Something that encourages the transition to OS X. In the original Classic that downside was performance. (Oh, there were others, but that was the one that slapped you in the face the most.) For Boot Camp it’s rebooting. This imposes a more-or-less iron psychological wall between the two OSs and makes it pretty darn clear that Windows is the ghetto. You don’t want to run programs in there, but you can if you have to. Near full-speed virtualization hosted inside of OS X might muddy these waters.

Perhaps not, you think? Maybe virtualization could turn the Mac into the premier platform for running both Mac and Windows apps? That would put Apple in the extremely awkward position of devoting significant amounts of time and money to supporting Windows, something I don’t think they’re exactly raring to do. (Actually, they’ve made their attitude on this pretty clear). It may seem like an obvious tautology, but you can bet that Apple still prefers you run Mac apps on your Mac and isn’t about to let those Windows kids swim right in their own OS pool.

Okay, so that’s why I don’t think they’ll do it. Now here’s why I’d love it if they did.

I’m a Web developer. I keep Virtual PC around solely for the purpose of testing sites in Windows browsers. And I test a lot. Update code. Refresh browser. Lather, rinse, repeat. To say nothing of the fact that it’s quite nice to have Windows running in a tidy little security sandbox where you can slap it around when you need to. (This blog post over at decaffeinated.org lists these and some other nice side benefits of this scenario.) Virtualization would be like giving this setup a sweet pair of running shoes. Indeed, with Virtual PC being AWOL on the new Mactel hardware and the nascent capabilities of the Intel chips just starting to become apparent, it seems that third-party developers like Parallels are clueing into this potential.

I won’t even get too far into the whole, This means they’re gonna dump OS X for Windows nonsense. (Why on Earth would they want to compete directly in a commodity hardware market with razor-thin margins? Nothing would make me sell my shares of Apple stock faster.)

Then there’s the whole, What if people buy an Intel Mac and only run Windows? gem. Seriously. Let’s think about this. If that’s really the case those are people you never would have sold that machine to before. Now that you’ve got Boot Camp you’ve made a sale, whereas before you had no chance. That’s damn good business. Furthermore, even if only a small fraction of this particular group gets curious and starts booting into OS X full-time those are still converts made from a formerly unreachable audience. As Gruber points out, Apple has seen the competition and seems to have little worry about losing OS X users to Windows on a dual boot machine. The potential upside is huge, the risk minimal.

Of course when all is said and done all I really care about is this: How well does Half Life 2 run?

The sad fact is that most phone manufacturers and wireless carriers have yet to get a grip on simply designing phones and networks that work as fantastic communication devices. Wireless e-mail is barely adequate. Bluetooth functionality is, for the most part, feeble. Many networks still have King Kong-size holes in them. Carriers seem so busy salivating over half-baked schemes to get you to consume bandwidth they lose track of the fundamentals–communcation, not entertainment. (Crappy cameras and $2 ringtones? Give me a break.) So what made anyone think that this would be a sure-fire hit?

I think at its heart, this taps into a much larger issue regarding convergence devices, and design, in general. Most convergence devices basically suck. There, I’ve said it. Why? Because many simply consist of several discrete devices mashed together inside a single case. Even the very well-integrated devices fail to reinvision their design as a complete whole, something greater than the sum of its parts.

Yet very few companies seem to possess the knack for this kind of innovation. So this other, mediocre type of thinking predominates. “A phone and a music player? Together? Yeah, that would be great. Two features are better than one!” No, no, no. Come up with something truly new. Does incorporating one type of functionality somehow enhance the others? It doesn’t necessarily follow that it will. Better yet, do the combined functions create some new type of capability or form that was previously unattainable? Someone may very well come up with a truly successful design that integrates wireless communication and music playback. Just don’t be surprised when it’s in a form that you didn’t expect.

Which leads me to the Apple factor. A lot of the buzz leading up to ROKR probably had a lot to do, and justifiably so, with Apples involvement. Apple is a company widely known for a unique history of exactly the type of insightful and germane innovation I’m ranting about. What is now painfully obvious to everyone though, and should have been obvious before, is that there are huge mitigating factors–Apple has virtually no incentive here. Design a device for somebody else’s company to undercut your own? To say nothing of carriers looking for their cut? The entire market for music on wireless devices looks like the Wild West right now, with every motivation at odds with the next.

Asking Apple to make this product a smash hit would have been like asking Apple to bash their right foot with a baseball bat. Gee, can’t imagine why they didn’t line right up for that one.

While this isn’t the first time Apple has used Flash on their site (see the Final Cut Studio pages, and the image galleries for the iPod nano that neatly mimic the side-to-side browsing of the iTunes Music Store), it’s certainly the most prominent. A far cry from the days of tinkering with sprites in QuickTime tracks. (How many old copies of LiveStage Pro are out there just hanging around collecting dust?)

Languishing? Well, that might be a tad harsh, but Automator definitely falls well short of the drag-and-drop nirvana many of us had hoped for. So maybe the level of interest isn’t quite what it could be. The concept of a workflow-style app is definitely the key piece that’s been missing from AppleScript all this time. It should help it live up to its mandate–an easy to use English-like scripting language to help non-programmers get stuff done on their Macs. It’s just a lot of us are feeling like waiting for the next version is the thing to do.

Automator seems like it needs some time to grow up a bit. It’s off to a solid start. Hopefully, if it eat its vegetables and studies real hard in school it could grow up to be a strong, healthy app someday. Throwing in a slick GUI way of doing some conditional logic and recursion would be a great step in the right direction. That, and a couple hundred more Actions.

I switched to using a Mac full-time with the advent of OS X. Since then I’ve really come to appreciate the elegance of the one-button setup, particularly when mated to the current Apple Mouse (née Apple Pro Mouse–a beautifully executed piece of industrial design either way). Moreover, I’ve even grown a tad irritated by the right-click. Well, not the right mouse button per se, but the way it’s commonly used.

As an UI instrument, the primary purpose of a mouse is selection and activation. It enables direct manipulation of interface elements, typically with immediate visual feedback. A mouse works fantastically well for manipulating windows, or for games–software where the metaphor is basically an extension of your hand. Click, drag. Click, shoot.

But right-clicking in GUIs has developed an unfortunate association with esoteric contextual menus that largely strays from this path, and the right mouse button has been dragged along for the ride. When I follow all the steps to use a contextual menu it generally requires multiple distinct operations, most of which focus on abstract commands buried in nested menus. Add to this the fact the typical right-click contextual menu has become synonymous with a dumping ground for all the commands a developer couldn’t find a home for somewhere else. (It’s a contextual menu, right? Then start acting like it, cut out the clutter, and show me what’s relevant to the task at hand.)

Somehow I’d rather just use a keyboard shortcut (faster) and save the mouse for what it’s really good for, whether it’s one button or twenty-five.