Painted on the iPad

I haven’t attempted to draw or color anything in 20 years, but the iPad feels so natural and unintimidating that you allow yourself to play. And then when I was reading TUAW, they highly recommended an app called Art Studio that’s like as good as Brushes but only .99! Pretty unbelievable. I jumped in.

So I just finished painting this on the iPad. Mondrian anyone? Hhehehehehehehehhe. But the point isn’t whether this is much more than a grade school coloring. It’s not. The ego is out of the way, just as in the paradigm of the iPad, the technology gets out of the way.

Rather, the important point is, and I don’t know if you can tell this from the photo, but: it felt like coloring or painting in the real world. I had fun doing it. Yes it’s possible to have fun with a regular computer using Photoshop or Illustrator or some such creative tool. But the experience isn’t as intimate, warm, and human like. Even with applications that excite me such as Garageband for producing music, I tend to leave the project more stressed than when I began. The 2 foot chasm between the person and the screen, with keyboard and mouse guarding the passage, is an even larger psychological gap, it seems, leaving a lot of emptiness on the table and more than a little reticence at trying something new.

But with the iPad that experience changes. The intimidation and distance, both physically and emotionally, seem to melt away.

That’s been one of my main take aways from using the iPad: It’s a marriage of the digital and analog worlds. I have never had this kind of “human” or “emotional” experience interacting with and creating on a computer or piece of digital technology.

That’s one of the many reasons that I think this is the most important, interesting, and will be the most popular technological device in history. I think virtually everyone on the planet will have one in a few years. It’s as revolutionary as the internet itself because its a way to engage and interact with the internet, and the digital world in general, in a human way.

And its just the beginning.

The iPad seems to manifest the archetypal spirit of a continuum. In all myths heroes and heroines have a single purpose, the power of a committment. In the spirit of that committment the iPad seems to unobtrusively and intimately be able to be one's delightful companion in seamless experiences of both entertainment, inspiration, productivity, and creativity. And it does this in a way that is an aesthetically pleasing experience, a natural experience symbolized by it's most important interactive gesture: that of human touch. Technology that is inviting and fun to use gets engaged. And the marriage helps both the technology, as a more diverse group of talents come in contact with it, and society as a whole as it interacts more harmoniously, and receives the benefit of both knowledge and emotional support. And finally the individual, who is freed by a system whose power now works with and for him, after so many years in the dark where cold, unenlightened systems were imposed upon him and his Spirit.