An engineering comment overheard recently: Make something faster and it’s helpful. Make something much, much faster and it changes the way you work.
Despite all the arguments about whether typing is faster than handwriting, there are times when the Tablet model can outperform standard methodologies. As a software engineer it’s tremendously rewarding when you stumble across the right combination of utility and design that significantly challenges how people think about performing a task.
OneNote achieves this, for instance. If you need to take a note you just scribble or type wherever you want. Forget something? Just pop back to where you were and ink or type some more in the margins. The rigid formatting of most word processors won’t get in your way here. As a result you can work much faster at bringing disparate information together. In fact, it’s so easy and fast to accumulate ink, text, screenshots, audio or whatever in OneNote that you begin to think of it in different terms than simply a document editing tool. It’s part database. It’s part archive.
I remember a similar sense of wonderment when I first used Turbo Pascal in the ’80s and I could compile almost instantaneously. For many of us developers, Turbo Pascal changed the way we approached coding. It was so fast at compiling that we could let the compiler reveal our mistakes rather than worrying about typing everything in correctly the first time. The net result: we could work faster.
Google is another example. Google is so fast and effective at searching, that it changes the way I think about solving problems. Almost always I Google first. And when I’m in the midst of a problem, I’ll Google for an answer rather than use local help. Or sometimes I’ll search for something and just a few minutes later search for it again rather than step back through the history cached on my machine. Google has changed the way I think about acquiring information.
Similarly, with Longhorn, the new search infrastructure is on track to being so fast that it’s going to radically change the way I think about organizing and retrieving information and documents on my computer.
When I’m developing an app I often don’t overly concern myself with speed. It’s something I consider at every step of the way, but especially if it’s something I’ve never done before, my first goal is to get it working. And in fact, many times “speed” comes not from simply writing highly optimized code, but rather solving the problem in a highly efficient and effective manner. I might make something a magnitude easier and faster by the approach I take whereas focusing on code optimization might yield an easy-to-overlook 20 or 30 percent performance improvement.
Writing Tablet apps is just different enough from developing a standard program that it gives me permission to rethink how the program should work and how people will use them. The result can be dramatic.
I’m betting we’ll see more apps such as OneNote that evolve from the Tablet sphere which dramatically improve the way we think about getting things done.