Okay. Single fingers are a amazing input device because of dexterity. Flat phones are amazing because they fit in my pockets. Text search is amazing because with 26 symbols I can query a very significant portion of world knowledge (I can't search for, say, a painting that looks like a Van Gogh by some other painter, so there are limits, obviously).
Maybe it is just a tone thing. Alan Kay did something notable - he drew the iPad, he didn't run around saying "somebody should invent something based on this thing I saw".
Flat works, and so do fingers. If you are going to denigrate design based on that, well, let's see the alternative that is superior. I'd love to live through a Xerox kind of revolution again.
I've seen some of his stuff. I am reacting to a talk where all he says is "this is wrong". I've written about some of that stuff in other posts here, so I won't duplicate it. He by and large argues to throw math away, and shows toy examples where he scrubs a hard coded constant to change program behavior. Almost nothing I do depends on something so tiny that I could scrub to alter my algorithms.
Alan Kay is awesome. He did change things for the better, I'm sorry if you thought I meant otherwise . His iPad sketch was of something that had immediately obvious value. A scrubbing calculator? Not so much.
Maybe it is just a tone thing. Alan Kay did something notable - he drew the iPad, he didn't run around saying "somebody should invent something based on this thing I saw".
Flat works, and so do fingers. If you are going to denigrate design based on that, well, let's see the alternative that is superior. I'd love to live through a Xerox kind of revolution again.