The Future of Form Factor

Form factor nowadays seems to be going wild.  Ever since the mobile revolution started, manufacturers have been trying out every form factor and seeing what sticks with consumers.  A few interesting results of this are attempts to combine devices, like turning a tablet into a netbook or a phone docking into a laptop.  One of the things about the future of mobility is that it is highly unpredictable.

To add an example of this, a very unknown fact about Apple is that they actually started working on the iPad years before the iPhone.  It suddenly hit Steve one day that the application of a mobile OS X was perfect for a phone, so he ordered the iPad project shelved and made iPhone the top priority.  Nowadays, the future of Apple products looks like they are moving away from the operating system and more into mobility.  Predictions say that OS X will begin functioning more and more like the iPad, and a lot of the features in OS X Lion and Mountain Lion are starting to show this foundation.

I want to take some time to lay out some ideas about the future of mobility and where I think it is heading.  Form factor plays a huge part in this as people become more and more disconnected from the desktop and live more and more in a cellular world.

Good Design + Fragility = ?

As an enterprise app developer on the Apple iOS platform, I am in a role where I have to be an evangelist of everything Apple.  In general, the mobility revolution is something I am very eager and enthusiastic about, but there is one thing that suddenly bothered me recently.

I would define a mobile device as technology or computing that is wireless, lightweight, and useful for  in-the-field scenarios.  Something that I never really considered before, was durability.

Store Concept: Acting Like an Online Store

Something crossed my mind the other day when I was in a grocery store and was looking for a specific brand of tortilla chips. When I arrived in the chip section, I saw the no salt, garlic, and other weird varieties instead of my coveted plain-jane sea salt crisps. Then I remembered that the hispanic section also had my tortilla chips, so I walked over and found only two left, awesome!

This reminded me of the days of working at Wal-mart when I was a student, people would always ask me "Well do you have any in the back?". The infrastructure allowed me to scan the barcode on the shelf to get an inventory of the product in which I could say, oh I see there are two left, but I have no clue where those two are. Maybe someone shoplifted them? Maybe they are sitting in a pile of basketballs? Or maybe they are sitting in a box exactly where they should be? ...I always went in the back for a couple minutes and returned without an answer.

A store has a general idea of how much inventory they have, but everything is quite unaccounted for. Add in the fact that customers move things to the wrong sections, shoplift, drop/damage goods, all before they pay for the item and that kind of messes up the whole idea of keeping things smooth.

But then there is the internet, a place where you shop around one item at a time, add things to an e-cart, pay for everything up front, and then get it at a later date. Why can't physical stores act like electronic ones?

Simplistic

I am a fan of simplicity, but when it comes to clocks I usually like to see all the inner-working guts ticking away.  Something about the amount of work and parts that go into making something so precise is just amazing; same with a vehicle or even a space shuttle.

But when I saw the following clock, I just thought it was a stroke of pure genius!

And then after that, I thought how easy would this be with a little bit of code!