On my last trip to British Columbia, I was lucky enough to have my sister and my niece visit-me on the island while I was there. I picked them up at the ferry terminal to bring them back to town. In the car, I noticed my niece taping away at an i-pod touch. I asked her what she was doing on it and she replied “playing a game and before that I was watching the rest of my movie…”.

Apple may just have done the smartest thing ever by introducing a multi-touch application interface to the ipod and I-phone. They have now trained an entire generation (maybe a couple of generations) on how to use their new tablet computers. Of course, I’m referring to the ipad. No learning curve here. If you can use the iphone, you already know how to use an ipad. At first when apps started coming out for the iphone, I thought… do people really want to manage all those apps? I mean – there’s an app for this and there’s an app for that. When I started downloading and playing with apps myself, I realized that the process forces you to pick and choose carefully. I found myself cleaning out my screen and getting rid of the dirty old apps and replacing them with apps I would actually use – a fairly quick and painless process.

Regardless of whether you think it’s good or bad usability – the last couple of generations have been trained and are ready to grab some more apps for the ipad. As anyone who has read my previous posts knows, I think we’re nearing the end of browser-based experiences. Mobile platforms and Apple has brought us to the dawn off the app.