As an app developer, Bess Ho typically cuts a serious figure as she sits writing computer code into the wee hours.
But not today. Right now she looks like a crazed kid at a carnival amped up on cotton candy as she and three other programmers all stab their fingers wildly at the same iPad tablet.
"Get that mouse, but not the cheese!" she yells on stage at a recent gathering of iPad app makers here on the joint campus of eBay and PayPal.
An unofficial variation of the arcade game Whac-A-Mole, Ho and her teammates' Whack A Mouse -- one of dozens of apps created over the course of this two-day conference -- appears at a glance to be nothing more than another computer game. In reality, it's nothing less than a window into the iPad's most revolutionary feature: its ability to literally bring people together.
"There's a potential here that is just starting to be realized," says Dom Sagolla, who helped create Twitter and is founder of the iPadDevCamp, which drew nearly 350 developers from a range of states and countries to brainstorm and share code. "The question is, what is the iPad's role in a group, public setting?"
Significant, it seems. Though smartphones and laptops are typically one-on-one devices, Apple's 2-month-old baby -- which already has sold 2 million units priced at $499 to $829 -- has everyone from developers to end users gaga over what they say is a coming cultural shift in the way groups will interact with a high-tech device.
Less a computer and more a digital coffee-table book with infinite content, the iPad has rendered its technology invisible in order to spotlight information that often is meant to be shared.
"By moving the keyboard and mouse into the Stone Age, the iPad has created a new dimension of interaction with...
Posted: 2010-06-14 08:43:29
