TUAW Livechat: Developing for the (possibly mythical) Apple Tablet

Hey Erica,

Enjoyed the chat... some very interesting perspectives

I think every family will have multiples of these-- at least: 1 for each family member and 1 for the kitchen, couch...

We all sit around the house (together or in separate rooms) doing work-at-home (whatever that is) homework, web surfing playing games, reading watching TV (streamed)... when need to go out and about, we just keep on goin' on!

It needs CCC: inexpensive; 811.n/cell/usb; needs to be offered in different colors. (Cost Color Connectivity)

Below are some more techie thoughts (wishes).


Dick


* Tablet can be used as a co-peripheral with a desktop/laptop:
-- tablet gets a larger screen (optional mouse, kb, scanner, etc)
-- the desktop/laptop gets touch I/O & multiple virtual kbs

• Drag and drop is similar to using a computer with 2 displays

* Tablet can use finger-touch and/or BT pressure-sensitive stylus i.e. graphics tablet

* Tablet could have touch-sensitive back-- use as split full KB and cursor, with optional Heads Up kb/cursor displayed on front

* iWork/iLife reworked to run on tablet and tablet/computer co-peripheral

• iWork/iLife available for Windows PCs

• One potential market is "Slim Client" for large percentage of PC & Mac install base that do not do heavy computing:

-- office cubicle-dwellers running web-like apps to feed data to/from a LAN/WAN;
-- homies who surf, schedule & stay in touch, play a few games, do the iLife stuff

I could have sworn that Apple denied that they were going to make a tablet.

How does that get to us being 3 months away from an "expected launch"?

You guys should really use blogtalkradio or something ... watching people type hasn't been fun since AOL. Or have the chat and just post the transcript since audience participation is so limited.

the discussion was not informative from the beginning so I closed out.

They seem to rehash what has already been specualted on over the last few months....