Trying to sell a PC to a bonobo

Some of the stuff that happens around us in this, our time, is just plainly astonishing. I don't want to minimize the discoveries of those that came before us -and we DO stand on their shoulders- but with Open Source initiatives, the available technology used as an enabler and crowdsourcing, the degree of progress is accelerating in this age, sometimes to alarming points.

The Bonobo Great Ape Trust Sanctuary have been experimenting with making available to their primates large touch-screen computer keyboards with symbols that correspond to different words. They're also working on ways to make computers automatically translate a series of symbols into a coherent sentence.

Now they started a Kickstarter campaign to help provide their bonobos with personal interconnected keyboards they can use to chat with humans anytime, and almost anywhere. Apparently, in initial tests the primates can effectively communicate with the use of these tools. Read the article on the Huffington Post HERE.

I cannot stop to wonder about these incredible animals and play some of the "Planet of the Apes" scenes in the background of my brain, but what really caught my attention is how this experiment is the pinnacle of User Interface testing.

Old Computer + Bonobo = Banana on monitor
Tablet + Bonobo = Communication

Wow.

If you look at the basic functionality, the traditional computers are all capable devices to transmit communications. Capable of doing email, chat, even voice. But it happens to be that THE USER INTERFACE is the middleware that connects the species to the device and apparently tablets are best received by our primate cousins. The takeaway? The user interface can make or break your application, whatever it may be!

Of course, you could always argue that bonobos are just hardcore Appleheads and they just would not use anything different than an iPad! :-)

The App Reigns

I should have known. I dared to mention the iPhone and I just got a gazillion hate mails.

The conversation went south quickly, falling into the this vs. that and the "I was here before" conversation.

What this made me realize that -personally- I care less and less about the device, about any device, and more about the apps. Functionality and content are king in my reign. TiVo and the DVR have done more for TV in my case than color, HD or any other improvement.

In the case of a computing or a Smartphone device, the reality is that very specific tasks are attributed to the Application and not the device. Nobody "Macs" or "PCs" something. But you do Photoshop an image, and you "throw it into an Exel" and on a bad day, it is your Outlook that is "acting up". In one concept: The App is the verb.

On the device, I have some killer apps that I just need to have. My preferred ones are:

Pandora. My music, randomized and with new stuff! Love it on the computer, even better on the handheld when it can go everywhere and has XG access.
Evernote. This is a powerhouse application. If you haven't tried it, you should. I just loved the first version because of the concept of ubiquity. The idea is a Notebook that can be accessed by a variety of ways, web, PC or Mac client, and Mobile client. In addition to this, the first version allowed for hand-written notes, email-to-notebook entry, and note emailing as well as a neat web-clipping functionality. On the mobile, it gets even better when you add the camera and the geo-tagging functionality.

GMail Sync. I mean Contacts and Calendar too.

Google Voice. If you read "The Mobility I Want", you know why. This is the closest thing to unified communications Nirvana.

You are like Einstein

Yep. Much like Albert Einstein. Not because you can come up with the Special Relativity theory and also play the violin, but because your ideas come in the oddest moments.

Einstein once said: "Why do I have my best ideas in the shower?"

This is true for most of us and it is ironic that most of the time your best ideas come to you in waves and in places where it is so hard to document them.

I am currently inmersed reading "The Artist's Way", which is what you can consider a "classic", written in by . The concepts exposed there are not easily proven, but they are still very valid. One of the key concepts, at the core of the author's thesis, is that repetitive tasks "feed" the creative mind and we can then tap it. This is the author's explanation on why these ideas come to us in places that we are sometimes even embarrassed to confess.

This is the reason why Evernote is probably my all-time favorite app on my phone and the new version on Android is capable of doing off-line creation and editing.

Now we just have to make it work under the shower.