Sorry, sorry, I know. Still, user interface designers like to think about things with interesting user interfaces. It’s a habit of the job.

Here’s the first thing I thought when I saw the iPad being demoed: the iPad is the laptop for desktop users who’ve never been able to justify the performance/price laptop trade-offs.

I’ve always been a desktop user. I need a big screen for Photoshop. I need something fast. I like to play the games occasionally (ahem). I work in the public sector. I really strongly prefer Mac OS X. So for me, the Apple computer that fits my needs best (fast, relatively inexpensive, big screen, nice GPU) is the iMac. I occasionally desire the portability when I’m away from home or work, and need to give a presentation or take notes.

The iPhone gets me some of the way there. It’s good for quick emails and keeping connected with the world. But it can’t output its display to a projector and I’m uncomfortable about using it for voice-recording of meetings and memos (and to be honest, I’ve never broached the idea with a client).

So here’s the iPad: bigger than iPhone, faster, and Apple explicitly wants us to use it for Keynote slide projection. iPad is smaller than a laptop but far cheaper than one too. For the use case I’d imagine for it, the 3G model isn’t too critical. Ultimately, it’s a very clever satellite device for iMac and other desktop (Windows?) users, which is why I think a lot of laptop-based Mac users are so perplexed by it. It’s not a laptop-killer for road warriors. But it is field artillery for desktop generals.

Interesting Ars Technica forum post by eVITAERC on some of the complexities that Flash acolytes don’t get when they complain about the lack of Flash support on iPhone and now iPad.

How are the Flash advocates out there suggesting to solve the interface problems anyways? The two biggest uses for Flash right now are:

• Video
• Games

The first one of which is in a state of flux. With HTML5 support and YouTube already a non-issue I’m gonna call this one on the road to solving itself.

That leaves games. How the hell are Apple going to emulate all of the following common Flash game mechanics:

• click
• drag
• keyboard

while clicking is fairly trivial, implementing drag and keyboard presses seem hopeless to me. Is Flash supposed to tell Safari which keys to pop up? What about a whole keyboard that pops up to take up 1/2 the screen real-estate everytime you click on a Flash object? How can Safari tell between, say, a game or a video player flash applet? There’s nothing in the API that can be used to distinguish the uses of the Flash apps. Changing that would require every Flash app on the web to be re-written. Besides, Flash is designed to be device-agnostic.

The iPad is not exactly built for device-agnostic tasks.

Except for maybe web browsing.

Actually the device is tailored for web browsing, so scratch that.

I simply can’t see Flash doing well at all on a tablet situation.

Don’t get me wrong — Apple has an ideological problem with Flash. And, as someone who does web standards, so do I. But it’s clear that Flash is problematic for more reasons than corporate rivalry.