How’s your desktop looking?  If the files on your computer seem sorted with as much care as leaves by a rabid badger operating a leaf blower, you should be rejoicing in the iPad. Not because you need the iPad as it stands now, but because of where the iPad/iPhone OS points to.

Right now, you have free reign over your computer’s file system, and look how well you’ve handled it! You can manage or mismanage files however you’d like.  Go ahead, drag your TurboTax files into the folder that houses your stolen music library – just to stick it to the man (or something).  You have that freedom. But you must take responsibility for the mistakes you make in maintaining it.  When your grandparents accidentally drag the letter they were composing into some unrelated folder because they held a double click for too long, it will be your responsibility to field that tech support call. But not for much longer, if Battleship Cupertino continues chugging in the direction I believe it to be.

Many IT people will tell you that the bulk of their headaches result from poor system management on behalf of the user. That is not the same as saying that the user is to blame – not when computer OSsessessses are designed as they currently are. There are simply too many interactions happening at the GUI layer, and the average user simply has too much freedom to screw things up.

What the iPad points to is the death of the “Desktop”.  Turn on your iPhone or iPad, and that, in essence, is what your future PC will look like.  It is an evolution in UI that Apple has been hinting at for years.

If you use Apple’s iLife suite, you already know how to play.  Any content you create is discovered through a menu system specific to the app which created it. You don’t interact directly with the GUI representation of your files as icons, within folders.  If you need to find a photo, open iPhoto.  If you want to sort those photos, you do it within the app.  What’s more, you don’t have to relegate one photo to one category or folder anymore. Tag them with multiple descriptions and suddenly you can drill down into photos of your kids, photos of your kids in wintertime, and photos of your kids in wintertime wearing red.

If you forgot to tag a photo properly, system indexing and search algorithms will be so quick and so talented, a few simple parameters will reveal what you were looking for in seconds. Are you aware that iPhoto can currently recognize faces so completely that you can call up just the photos with “Mom” in them?  It knows how to look at 1′s and 0′s in such a way as to divine the bit of code that looks like Mom.

Did you know that Google is working on technology that can automatically recognize other things, such as cars, in a photo?  Type in “Red Honda” and one day – without the user tagging the file with any references to cars or colors – the algorithm will find it. No more guessing what file 091498_00123.jpg is all about.

If you want to email that photo you so cleverly found, notice what you don’t do. You don’t navigate to the folder that contains the photo, drag that photo to your desktop, then open Mail, then a new compose window, then move the window a little bit over to reveal the photo you just put on the desktop, then drag the photo into your “Attachments” area.  Then forget to delete that photo off your desktop for three weeks, and realize once you have deleted it, that you trashed an original because you hadn’t copied it over like you thought you had.  Oops.

Do you see how this new OS scheme simplifies things?  To access your music, open iTunes, not the iTunes folder.

With the current version of the iPad OS, in addition to the death of traditional file browsing, we’ve also seen the death of windows.  No, not Microsoft’s OS (have you seen the Courier?), but the rectangles that you move about on screen, through which you view “stuff”.

Windows however, are what allow us to multitask. They allow me to watch a TED talk in the corner of my screen while writing and keeping tabs on new email and my twitter feed.  Yes, I typically do all these things at once, and that is why the iPad currently is not for me. Indeed by far the loudest cry amongst critics of the iPhone/iPad OS is that there is no multitasking.  You jump in and out of single applications, and when cross-pollination between applications is required, the menu system allows for the transition. The interaction is simple to understand and largely automated, but functionally less capable and productive.

Apple will be announcing the new version of it’s mobile OS (iPhone OS 4) on Thursday, and it is widely expected to present a certain kind of solution to this problem, but it still won’t be quite like what you get on a desktop, or perhaps not even what I enjoy on my Palm Pre with webOS (which would make a fantastic tablet OS btw).  This space is still evolving, and I’m simply placing a trail marker. Apple hasn’t quite figured out how to satisfy all styles of working within this new operating framework. A pro user for example is usually eager to play with new toys in their personal life, and may buy an iPad for that reason, but a pro also requires a tremendous degree of manual control and fine tuning in their work. Pro photographers don’t shoot on Auto mode, and ultimately, that’s what the iPad is.

A computer on Auto.