Gizmodo have published a really very good article on the eve of the supposed announcement of the Apple Tablet (or iSlate if you prefer). Having spent most of my career considering interfaces of one sort or another, it's given me much to think about. I'm currently midway through a pitch at work which is considering all things future in the way it presents it's interfaces. It's been fascinating seeing a massive organisation try to realign itself as the paradigms literally shapeshift in front of their eyes.

It's hard to explain to elements of an organisation that still think portals are a pretty neat idea, the importance of these paradigm shifts - And yet what Sky have always done so well is to bring complex systems to a consumer audience. Sky+ is a miracle of user design and it achieves this by abstracting the task into a really simple choice: "That one!" - let the technology do all the heavy lifting. All the user wants to do is tape the program they want to watch. By giving them a list of what's showing and let them select "That one!", they need not be concerned with the mechanism by which it tapes it. This abstraction is at the heart of every good interface, from gaming to cash machines.

At Flash on the Beach last year, I heard a quite amazing lecture given by Contrast about unconventionality and the importance of innovating within user interface design and technology. It's really stuck with me, and I've used a lot of their material in my own talks since. Of particular interest was the section on Web forms, and why we collect data the way we do, with long, tedious forms. Compare and contrast to Hufduffer for instance, and you'll see a much more user-friendly example. Brief, to the point, fun and engaging.

There were, of course, those that scoffed at Apple's entry into a well established market with the iPhone, and yet that device laid the foundations not only for the popularity of multi touch, gestural devices, but also to whole new business models (barely a week goes by that I don't hear the phrase "app-store style" - it's up there with "minority report interface"). I strongly suspect that, whatever Apple's announcement tomorrow, these kind of devices will be part of the fabric of our lives in the very near future.