When Georg Petschnigg explains something, he doesn't just talk. He draws. And when he does, he makes tablets look every bit as transformative as we always hoped they would be.
Petschnigg is a co-founder of FiftyThree, maker of the iPad sketching app Paper. He was visiting the WIRED office to show me Think Kit, a free collection of tools that will let Paper users quickly draw diagrams, flow charts, and concept maps using Pencil, the company's nifty iPad stylus.
We were talking about the challenges of bringing productivity on touchscreen devices. Petschnigg offered a theory of how technology develops, sketching a graph in Paper as he spoke. He drew a vertical axis for "power" and a horizontal one for "speed." This served as a demo of Think Kit's diagram tool; without fanfare, the app automatically straightened the lines into a crisp right angle, using clever geometry-detecting algorithms.
Petschnigg explained how technologies typically start out powerful and clunky, moving his stylus to "powerful" and "slow" quadrant of the graph. Over time, he explained, people figure out how to make that technology easier to use, but they sacrifice power in the process. He drew a line slumping downward to the right.
Eventually these easy-to-use technologies become powerful again, an inflection point Petschnigg thinks we're nearing with touchscreen devices. He believes tools like Paper, Pencil and Think Kit will help get us there. Central to this breakthrough is what Petschnigg calls "pen-and-touch"---interaction that combines both finger and stylus. On the graph, Petschnigg sketched a hopeful trajectory upward with a flick of his stylus. Then he paused.
"This is probably the first time you're seeing someone create at the speed of a conversation," he said. He was right, and he was making his point beautifully.
If anyone has the pedigree to reinvent productivity for the touchscreen era, it's Petschnigg. Early in his career, he spent several years working on Microsoft Office, the software suite that defined the last era of digital productivity. Then he helped develop Courier, Microsoft's trailblazing tablet project. In a demo video that leaked in Fall 2009, Courier was shown to be a dynamic virtual journal with two screens, driven by a combination of finger and stylus input. It was thrilling but doomed. Within months, the iPad was a hit and Courier was dead.
The pen-and-touch dream lives on in FiftyThree, and Think Kit brings it closer in some small but compelling ways. Where Paper's original tools were about sketching in all forms, Think Kit is expressly designed to encourage visual thinking and communication. It's a tool for mapping out problems like you would on a white board, or effortlessly sketching a Venn diagram that'd you'd otherwise have to tediously piece together in PowerPoint.
This may not sound especially exciting---much less like the future of productivity---but Think Kit is a marvel to see in action. The main diagramming tool recognizes circles, triangles, and rectangles, tidying your work as you go. Ingeniously, the app uses your speed to decide how much auto-correction to apply. If you're sketching fast and sloppy, it'll neaten things considerably. If you're drawing slowly, it will assume you're being deliberate and correct your work with a lighter touch. Other Think Kit tools let you cut things and move them around the screen, fill shapes with color, and sketch arrows between objects.
All this happens with tremendous fluidity. The "power" versus "speed" graph was one of at least a half-dozen visual aids Petschnigg sketched on the fly during our conversation.
This is where Think Kit starts to fit into those lofty dreams about the future of productivity. Some look at diagrams and flow charts and see a humdrum app update. Others see powerful tools for turning information into knowledge---templates for new ways of thinking, communicating, and understanding.
Indeed, visual communication is integral in many industries. As Petschnigg notes, white boards are a multi-billion dollar business. Keith Yamashita, founder of consultancy SYPartners, is a huge proponent of white board thinking---and a Paper devotee. He sees both as means of turning abstract concepts into real solutions. "Without a doubt, tools shape our success as human beings," Yamashita says. "We need more tools that work at the speed of your mind, that let you capture and share ideas quickly."
Think Kit is simple set of tools, but it rests upon a foundation of conceptual and technical innovation. The speed-dictated autocorrection is particularly brilliant. It invisibly helps negotiate the process of creation. In addition to neatening up squares and circles, its algorithms can also can tell the difference between, say, a capital D and a sloppy rectangle, so you can draw shapes and write text without switching tools.
This is something you'd never notice unless the app got it wrong. But it's another way of lubricating the creative process. Just like Pencil lets you switch between sketching and erasing simply by spinning the thing around in your hand, Think Kit lets you draw charts and label them naturally, without interruption.
With regular old pencil and paper, we expect this fluidity. We take it for granted. But it's something we're only gradually introducing to our digital tools. As Petschnigg points out, with Microsoft Office and other PC software, you're continually telling the computer what you want to do. If you're making a Venn diagram, you do so by telling the computer to "insert" a "shape" and then selecting the one you want from the menu.
With Think Kit, you just do it. That's the whole point. "We wanted a tool that allows you to very quickly draw and have the computer understand what it is you're doing," Petschnigg says. He figures the diagram tool alone probably stands in for forty icons on the PowerPoint toolbar.
This fluidity is the real promise of the pen-and-touch interface. With the help of some ingenuous software, this dual approach to input can help our devices understand what we're trying to do. Touchscreens come with limitations and ambiguities. When you've only got your fingertips to communicate with, how can an iPad app know when you're trying to create something and when you're to manipulate it?
As we talk, Petschnigg doesn't explain his solution to this conundrum so much as perform it. He creates with pen and manipulates with touch, with Think Kit's algorithms tidying up after him. It all seems perfectly natural. And it makes it hard not to get excited about the tablet's promise all over again.
