Note to Apple: Buttons aren't bad in moderation - Boston Herald

The anticipated unveiling of the third-generation iPad tomorrow has Apple fans straining at the bit for potential upgrades — super-fast 4G LTE data capabilities, high-definition retina display and the ever-charming voice recognition system Siri, the crowning achievement of the latest iPhone.

All I want is a back button.

I know, I know. I don't grasp the unique aesthetic vision of Apple and the late Steve Jobs, who so yearned for a world without buttons that he famously joked about the lack of buttons on his shirts. Even the elevator in Apple's popular Tokyo store has no buttons, forcing visitors to stop at all four floors.

But I need a back button.

When I'm using the Zillow app to look at real estate prices on my iPad, for instance, perhaps I want to toggle back to an email that I had just opened from a Realtor. It's impossible to do in one seamless step on the iPad. Instead, you have to close the Zillow app, navigate back to the home screen and then open up email.

Some apps have "virtual" back buttons. In the event that the designer of such apps has seen fit to include such a feature, you may struggle to magnify the screen enough to allow your finger to touch it just right. Hence the need for a designated, tangible key.

I can picture the ghost of Jobs right now. He'd say I'm living in the past, caring what I did a mere moment ago and wanting to relive that moment with the crutch of a back button. Apple is not about the past. It's about the future. But I do not believe that wanting a basic tenet of user interface design — universal across every platform — makes me an old fogey.

It does make me a fan of multi-tasking. I want to be able to have a calculator app open on one side of my iPad while simultaneously navigating BACKward through my list of monthly credit card statements — when I'm horrified by all my iTunes purchases.

Aside from control features such as the volume rocker, the iPad's only tactile touchstone is a home screen button, the lone round indent that punctuates its sleek frame. And now there's even talk in the iRumor mill that Apple might scrap that, too.

I hope they don't. Society isn't ready for a buttonless world. And an iPad without a home button is a slippery slope to button extinction.

Here's why: Visual simplicity does not automatically equate to actual simplicity. Let's be honest, despite what Jobs claimed, the decision to omit physical buttons from the face of Apple devices was not for function, but for form. Having to hunt around for the thing you were looking at a mere second ago doesn't add ease, it takes valuable time. Time that I could be spending shopping in the iTunes store.