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Either Steve Jobs has so finely tuned his infamous reality distortion field (RDF) that it’s now capable of delayed affect or one of the most important pieces of Apple’s iPad introduction completely evaded me. Either way, I’ve come to partially rethink my position on the iPad.

Late yesterday I learned that Seattle-based Omni Group—the company that makes three pieces of software I live in every day: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan—has intentions to make iPad versions of its software. Most importantly, company chief executive Ken Case wrote that Omni has already started work on an iPad adaptation of OmniGraffle and is putting its work on OmniGraffle 6 for the Mac on hold. I’m not real happy about the Mac version being put on hold, but I learned a long time ago to try to ride the horse in the direction it’s going.

The importance that the bulk of Omni’s team came out of the University of Washington—an institution with one of the historically best human interface labs on the planet—can’t be understated.

OmniGraffle is one of a handful of software tools that just screams for a new approach to human interface design. If you don’t use tools like OmniGraffle or Visio, it’s hard to understand this. But what anyone can understand is that the human interface for working with computers hasn’t really been improved since 1984. Yes, the current version of Macintosh OS X is a couple orders of magnitude better than the original Mac OS. Same with Windows and Unix/Linux. But the human interface of these operating system is roughly the same now as it was 26 years ago. The desktop metaphor and files and folders were useful back then, but now they’re too complicated. I spend 10-12 hours each day on a MacBook Pro, and there are still pieces of the operating system and its interface that I just don’t understand. I don’t use Expose and Spaces, for example at all. Well, I use Expose—or what I assume is Expose—by mistake from time to time, with a gesture that I can’t reproduce on command.

Gesture-based computing has been the future of the human-computer interface for almost as long as I’ve been involved with computers. Apple’s iPad is the first real step in that direction, and that’s the bit I missed in my original assessment of a device I haven’t even seen except on a computer screen. Make no mistake, it’s a baby step, but it’s a baby step on the level of magnitude of the original 1984 Mac.

OmniGraffle, with a gesture-based, direct-manipulation interface, promises to radically change how we use those tools—if Omni gets it right. In addition to direct manipulation of objects on the screen, OmnigGraffle has to have a rudimentary drawing recognition engine. If I draw what resembles a square on the screen—four relatively straight lines connected by roughly 90-degree angles, OmniGraffle has to be able to know to render a perfect square. Same for other basic two-dimensional shapes. And that seemingly small gesture—Omni Group’s recognition that the iPad is a more important platform for OmniGraffle than the Mac—is certainly enough to make me rethink the iPad from the ground up.

I’m still not absolutely sold—a lot of the gesture-based interface breakthroughs can be brought to the current crop of MacBook Pro laptops, for instance (albeit with indirect-manipulation; actually, there’s nothing to prevent Apple from releasing the Touch operating system as an option for its Mac line). And as a publisher, Apple’s walled garden still scares the living shit out of me. Amazon.com apparently blinked, too, taking MacMillan out in the process. So, on the one hand, baby steps to a brand new, infinitely more appropriate user experience; on the other, a closed ecosystem. At least it won’t be boring.