hello.

When I started “in the internet”, people and businesses alike were still trying to find their ways in the new medium. This led to a time, when on a lot of websites you could read “Welcome to the website of …”. And that’s not private homepages, I am talking about businesses. You could see this everywhere. It was a way of borrowing from TV presenters, In-store sales people, and personal interaction. No content authority would tell you how to look professional, so this was the first de-facto-standard of online content. It was also connecting with the visitors on a personal level, based on existing conventions of in-person interaction. To be fair, there was not so much different asynchronous interaction - letters maybe or fax, but the majority was somehow personal.

You can still see echoes of this now, some e-commerce websites or other websites with a login would greet you “Welcome back, $name”. Mostly though, the most personal connection that you would get is “We are X. We do Y.” which is efficient and somehow still eludes to conventions of social interaction, but it is not anymore “welcome”. If anyone would put this on their (professional) website, they would at best be ridiculed as “old-fashioned”, unprofessional or alike. We have come to perceive this as a clumsy mode, and at the same time built up our arsenal of providing personalized experiences and honed our content crafting skills – all to say “Welcome” in a subconscious manner.

There is one notable difference: when Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984, it greeted the audience with “hello”. It was to make this same personal connection, to get from an inanimate business machine to a very comfortable creation tool, a companion almost. Apple kept this “friendly” metaphor all over the place – most prominently the Finder icon, but there was “something human” everywhere. With OS X, even the onboarding experience – when you’ve put your newly bought Mac into operation – was a choreographed journey, from the famous startup chime over an intro video up to very human dialogues.

A lot of this has gone in the meantime, but when you switch on a brand new Apple device, it still greets you in a lot of languages, making the connection just a little more personal.

Picking up this tradition, I say hello. Welcome to dtdi. I hope it will be as exciting, entertaining and educating for you as I want it to be for myself.

Enjoy the ride.