random8

So I’ve had my iPad for a couple of days now. I have some thoughts about it…

• 
  The iBooks reader: is absolutely phenomenal, and the dictionary is just awesome. Would be great if it was multi or poly lingual, though. Speaking of the context-sensitive dictionary, it’d be even better if this feature was on the mac as a service. The iBooks delivery mechanism makes amazon’s buying experience look like a total piece of crap. By the way, why can’t we read eBooks directly in iTunes? I also want to be able to “run” apps directly in iTunes too. Hurry up apple… don’t let you developers run circles around you in terms of updating.
  


• 
  “Services” menu and syncing: man, I totally hate the huge, disparate random set of ways that we currently have for synchronisation across these devices. The whole thing feels like a total mess. I wish they’d all comply to the Mobile Me api and that Apple would make the whole Mobile Me thing free for the first two years of having a device and build the price into the price of hte device, because the device really is SO MUCH BETTER with mobile me. Most people would update their devices after two years anyway and possibly buy both an iPhone AND an iPad (and the same with the mac). By this reasoning I’d have never had to have paid directly for mobileme… and make it so that developers just use the mobile me sync method.
  


• 
  Netnewswire:
  Netnewswire is just excellent when combined with instapaper for reading distraction-less news feeds, and webpages that they link to. Awesome. If it had a dictionary like the iBooks app, that’d be even better, but instapaper has one so I don’t really mind that much as most of the things I need to look up are in longer articles anyway. My workflow basically goes that I use netnewswire (on iPhone / mac / iPad) to mark interesting articles and scan non-interesting ones… then I use Instapaper (clutter-free reading) to actually read the articles, and highlight interesting things and the like.
  
  One thing I find very frustrating is if I “jump” to the next article and then want to go back to where I just came from because I didn’t want to go to the next one, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do this. Also if I’m in the middle of my RSS reading and a new one comes in to a feed list at the top, then this “next” won’t “roll around off the bottom and start again at the top”. It’s a bit counter-intuitive. Also adding new RSS feed… what the? I must be missing something but there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do that… in fact there doens’t seem to be any way at all! I have to add them on the mac first and then re-sync my iPad. Meh!
  


• 
  General use: Man reading stuff on the iPad is awesome. What a great experience. It’s about the perfect size for reading stuff wherever you are, and it’s the perfect weight as well - far less than most books, and just feels right in your hand. Lovely. I had the interesting experience before purchasing of trying to describe what it’s going to be like and why I’d want one before I’d use it. As someone who spends their whole lives pretty much abstracting things and re-applying truths I find in one are to another are or recontextualising information, I found this experience quite strange. Mostly because I’d never actually used one, and yet I was trying to explain the very same experience of trying to explain to someone what using an iPhone is like to someone who’s never used one. It’s the experience that matters, not so much the feature set. It’s like there’s this unique item and you can’t exactly explain exactly what it is that makes the thing wonderful to use. It’s something to do with the fact that it’s been designed so well to do most of the simple easy things we do day to day. This means we feel more pleasant, because the experience is so sweet. Take the phone: using an iPhone is so great because all my contact information is connected up in that basic way between email client, contact list, web sites, and so on… the little things that are so simply to think of if you actually use a device, but so difficult to put a monetary “feature set” developmental price on. It’s the difference between it feeling like it’s actually good and fun to use and it feeling like it’s an absolute pain to use.
  For a long of people, such as my David, my father, the iPad could effectively become his day to day computer. That’s just amazing. $680 aussie dollars and it can be your main computer! wow. Get two! (Actually I was thinking it’d be quite good to have two or more the other day… and at the price point, it almost makes it possible. I may just pick up another one later on… it’s kinda like having a second screen but oodles more useful).
  I noticed a lot of the time where there are comparable tasks possible on my laptop or on the iPad, I will choose the iPad just because generally the whole experience is so much nicer using the iPad for things like searching, browsing the web, etc. Interesting, huh? :)
  


• 
  Safari: What happened to searching within a document? I can’t seem to do that. Once I’ve loaded a web page, how am I supposed to search for a particular bit of text in it? This wasn’t a problem on the iPhone implementation of the iPhone OS, but on the iPad it’s something I need because you can actually do work on this thing.
  


• 
  VNC: In order to control other machines remotely from within our network, I tried out a couple of the free VNC utilities. This is something that I’d tried on the iPhone before but never really felt useable at all. I want to try out the Jaadu VNC (Now named iTeleport which is a much better name) but at the moment I can’t justify spending $30 AUD on a VNC for something I might not use too much… I probably will soon… apparently it’s the best and from the demos and such it looks pretty nice… if it makes actually using a mac or PC from the iPad viable, it could be awesome!