I have been an iPad owner for nearly as long as I have been doing MMM full-time. And for good reasons, I have had several moments of both liking and loathing the iPad. Don’t get me wrong, I believe a lot about it (and really tablets in general that are well designed)…
Side note: I just grabbed the wireless keyboard to write the rest of this post, and I’m in the bed – aka one of those moments I loathe.
…I believe and am slowly living out a lot of the core design behind it. The iPad hasn’t change how I do computing though. It has made me step backwards actually. And this isn’t bad, it just points out some areas where I’m reluctant and excited to experiment around its use.
For example, right now I am typing this using my wireless keyboard inside of the applicationEvernote. Evernote is one of those applications that you can have on several computing devices, but then share information between them – and edit that information – as if it were stored on the computer you are on. This works for the most part, and outside of looking for ways to sketch/write on pictures that I take on my mobile and save into Evernote (Inkiness), I think that this could end up being a very good solution for me for concepts, writing, and a few other things that I’m ready to now use the iPad for where collaborating is more or less needed.
Thing is, the iPad is also a sign of experimentation. There’s very little about using an iPad that is certain outside of browsing and an almost certainty that an application of some kind needs to be added to the core experience. Now, this wouldn’t be a situation if web services (Google Apps, etc.) were up to speed on UI/UX for tablets, and then also that browsers on the iPad were ready to handle those differentiated UIs. But, this is an issue. And therefore, one of my earlier intentions – to live with the iPad primarily within the browser, is slowly being chipped away because of the slow speed of development/functionality that I can do in a browser.
You see, I should be able to take an image, load it in my browser, and then using a browser extension on this tablet, be able to ink the image, and then share it real-time with someone else either over a closed wireless network (ad hoc Wi-Fi if you will) or over a collaborative webspace like Google or Evernote. I shouldn’t have to deal with emailing anything on this device. And I really shouldn’t need anything more than a browser.
I’m typing this post in an application using a wireless keyboard. I can do it, but it takes away from thezen kind of experience that this kind of device offers – should offer.
Such actions I can do on my mobile, and should continue to be happy to do on my mobile (phone); thing is, I ran to this larger screen [considered this larger screen w/o keyboard better for me needs] because it was easier to read and share, and now I’m finding that in order to read and share effectively, I have to unlearn things that were much simpler on a device that was even less purposed for content consumption than this one. It seems backwards to me – the iPad’s was truly designed well for consumption tasks, but I wonder if the software will ever get to the point that it will also be able to be a computer as well.
blog.arjw 