(Fri, Aug 05, 2011)
I ordered an IPad from that irritating company in Cupertino, the one with the insulting advertising. The order was sent to shipping on Tuesday morning, left China Tuesday afternoon (yes, China, because Steve Jobs doesn't care about American jobs, hurrrumph and pftheeeeew), and arrived here in PA at 10am Thursday. It picked up a day at the IDL but that's still pretty damn fast. UPS is Amazing!
(Sun, Aug 21, 2011)
Here are some goods and bads wrt the IPad from a longtime non-Apple cretin:
Good:
It's great for casual, occasional Internet, which is the main reason I bought it. Oh really? Three examples please! Okay, so I'm sitting on my recliner yesterday watching the Phillies play the Nationals and I wonder what minor league player salaries are lately. Before the IPad this data would not have been worth the effort of making the cross-manse journey to the office, but now it is at my regal fingertips. (I suppose this could have been done with a phone but I've never embraced phones that do much other than make calls.) Later I am reading Martin's Feast for Crows and I wonder what a Dromon looked like and whether it was contemporaneous with the trebuchet. Even later I wonder if my favorite Kindle game Triple Town is available for IPad or if it might run through the Kindle app (no and no).
Bad:
It's still too heavy. Presumably Moore's Law will help to improve this in the coming years.
Good:
It's great for PDFs. Much better than Kindle. I've already read several PDF books on investing on IPad.
Bad:
The pseudo-multitasking needs better usability. I say pseudo because it seems like most apps just suspend when you switch out of them (some still receive notifications and I guess ITunes still plays music but I don't use IPad for music). The problem is switching between and closing active apps is a little cumbersome and a little annoying. IPad needs an Alt-Tab equivalent and a dedicated close button inside the running app. Also -- and I am reluctant to question the design masters over in Cupertino -- but there is a bit of an aesthetic disconnect when you have to switch from using the touchscreen to using the mechanical button for certain tasks.
Good:
It's great for comics. I've gotten back into reading comics because IPad is so perfect for them.
Bad:
No Flash. No Java. This actually bothers me less than I expected. Sometimes I see a dead Flash box and feel annoyed, but otherwise I hardly notice the absence. YouTube's HTML 5 support helps here: I don't spend a lot of time watching YouTube but not having access to it would be irritating. As for Java, there are simply things I can't do with IPad that I never intended to do with IPad anyway: I can't use it to VPN into my office computer or run any of the 9000 Java programs I've written; I can't use it to write code for my job (and couldn't imagine using a tablet for software development anyway).
Good:
I think a lot of the appeal of IPad is how quickly it wakes up when you want to use it. There is no power-up delay.
Bad:
File transfer and management. Apple has this weird, counterintuitive (for me) application-centric philosophy where files only exist for the programs that can run them. If there is no program that can currently run a file of a certain type then those files cannot live on IPad. Even worse I have to choose between using ITunes on my laptop or Dropbox over the Internet to transfer any files at all. The IPad needs a USB port.
Bad:
No support for many common video file formats. Most of my video files are in Xvid. Most of my video files won't play on IPad. There is an app called CineXPlayer that may do the job though, so hold on....
Bad:
The fonts in most web pages are a bit too small for the IPad screen (in portrait anyway) so you frequently have to zoom in. Safari needs the ability to increase and lock font sizes.
Bad:
The camera sucks.
Ermm... that's four bads without any goods, so here's another final good: all the rest of the stuff people love about IPad and all the reasons they sell so damn many of them. The IPad is surprisingly cool. I've had a Fujitsu touchscreen tablet for about five years so the whole concept is not novel for me, but IPad is better, much better than that tablet, even though the Fujitsu runs Windows and can do anything Windows can do, and has a convertible keyboard attached.
Good:
It's great for casual, occasional Internet, which is the main reason I bought it. Oh really? Three examples please! Okay, so I'm sitting on my recliner yesterday watching the Phillies play the Nationals and I wonder what minor league player salaries are lately. Before the IPad this data would not have been worth the effort of making the cross-manse journey to the office, but now it is at my regal fingertips. (I suppose this could have been done with a phone but I've never embraced phones that do much other than make calls.) Later I am reading Martin's Feast for Crows and I wonder what a Dromon looked like and whether it was contemporaneous with the trebuchet. Even later I wonder if my favorite Kindle game Triple Town is available for IPad or if it might run through the Kindle app (no and no).
Bad:
It's still too heavy. Presumably Moore's Law will help to improve this in the coming years.
Good:
It's great for PDFs. Much better than Kindle. I've already read several PDF books on investing on IPad.
Bad:
The pseudo-multitasking needs better usability. I say pseudo because it seems like most apps just suspend when you switch out of them (some still receive notifications and I guess ITunes still plays music but I don't use IPad for music). The problem is switching between and closing active apps is a little cumbersome and a little annoying. IPad needs an Alt-Tab equivalent and a dedicated close button inside the running app. Also -- and I am reluctant to question the design masters over in Cupertino -- but there is a bit of an aesthetic disconnect when you have to switch from using the touchscreen to using the mechanical button for certain tasks.
Good:
It's great for comics. I've gotten back into reading comics because IPad is so perfect for them.
Bad:
No Flash. No Java. This actually bothers me less than I expected. Sometimes I see a dead Flash box and feel annoyed, but otherwise I hardly notice the absence. YouTube's HTML 5 support helps here: I don't spend a lot of time watching YouTube but not having access to it would be irritating. As for Java, there are simply things I can't do with IPad that I never intended to do with IPad anyway: I can't use it to VPN into my office computer or run any of the 9000 Java programs I've written; I can't use it to write code for my job (and couldn't imagine using a tablet for software development anyway).
Good:
I think a lot of the appeal of IPad is how quickly it wakes up when you want to use it. There is no power-up delay.
Bad:
File transfer and management. Apple has this weird, counterintuitive (for me) application-centric philosophy where files only exist for the programs that can run them. If there is no program that can currently run a file of a certain type then those files cannot live on IPad. Even worse I have to choose between using ITunes on my laptop or Dropbox over the Internet to transfer any files at all. The IPad needs a USB port.
Bad:
No support for many common video file formats. Most of my video files are in Xvid. Most of my video files won't play on IPad. There is an app called CineXPlayer that may do the job though, so hold on....
Bad:
The fonts in most web pages are a bit too small for the IPad screen (in portrait anyway) so you frequently have to zoom in. Safari needs the ability to increase and lock font sizes.
Bad:
The camera sucks.
Ermm... that's four bads without any goods, so here's another final good: all the rest of the stuff people love about IPad and all the reasons they sell so damn many of them. The IPad is surprisingly cool. I've had a Fujitsu touchscreen tablet for about five years so the whole concept is not novel for me, but IPad is better, much better than that tablet, even though the Fujitsu runs Windows and can do anything Windows can do, and has a convertible keyboard attached.
(Sun, Aug 21, 2011)
This really seems like a bad idea. I have no choice but to veto it. Veto, I say, Veto! Why won't they listen?