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by Martin Fowler.
Original Post: Bliki: iPad
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Feed Description: A cross between a blog and wiki of my partly-formed ideas on software development
I've not seen myself as an iFanboy. I didn't get an iPhone for
ages after it came out, and only got one because it was the only way
to upgrade my data plan to 3G. I use a mac, but I also have an
Ubuntu desktop. But I have got an iPad, and I think it's a
significant product.
I knew I wanted one right from the announcement. A while ago I
used my desktop for work and kept my laptop floating about the
house. I liked that arrangement as it allowed me to get away from my
desk for reading the web and doing email. But now that I use
Keynote, Aperture, and Omnigraffle I need to use my Mac with a big
screen. So my laptop is stuck on my desktop while I'm at home. To
compensate I bought a cheap laptop. But using a laptop like this was always
kludgy. The clam shell is awkward when I'm reading rather than
typing. The low battery life means I try to keep plugged in as
much as I can. So a few weeks ago I splashed out.
The Good
The form factor and low weight makes it comfortable to use
on a sofa.
There's enough battery life that I can forget about it as
long as I charge it overnight.
The screen is gorgeous: bright, clear and sharp.
The touch UI is familiar (due to the iPhone) and works
really well on a tablet device.
Reading books using the Kindle app works really well. I
don't miss having a paper book and I appreciate the lighter
weight.
Web surfing is mostly very good. I find myself using the
news apps from BBC, New York Times and NPR a lot.
It's good for watching a movie. (The Netflix app could be
really big here, although I haven't used it yet.) I appreciated
the mix of reading and movie watching while flying back and
forth to San Francisco in a middle seat; not to mention the fact
that I used less than half my battery in the process.
The Bad
I worry about the lock-in when buying an electronic book. So
far I'm thinking Amazon is less likely to lock me into a
specific platform than iBooks. But I do worry that I'll have
lots of books that I can't read any more some day.
Web-app sites, such as Google's, often don't work too
well. For regular use they make good use of the difference
between hover and click - and this doesn't work with the
iPad. This pushed me to get an app for reading my news feeds,
even though I like Google Reader.
Like with my Android phone and the iPhone, it's awkward to
sync some text or html files from my other computers to my
iPad. This is annoying as I like sharing information this
way. Dropbox may be the answer, we'll see.
Hotels with restrictive wifi are a real pain. I want to work
on my laptop with wifi and use that nice Netflix app on my
iPad. Paying for wifi is bad enough, being unable to use it on
multiple devices is awful.
While it's ok to look at my inbox, the mail app doesn't work
well for threaded discussions on mailing lists.
I would really like to be able to change the font size in
the web browser.
The Puzzling
Apple gets a lot of heat for being a curated software
system, rather than the traditional open one. Given how much of
my life I've lost to sorting out software incompatibilities I'm
not sure whether to like curation of not. In any case the
competition with Android and the like will prove
interesting.
The Bottom Line
After a few hours with the iPad, I realized that I was feeling
a sensation I'd only remembered once before: back in 1995 when
someone showed me the World Wide Web. There's no dramatic new
technology, we've seen tablets before just as we'd seen hypertext
before. But the overall package was game-changer. I don't know if
the iPad will be The Device, but I do think that this kind of
device will make huge difference to how we read and watch things
in the future. I certainly need to work at making sure what I
produce in the future is built with these kinds of devices in
mind.
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