When I first got my iPad, I was very impressed with the media capabilities. Watching Videos with NetFlix, Reading the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today and Epicurious is just gorgeous. It replaced my kindle the day I got it. And the games are decent, but there are still limits to what you can do with a touch screen (compared to a controller ) but the visual quality is outstanding.

Still, the one big draw back was creating content. Keyboard support is spotty, and there’s no easy way to flip between apps when you want to clip something from a website to put into a Pages document. Even creating emails felt like an iPhone app and not something you would expect to find on a useful computer with a screen this big. And don’t get me started about pen based input. It’s still a joke.

So I figured that the iPad would be mostly a reader or browser, until I saw Photosplash.

The first real program I used to create anything meaningful on my iPad was MaxJournal. During our vacation I kept a daily journal of what we did and attaching photos to it was cool. The iPad is still a nightmare to get photos on for me because I tied it to the iPhoto library on my home machine. Once you’re out on the road, getting photos onto it was not trivial. I had to upload them to a web page with another computer and copy them down. I know why Apple didn’t put an SD card reader on the iPad. There’s open, and then there’s open. Apple believes in open with their permission. But like Jobs wrote in multiple emails, if you don’t like it buy something else.

However, back to Photosplash. This is a very, very clever application that allows you to selectively color photographs. And for the first time, it’s a creative program that feels way more natural on the iPad than any other platform I could image. The gist of it, is that they made coloring with the tip of your finger feel intuitive, and natural. Like coloring with charcoal, or finger paints. The ability to zoom in – even beyond pixel depth, to smoothly trace a region or a line is just amazing.

In just a few minutes I was able to create these images, photos that would have taken me hours to do in Photoshop, mostly because I’d still have to figure out how to do it.

And for the cost of the program? It was well worth it. Now that I’ve seen it, it seems like it is possible – I can’t wait to see what else they come up with.

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I have been using PDA’s forever. Going all the way back to the original Palm. Along the way, I was always obsessed with having a real keyboard. So I have a bizarre collection of foldable portable keyboards. Perhaps even more bizarre is that I kept them all. Well one of those turns out to be a Bluetooth keyboard manufactured by Think Outside (now iGo.com).   After a little googling, I found the PDF guide for the keyboard and learned that

<Ctrl> <Left Fn> <Right Fn>

When held together will put the keyboard in discovery mode and low and behold the iPad will actually work with this keyboard!  In fact, it works quite well.  The Windows key acts like the Mac Command button, and the arrow keys and all the other function keys seem to work normally.

That has to be the first time ever that holding onto something for 10 years proved to be useful!

And the included Stand holds the iPad pretty well.

– Scott

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Well, after spending most of the Easter Holiday focused on my iPad I learned a few things.

1. It’s a little buggy. I have a few apps that crash out to the home screen (Evernote, and the ABC Viewer)
2. It’s really challenging to update a blog with. Can’t wait for the iPad versions of Facebook and Wordpress.

My favorite apps so far?

• Epicurious is georgious
• NPR – it’s awesome to be able to scan the articles, read them, or listen to the content
• GamePlan – Jason Giambi showing how to do drills in a collection of videos almost makes me not hate the money leach that is downloadable content (DLCML)
• Weather
• Google Maps with a window large enough to actually see a map instead of a single street or intersection
• USA Today – I’m now done with news papers. Officially, once and for all. If every paper doesn’t go to this…

None of the games have clicked for me yet, that’ll take some time but I know it’ll be a great gaming platform.

Kindle / iBooks

After a full day of use, my iPad ran down to about 18% of charge, so I threw it on the charger and grabbed my kindle. I started reading Bullpen Gospels by Dirk Hayhurst (funny but kind of depressing). I bought it through Amazon and started reading it on my iPad. When the batter got low I switched to my real kindle (v2) – but after an hour, I just couldn’t find a decent reading light – I went back, saw my iPad had charged to 40% and I snagged it and resumed reading on it. I may never use my kindle again.

However, there is one stupid thing about both the Kindle and iBooks readers – it’s the margins. Books have margins because (among other reasons) you need somewhere to hold the book without covering the text, or to take notes. But ebook readers a) don’t need margins for notes and b) I have the edge of the iPad or the kindle to hold. Why do I need another INCH of useless screen space? Can’t I just zoom to the width fo the content? This is the most stupid oversite in all these readers forcing me to use 1″ of screen for absolutely no reason. Get over it and let me zoom to the content width – just like mobile Safari.

The guys that nailed this are Marvel with their comic reader. I may actually start buying comics again. I think that was the first time I enjoyed reading a comic in 30 years. It’s better than the print editions.

So all in all, love the iPad. Will be interesting to see how much I really use it going forward, but it is now my default reader, of all kinds of media.

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OR Me and My iPad

Okay, I’m the kind of guy who has to have every new gadget. Well almost. The reality is that a few years ago I become an Apple Fan Boy. I wrote about my switch from PC to Apple back in 2006, but with the iPhone and iTouch I pretty much joined the ranks of the apple fanatics and left it at that.

So of course I pre-ordered my iPad and my less than 6 month old Kindle started to shoot me dirty looks. But you know, it’s another Jobsian hyped product and well… I had to have it. I’d read all the stuff I was supposed to read. Scanned all the blogs. Updated my iTunes at midnight. And here I sit on Easter Sunday playing with my new toy. (And my wife and children are standing over me wondering why I’m playing with this instead of them on Easter Sunday)

The Good

Okay, everyone has pretty much reviewed all the same things so I’m not going to cover any of that. What I’m going to hit are the stuff that wasn’t obvious to me from reading to the reviews good and bad.

1. Media Consumption:

   Wow, this is unlike any other device I’ve ever played with. You just can’t get the experience of skimming through content with an iPad like you can on a touch or a phone. The big colorful screen making skimming USA Today, or NPR like nothing I’ve ever done. And in a world of been there done that, new experiences are to be relished.

   I have a net book, a laptop, and desktop, and a kindle, and this thing blows them all away. I never really enjoyed reading on a pc, sitting in my chair like a kid at school, and cuddling up with a netbook… well just sucks, even if you try to rotate the screen. As for my kindle? It is AWESOME at reading paperback books, you know novels, but anything else? Come on. Just navigating to a chapter or verse is a nightmare. But the iPad? It really feels new and different. This I give an A+

2. The Bad:

   It’s not really the bad. It is really more like the missing. I told my brother, the iPad is the exact opposite of a netbook. A net book is everything you want except the screen. Everyone knows the screen on ALL net books blow. Why? Probably because if they fixed that no one would pay for the much more expensive laptops. But an iPad is nothing but screen. And nothing else of a computer – no usb, no hard drive, no upgradable memory. No physical keyboard. Zilch. The bluetooth keyboard support for the iPad is nice, but an expensive add-on.

   No where the iPad has a lot of room to improve is when it comes to creation. For example, that nifty photo in this article? I had to take that with my iphone and post it with my iphone then copy it over. There’s no camera or way to capture pictures with this thing. Also, a lot of apps are missing basic functionality you expect from a computer but don’t miss on a phone. For example, log into gmail with safari, then try to forward someone an email… wha? You can’t. Or how about in mobile mail, you want to make some text bold, or italics, or underlined… forget it. Really? You’re kidding me.

   Also basic features you just get used to on a PC, I want to send an email to my baseball team and include a link to the game schedule and… iPad doesn’t multi-task. Instead of quick switching to a window in the browser with the information I need, I’m opening and closing apps. Man that feels clunky.

Summary

So we have to go, but here’s the bottom line after playing with it for a day. iPad has a long long way to go to be a competent content creation platform, even for bloggers. The lack of a camera is a big big omission. What’s more, the work pattern is so different, you just don’t realize what you’re missing until you reach for it and realize the platform doesn’t support it (like no scroll bar on the side of this text entry box in the word press blog page). And while Apple keeps hyping that flash is about video – Flash realistically is also about charts, and graphs, and useful tools (speakeasy.com), or livestrong.com weight management tools (yes, I’m trying to become a lesser person.) Video is perhaps the largest and… (wait for it) flashiest part of the web, but by no means is it the only useful application of Adobe’s signature web technology. Man I hope Apple and Adobe work this out.
But nothing, beats an iPad for enjoying wonderful media created by other people.

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update: Turns out going back to edit this blog with iPad safari is practically impossible. The text edit box has no scrollbar and the software keyboard has no arrow keys. So how do you scroll to the end of the article? I can’t wait until they start updating the wordpress and other apps for the iPad.

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