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Posts Tagged ‘iPad’

iPad apps: best I’ve found so far

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

@savoieadam was wondering what to get for his iPad, which prompted me to post this (I’d been meaning to anyway, since people keep asking…) To keep this short, I’ll limit it to iPad-specific apps, and leave out the iPhone apps I’m using. As on iTunes, “+” indicates universal iPad/iPhone/iPod apps.

Productivity Apps

News Apps

  • bbc_news.pngBBC News + — best news app I’ve found yet.
  • NPR for iPad — very nice
  • Editors’ Choice (NY Times) — weird leading issue (extra space before last line of every paragraph) makes it irritating to use. Call me fussy; polish matters.
  • WeatherBug Elite — nice; not sure I need the map; still looking for the perfect weather app that does metric.

Utilities

Social Media

Reference Apps

Downloaded, installed, deleted

  • GoodReader — bizarre interface
  • National Geographic World Atlas HD — what is this for??
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day
  • Globe & Mail’s Globe2Go — indecipherable
  • NYTimes Crosswords
  • Tweeps
  • Reuters News Pro
  • Pulse News Reader

Anxiously Awaiting…

  • Reeder — currently in Apple approval hell
  • MarsEdit for iPad (unannounced, but fingers crossed)
  • Analytics Pro
  • Twitter (née Tweetie; for Mac and iPad) — currently in development hell
  • Billings
  • CBC Radio
  • CBC News app (mobile sites only get you so far…)
  • FlickIt Pro
  • Skype
  • Pastebot/Convertbot/Tweetbot
  • TED

…and why did Apple leave out…

  • a clock?
  • a calculator?
  • a notes app? (not that I like theirs…)
  • Messages? (could’ve included it on the 3G model…)
  • Compass?
  • Weather?
  • Stocks? (again, not that I’d use it, but…)

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Posted in Mobile computing | 5 Comments »

Handedness and the iPad

Monday, June 7th, 2010

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed about the iPad is how I’m left-handed on it.

Someone commented the other day that they found using a computer difficult because they were left-handed. That seemed odd to me, since I’m predominantly left handed and I’ve never found it to be a problem on a computer. It may have come down to the fact that they shared a computer with a user who had a right-handed input device like a curved mouse.

On the desktop, despite being left-handed with a pen (for writing or drawing), I’ve always been a right-handed mouser; can’t use a mouse with my left hand to save my life. But that also means I’ve always had room to the left of my keyboards for a Wacom tablet of some sort — the ideal switch-up if my right hand or arm gets tired.

After a couple of years using an iPod touch and a couple of iPhones, I’d never really noticed whether I use my left or right hand on them. I’d guess I use each about equally, especially since I’m a reasonably-proficient two-thumbed typist (in portrait mode, please) on those devices. I could be wrong, but that’d be my guess.

On the iPad, I seem to prefer using my left hand for a lot of input, even when it’s on the right side of the screen. It doesn’t feel awkward to do that, it feels natural. I think that’s interesting.

A device with a virtual keyboard feels natural. That somehow seems counter-intuitive to someone like me who’s used so-called traditional computers for more than 20 years. Like Steve Jobs said: on the iPad, it’s like touching a web page directly. The device gets out of the way. I naturally gravitate towards using my left hand, without even thinking about it.

I even find the keyboard pretty easy to get along with, especially as I become less conscious of it; it’s still not quite as fast as a physical keyboard, but that’s mainly a case of adjusting to the slightly different arrangement from the iPhone. I have no doubt this will improve with a bit more use (I’m writing this on my iPad).

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Posted in Mobile computing, Usability | 1 Comment »

Adobe Flash, Apple’s iPhone OS, Asterisks and Abraham Lincoln

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Every time I see some website drag out that old saw about how Flash has been installed by all sentient beings in the universe — and it’s been dragged out a lot lately, given the public spat between Apple and Adobe over Flash on the iPad — I’m reminded of a quote by Abraham Lincoln:

“People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.” —Abraham Lincoln

A recent article featuring similar logic (but without the sense of irony) can be found on DevGrow.com: Why Flash is here to stay.

Let’s be clear — I’m not saying Flash isn’t here to stay — Flash has a lot going for it.

DevGrow.com states: “Let’s face it, Flash is everywhere these days” and “…almost everyone has Flash player installed (99% of internet users, for those too lazy to check the link).”

Please: let’s stop pretending that Flash is ubiquitous, shall we? It’s misleading, as they say in parliament.

Those of us who weren’t too lazy to follow the link will note that Adobe is a bit more careful with their claims, qualifying this impressive-sounding statistic with the term Internet-enabled desktops.

It’s not a small difference.
(more…)

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Posted in Content, Mobile computing, Web sites | 1 Comment »

iWork syncing on the iPad

Friday, April 9th, 2010

It’s 2010.

There are no flying cars, but we’re living in the future.

You can tell because people keep pointing to the iPad as proof.

But the future isn’t perfect.

There have been rumblings about the clumsiness of document synchronization between the Mac and iPad with iWork documents from Keynote, Pages and Numbers.

iWork (Keynote, Numbers and Pages) and an iPad in the cloudJohn Gruber has suggested, in his thorough iPad review, that you should be able to “specify iWork.com as the canonical shared storage location for an iWork document“, so that there’s no more user-management required and no more duplication of your documents every time they migrate between devices.

Agreed.

In fact it’s a bit surprising that it doesn’t work this way today, given how magical the iPad is according to many.

Why isn’t it this easy? I think the trouble is that iWorks documents can get huge.

Most of my presentations, by the time they’re 15 or 20 slides, have 200 MB of embedded graphics and video. Today’s high-res photos and HD videos — which Apple has encouraged us to store in iLife or Aperture, and easily adding them to iWork documents is a key selling point — leads to this. My Numbers files rarely contain graphics, but that won’t be true for others; same for Pages.

The end result is that on a typical high-speed connection, it could take an hour or more for a graphics-heavy document to upload. That will take a fair bit of the “magic” out of the iPad experience.

Which is why I think the USB-tethered syncing of iWork files to the iPad is tolerable. For now. Even with a DSL or cable connection, which is typically much faster into the home or office than out to the cloud, it would take a long time to move all that data around. It isn’t going to be like adding a new contact on your iPhone and seeing it on your Desktop a few minutes later: it could take an hour or more to upload even a moderately-large file at 30 or 50 kilobits per second.

Time to check that your ISP is delivering the bandwidth you’re paying for.

Yes, Apple can get smarter about storage (keep the file local and the linked/embedded media in the cloud; or only keep low-res proxies of the media on the iPad, especially where it can’t print).

These problems will diminish as network speeds improve, but they haven’t in 10 years, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.

For now Apple needs to work on the iTunes-based file transfer and iPad-based file management — no mean trick on a device designed to shield users from its file system — and hope ISPs (or Google!) solve the network problem soon.

Or let us all move our iPhoto/Aperture/iMovie/iTunes libraries onto MobileMe or Dropbox where our digital assets will always be available all the time.

I’d pay for that.

Now… where did I leave the keys to the hovercar?

Update (9:50 pm) — John Gruber has just posted a piece quoting Tim O’Reilly on iPhone/iPad media syncing. Gruber’s take: turn MobileMe into a free cloud-sync service.

I’d still pay for it. :-)

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Posted in Mobile computing | 2 Comments »

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