Working with the iPad
Over the last several days, I’ve been working to determine if the iPad could be an effective on-the-road replacement for my notebook. Here’s what I’ve found so far.
I wanted the iPad to be a Kindle replacement that was easier to use and allowed me to use my personal research library of six thousand PDFs and eBooks without hassle. In this, the iPad has largely delivered, through the good services of GoodReader and the Kindle iPad apps. However, the lack of free-text search in GoodReader or the iPad in general is hobbling my ability to quickly find what’s in the PDF collection. Either I have to go through the data cleansing exercise of renaming all of the docs (something I’ve been avoiding for a decade, or I’ll have to come up with some other organizational scheme. I was hoping something like Papers would come in handy here, but it looks like matching is as manually intensive a process as directly editing the filenames.
I wanted to use the iPad as a presentation machine. Again, I’ve gotten this to work for me. I’ve managed to import my existing PowerPoint decks, edit them using Keynote on the iPad, and use the VGA adapter to display them on another monitor. For someone like myself who largely communicates to others in the organization through slide decks (sorry, Ed Tufte) this is great. However, the act of moving things back and forth through iTunes is painful. I can’t see this state of affairs persisting even if there is a walled garden for Apple to protect. The issues associated with being unable to roundtrip the edited content without formatting and fonts weirdness are real and annoying, but not showstoppers.
I also wanted to use Safari to get at my corporate email if need be through Outlook Web Access, and this works as well in this context as it does on my notebooks. I can’t get to sites on the intranet through the VPN, but that’s more of an issue with IT policy and browser support than with the iPad. But I’ll probably mainly be using my Blackberry for on-the-road email as usual.
As far as life streaming is concerned, both Google Reader and Tweetdeck work great, allowing me to aggregate micro content and links as I do with my notebooks. I’m using the Tumblr web interface to enter this; yesterday I was failing to be able to select the part of the form that allows me to type a post in for text, but that seems to be working now.
Anything involving actual coding depends on iSSH for iPad, which works adequately, better than using ssh on an iPhone or iPod Touch but still kind of cramped. Thirty years on and I’m still using Emacs through a terminal emulator.
I’m using JungleDisk’s iPhone app to provide access to my online Amazon S3 backups. This is useful to allow me to grab pretty much everything in the way of content that I want, but getting a document onto the iPad involves a pretty silly process of emailing it to myself.
And the fact that Google Docs is read-only is hopefully only a temporary fail.
Anyways, we soldier on. The iPad seems really close to what I want for a road warrior device, but the inability to use the cloud aggressively across apps and all content types means that something like the HP Slate or an Android device could still win for this use case if Apple keeps things as they are. The fact is that the major innovation of combining the gestural interface with this particular form factor is not something that only Apple can deliver.
