

3 Weeks of iPad: Some observations - kenshi
http://logiccolony.com/2010/04/25/Three-Weeks-of-iPad.html

======
jamesjyu
"In fact, I am trying to migrate as much of my communications applications
(twitter, mail, social web) to the iPad and leave my computer for actual,
productive work."

+1 on that. At home, I basically use my iPad to do all my consumption and
"light" communication. For development and highly intensive typing, I'll
switch over to my laptop.

When I'm relaxing on a weekend, I find that the iPad is about 80% of my
computer time. This has been a huge shift.

On the other hand, I haven't been able to effectively use the iPad at
meetings. I had thought maybe I could take notes on it, but it just doesn't
flow as well as when I'm typing on real keyboard. However, it does rock for
demos.

~~~
papa
Totally agree. The iPad is my "couch-surfing" computer of choice these days.
You really can curl up with this sucker or lie on your back comfortably while
reading.

I've been using it for most of my reading (newspapers, books, magazines). A
lot of my surfing and a lot more video consumption than I had expected.

The sketching apps are great. I bought a little stylus to help out where
fingers fall short. I'm doing a lot more drawing than ever b/c of the facility
and convenience of drawing on the pad.

The comic book readers are great (I use comic reader mobi). I hadn't read a
comic or graphic novel in years, but they just looks so gorgeous on the ipad
that I've been voraciously catching up on various comics that I would have
otherwise ignored.

I find myself using the iphone much less when at home and the laptop has been
relegated to "work"/upright/serious stuff.

iPad, for me, is something of a leisure computer. If that makes any sense...

~~~
swernli
Makes perfect sense to me, as that is my use as well. I find myself very
rarely turning to my laptop at home. iPad for web browsing, video watching
when I'm not in front of the netflix enabled xbox 360, and pretty much all
communication, with my iPhone picking up the slack in the text messaging
department.

For me, it's definitely not a complete laptop replacement, but at home I
wasn't really fully utilizing my laptop anyway, so this ends up being more
than perfect.

------
thought_alarm
I haven't had an iPad for very long, but I love, love, love it for web
browsing. It's like you're flying over your web pages.

However, I don't like how iPad Safari handles "tabs". I would much prefer
traditional tabs where I could select or close a tab in only a single tap,
instead of the three taps that are required now.

Regardless, it looks like I can finally retire my Newton.

~~~
zzzmarcus
Really? I try to love mine for browsing (on it now) but the silly thumbnail
tab screen that feels like a clumsy iPhone leftover kills me. I almost feel
like I'm going back to IE pre-tabs.

Copy/paste is also so much slower than a laptop... I don't know how to improve
it, but it is relatively tedious.

I don't care about the lack of Flash, but broken iframes, no drag/drop, no way
of bringing up the keyboard for things like javascript/canvas apps, no proper
fixed positioning for CSS, no resizable or even scrollable textareas and the
ocassional full page refresh when switching apps and/or "tabs" that kills form
input all combine to make it a mediocre experience IMO. Granted, all this is
also true on the iPhone, but it's a phone, not a 10" tablet.

I really like my iPad and I'm by no means going to return it, but browsing
doesn't seem like the high point.

~~~
derefr
> Copy/paste is also so much slower than a laptop... I don't know how to
> improve it, but it is relatively tedious.

On the iPhone, screen space is precious; there's pretty much no other way to
do copy/paste than the way they're doing it. However, there's a lot of room on
the iPad screen—it would be pretty simple to have a "fine selection input
mode" where part of the screen gets overlayed with a "touchpad" and an actual
selection (vertical bar or crosshair, depending on the activity) cursor moves
around on the rest, controlled by it. I imagine they're only doing it the
iPhone way for consistency.

------
kenjackson
How do you guys do it? Admittedly, I returned my iPad after a week or so. But
I just found it to be a lot less productive, even for consumption, than my
laptop.

For example, I have about 20 total tabs open right now, on two instances of
the browser. Why two? I can snap the two side x side whenever I want to
compare two pages, or have them both up (this is useful, when I'm watching
video, and browsing at the same time).

Do most people just browse one page at a time?

~~~
grinich
_I have about 20 total tabs open right now._

What are you doing? How focused are you on reading any one of those tabs?

~~~
elblanco
I'm surprised he only has 20. I use tabs as a reading queue...usually from
news aggregators like HN. If I waited till I had time to read everything that
looked interesting, I'd miss most of the stuff that looked interesting. If I
just queue it up, it can sit quietly in the background and wait for me to take
a break from work.

I use different browsers to logically separate my groups of viewing habits.
One is open for casual HN style surfing, one for a hobby I'm work on, one for
work, one for school, one to isolate media apps like Pandora or Hulu, etc.
Each has a queue of pages I was working on/reading/in the middle of something
and had to run out to a meeting or whatever and didn't get back to it
immediately. Heck I've had half-written replies in emails up for days in a
separate browser with all of the related research tabs I was using while
constructing the email up as well.

I tried to keeping myself to just a handful of tabs in a single window but I
found I was missing so much good stuff I just gave it up.

I find this only works if you have a high abstract -> concrete learning style
(sometimes called "synthesizers"). Not everybody works that way and that's
fine - but other workflows drive me batty. Once I've assembled everything in a
browser instance, I can even let it go for a week or two, forgetting
completely about it before returning devoting my attention to the "concept" of
that instance -- the semantics of what it's for are all there because
everything is grouped in an instance. I can dash off a several thousand word
paper in just a few hours of focused concentration because all of the research
is done and sitting there for me -- left by my past self.

But if, like most people, my attention wanders after a few hours, I can switch
instances and immediately context shift to a completely different semantic set
and let my mind chew on the other problem unconsciously.

Even IRL, when in college, I'd have different tables setup the same way for
different classes or projects. All the books and research notes in a stack
next to the half-written paper.

~~~
derefr
Wouldn't it be relatively easy to create an alternative iPad browser using the
Webkit component, but with the chrome more aimed at this style of surfing? It
would only take a few alterations from the default: Pages wouldn't be loaded
until you actually switch to them, and so all non-active tabs are really just
quick, forced-order bookmarks; clicking on links would always push them onto
the queue (with the option to push-front if something is important); and the
primary interaction mechanism would be an "I'm done with this one, give me
another" button, which deletes the current bookmark and opens the next one.

It could be called WikiWalker:
<http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WikiWalk> (Yes, I have, in fact,
linked to the most degenerate case of the need for such a browser.)

Actually, upon further reflection—why doesn't this browser exist _for PCs_
yet? This is an itch that has needed scratching for a long while now; I'm
surprised in its apparent non-existence (Tree Tabs doesn't count.)

~~~
elblanco
Yes please! A browser built around this workflow would be fantastic. You don't
have any idea how many times I've accidentally closed one of my "workspace"
browsers and left another browser open and lost several hours worth of
research because there's no good way to retrieve all of the tabs that were
there in a simple way. Keeping the tabs as bookmarks would likewise be even
better since I've brought even quad core systems with 8 GB of RAM to their
knees on occasion. The only way I can get along now is by using extensions
like flashblocker which helps somewhat with the performance, but still doesn't
help much with the workflow.

The worst thing is that there seems to be this weird proclivity for GUI
designers to put long lists of things horizontally instead of vertically, the
Windows Task Bar, Tabs in browsers, diagrams in Visio, etc. Wouldn't these
things just work about a billion times better as a simple list along the left
or right side of the window? Especially since most screens these days are so
wide, web pages never actually fill them up horizontally. (Yes, I'd tried
various extensions, but none of them really seem to do what I want).

~~~
gte910h
You happen to have interested an iPad developer who thinks this is an
excellent idea. Please send more details on this idea to the address in my
profile, and I'll see what can be done to make it a reality in a quite moment
one day :OD

~~~
elblanco
I'l send you something a bit later today when I get some time.

------
jazzychad
_The screen in gorgeous. It’s the first thing that strikes people when they
see the device._

I am not so impressed with the screen. The dpi is ~30 dpi less than an iPhone,
but it is noticeable... especially since you have to hold it at less than
arm's length away. If the new iPhone dpi is really 2x what it currently is,
the iPad's lower resolution will become very noticeable.

Edit: changed 4x to 2x. I wanted to convey the total pixel count going up 4x,
but I guess since dpi is a linear measurement it should only be stated as a 2x
increase. Either way, it will smoke the iPad's pixel density.

~~~
jarek
The DPI on the 960x640 will be doubled compared to the 480x320; only the pixel
count quadruples.

------
Anon84

         iPhone apps suck on the iPad. Not because the iPhone 
         simulation is bad, or the apps are bad, but because the 
         moment you run an iPhone app on an iPad screen you 
         realise exactly why the iPad is not just a “big iPhone”. 
         App design is very different for each of these devices * .

------
glhaynes
iPhone apps on iPad both suck and are more awesome than I expected.

Anything text based is pretty poor. Nice that it's an option, but not
something you want to use regularly unless you have to. Especially because
they use the iPhone soft keyboard rather than the iPad one.

Games, on the other hand, work just fine. I usually forget I'm playing a
scaled version once I start. Kind of like TV resolution: 20 minutes into my
movie, I've totally forgotten whether I'm watching 720p or 1080p. (Others
certainly have different experiences, though!) I've found that several iPhone
games (mostly graphical adventures) that I didn't have much patience for on a
tiny screen are engaging and fun on an iPad. So for me, the biggest problem
with some iPhone games on iPad isn't the resolution, it's the controls: most
games with a "traditional" control system (joystick on the left, buttons on
the right), would be _much_ better if you could move the controls farther into
the corners. Between the iPad screen bezel and the black border that gets
added to iPhone apps (they're a slightly different aspect ratio than the iPad
screen, so they don't entirely fill the screen), it's hard to reach my thumbs
to the controls.

------
elblanco
How does Google Wave work on it?

------
cesare
"Syncing and transferring documents is a pain. At the moment the best bet is
to email documents around. Apple should buy Dropbox, or come up with a
(better) solution for cloud storage. This is probably the clumsiest part of
the iPad user experience."

Or maybe just have a shared directory or, even better, a microsd card, where
you can get/put stuff via usb like you can do on an android device.

------
randallsquared
_Digital comics on this are awesome. I think the medium is going to change for
devices like this - the idea of a page feels like an artificial constraint
when reading digital comics on a larger screen device._

I guess he meant "smaller screen device"? Virtually every computer monitor is
larger than the iPad, after all.

~~~
kenshi
Should have been cleared in the post - I meant larger screen (and higher
resolution) devices _including_ monitors. Reading digital comics on an iPhone
or small screen is something I just dont like doing.

------
iuguy
I wonder if he typed that post on an iPad.

~~~
kenshi
I typed up most of the individual observations in the Notes app over the past
3 weeks, hence the list-based nature of the blog post. Then I copied and
pasted the notes from Mail (on my main computer) into Textmate for some
editing/refinement. The whole thing was then published using Jekyll.

