FREN

#FF00AA


8 jul. 2010

24 hours with an iPad

Oh, it’s smaller than I expected. Oh, it’s heavier. Oh, it’s shinier and I really don’t like to see my face in it. Oh, and the pixels are so big and pixely, and there are no goddamn folders on the home screen (that’s much worse than the lack of multitasking).

And, well, I love it.

Like the iPhone 4 (and much more so), the iPad looks better in person. The overall proportions, the bezel’s size, everything, is much more appropriate to its real size than to blown-up photos on apple.com. It just looks really nice, and works fine (excepted for the aforementioned lack of iOS 4), and damn if this isn’t the best netbook ever imagined, let alone manufactured.

The first few minutes were really a bit hard for me, mostly because of iPhone 4 — this post’s first paragraph accurately describes my reaction step by step. But once I installed and sifted through all the many, many apps I had on my account, I was convinced: I love this thing in just about exactly the way I expected to.

The lack of iOS 4 is a torture, and it’s going to be really painful next year when they introduce the new model with a Retina screen and more RAM (which is why I didn’t get the 3G model this year — actually, I realized today that, contrary to what I had assumed so far, they could very well introduce a new model this fall, in tandem with the availability of iOS 4). But this thing is great, and fully satisfying, as it is already.

I’ll spare you the rest of the superlatives, because everything’s already been written about this thing in the past two months. Just know that everything’s true, and it is worth buying (assuming that the resale value next year will be good — and unless, of course, you never ever spend any time idling in your couch or bed, as those are definitely the settings the iPad is made for).

 

Just a double nitpick to justify my salary: First, the screen spinning every single time you put the iPad down on a table (because the movement itself is interpreted by the accelerometer as an orientation change) is really annoying, and I wonder if having a gyroscope like in the iPhone 4 would help.

Second, and related, it’s really annoying, when you want to quit an app, to find out that you’ve ended up with the Home button on top. When I read about the development prerequisites (it is pretty much forbidden to have an app that supports portrait but not upside-down portrait), I thought it was a weird idea; I was right.

(Although it is convenient that you can read a magazine with the iPad resting on your lap while charging, with the power cord pointing out the top rather than digging into your thighs. But that would have been solved by putting the dock port somewhere else or engineering it differently.)

 

After the break: all the apps you should or shouldn’t download.

 

Applications

I haven’t spent a lot of time with Apple’s system apps, because I don’t have as much of a use for them as I do on the iPhone, but they’ve been amply documented everywhere already. Suffice to say that the iPad has finally convinced me that I need to move my main mail account to IMAP so I can productively use e-mail on several devices, which the iPhone never managed to do. And a special mention to the damn App Store app that loses your page number in the listings every time you download an app (like it did on iPhone until multitasking arrived).

And another general observation: as has been reported elsewhere, there is no way anyone will ever want to use an iPhone app, whether in a small window or with horrible pixel doubling. I’ve kept the Facebook and Messenger apps installed under the assumption that they’ll soon be updated to universal apps, but everything else was quickly deleted.

Now, for a selection of good apps. (Warning: iTunes links ahead.)

Twitter: When I saw screenshots, I thought that Twittelator looked to be the most pleasant client for iPad, and usage confirms it. It’s not perfect, but nicer than every other option (except those I didn’t try because they weren’t free). Until the official client is updated, I assume.

Blogs: There just isn’t an app I’m happy with. (I haven’t tried NetNewsWire, too expensive.) So far I’m sticking with Reeder, which mostly does what I want it to — I’d almost be happy with it if the unread counts on feed categories weren’t ridiculously small and dim, and if the tap zone to go to the next article was much bigger (their swiping implementation requires way too much effort to be usable; hopefully they’ll soon think of having e-reader–like hot spots on the bottoms or sides of articles).

Note taking: I’m still using Simplenote for cloud-based notes, and still wishing there was a better option. Moodboard (Moodboard Lite) is very close to the Courier-inspired virtual scrapbook I had thought of making, and well worth a buy even though I’m not quite sure what I might ever use it for. Popplet (Popplet Lite) is another interesting take at organizing your thoughts, and may be worth a buy when they solve the crashing bugs. I’m not convinced at all by Penultimate, even though it has a lovely algorithm to make it look like you’re using a pressure-sensitive stylus (so does iDraft, along with a much worse interface). And I don’t like the Evernote client at all.

Drawing: I’ve gotten both Brushes and SketchBook Pro (damn you, Adobe, for not letting users download Ideas outside of the U.S.), but haven’t used either enough to have an opinion. Both have quirks that I don’t really like, but I can’t say how they bear upon actual creativity. But do check out TypeDrawing, which is of more limited use but really cool.

File management: Dropbox works, but the inability to edit even plain-text files is getting ridiculous. GoodReader (which is also read-only, obviously) lets you put files onto your iPad via wifi or USB (through a free little desktop app), which is excellent. I’m using it to put small videos on my iPad for instant watching (so instant that I don’t want to have to go through iTunes), and that works perfectly — unlike Air Video, which is great in concept but unusable on either of my Macs.

Miscellaneous: Wikipanion is a perfectly fine alternative to Articles (for which I’m not going to pay again, it’s just a damn web browser after all) once you switch to “Serif” in the options. I thought I read that Google Earth was impressive on iPad, but I find it terribly slow to load textures.

Games: I haven’t found yet a solitaire game I’m quite happy with. Smiles HD is a weird, clever take on Bejeweled with quirky kawaii-ish graphics and game show sounds, but you should give it a try long enough to see how it works (hint: you can keep swapping pieces during combos). I may be getting addicted to We Rule, which I understand to be similar to Farmville and, yes, I’m ashamed. Harbor Master doesn’t feel as exciting as Flight Control (maybe because we just know that boats can stop), and I got tired of the latter a while ago anyway (I didn’t try the iPad version). Uzu is pointless but awesome, and you have to buy it if only to show it to your friends when you’re bragging about your iPad. And would you believe that’s all I have to list? Thing is, you can design good utilities without hands-on experience with a device (I’m insanely proud of how good Unicode feels), but not good games. So we’ll have to be a little more patient.

 

Content Apps

This is getting its own section because, obviously, everyone has pegged the iPad as a content-consumption rather than -creation device. And, well, it’s mostly true — you can be productive on an iPad (I haven’t bought the iWork apps because I don’t really have a use for them), just like you can with a netbook, but the most prominent use case will clearly be consuming media, with some browsing and a bit of communicating on the side.

Just like in other categories (and that’s definitely because the platform is so young, remember), there isn’t a book reader that I’m really happy with. Part of it is because I couldn’t test them all, as there is no free book included with the Kindle app, and the free books in iBooks are public domain crap shot straight off the ePub importer, riddled with formatting snafus and character-encoding glitches (because only American consumers are entitled to a free Winnie the Pooh book, evidently) that would be absolutely shameful even if the store didn’t sport the Apple brand. In short, I’ve spent enough money on the App Store since I turned that thing on yesterday, I’m not adding book purchases to the equation.

But the bottomline is, I have no doubt that the iPad is, at least in theory, viable as an e-book reader. And I have no doubt, either, that I’m going to keep buying paperbacks for the foreseeable future. I’m old-fashioned this way.

Magazines, though, are another matter. I haven’t bought one in ages, and I’m so sold on the idea of the iPad saving that form of media that I’m seriously considering ideas for developing my own virtual magazine platform. So I downloaded and bought a lot of them.

I won’t be able to avoid repeating myself: none of the publishing solutions chosen is quite mature yet, and they can’t really be blamed, either.

I think Popular Science has a nice gimmick, and good technology behind it (except for the lack of zoom), but it’s really repetitive and the images aren’t of high-enough quality (we’ll see how that evolves over time). BMW Magazine is really pleasant to use: it may have the best page-flicking algorithms, I like how you can swipe down to reveal the table of contents from “above” the page, and the idea of making the pages into a vertical continuity when the iPad is in landscape is pretty interesting. But it pains me to say that Wired, with Adobe’s solution behind it, may offer the best experience. Except for the response to page-flicking, which I expect to improve in the future, the app is just the most pleasant and consistent; there’s definitely something to be said for designing the portrait and landscape versions as completely separate layouts. (Except when the team plays with the concept, and has easter-egg text blocks appearing in one orientation and not the other.)

And yet the technology is just all wrong: since each issue is 100% bitmaps (and with two versions of each page), it’s also a 500MB download that’s excruciatingly slow to come down from the publisher’s servers (so slow that even with multitasking, iOS 4 will definitely shut the app down before it’s done, if you try to download in the background), and existing issues won’t take advantage of the next iPad’s hypothetical higher-resolution screen. For that matter, new issues probably won’t, either, since that would all but quadruple each download size.

I haven’t done my own testing yet, so I don’t know if the iPad would be able to present Popular Science-like effects with vector-based material, but it is a known fact that it’s able to render PDFs, and I can’t even quite imagine why Adobe wouldn’t have wanted to use that in the Wired app. I’m sure they have a reason, but I can’t believe that it could be good.

 

A common problem with all magazine apps: I kinda feel seasick when flicking through pages rapidly. On the one hand, you could say that you’re not supposed to flick through them so fast, and I’m only doing that because I’m not a real reader. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure flicking through pages is an integral part of a magazine’s UI. Clearly, flipping animations are easier on the eyes than lateral swiping. But they’re also harder to do.

And a special mention to The Optimist, which does a pretty clever job of displaying an HTML page in a magazine-app shell. (They’re not the only ones but, of those I saw, they do it best.)

Oh, and just so you know: full-page ads are that much annoying in an iPad magazine, because of the way they command the entire screen, instead of being contextualized by the opposing page. (Or maybe I’m dating myself here, as I used to read magazines in a time when there weren’t 10-page tunnels of advertising.)

 

A final nugget for the 0.05% of my readers who made it through to the end of this article: don’t miss The Guardian’s Eyewitness photo app. The iPad doesn’t have a Retina display, but it has an IPS screen, and damn does that thing shine when it comes to displaying photos.

Want to know when I post new content to my blog? It's a simple as registering for free to an RSS aggregator (Feedly, NewsBlur, Inoreader, …) and adding www.ff00aa.com to your feeds (or www.garoo.net if you want to subscribe to all my topics). We don't need newsletters, and we don't need Twitter; RSS still exists.

Legal information: This blog is hosted par OVH, 2 rue Kellermann, 59100 Roubaix, France, www.ovhcloud.com.

Personal data about this blog's readers are not used nor transmitted to third-parties. Comment authors can request their deletion by e-mail.

All contents © the author or quoted under fair use.