Adhearsion Blog by Jay Phillips

I’ve been surprised by the amount of hostility to the iPad out there. Some disinterest I can understand but most of what I hear is just unimaginative trolling.

I’m excited about the iPad. Here’s why.

iPad as a Minimalist’s Laptop Replacement

My personal history of computer use has been a story of habit hacking and employment of various tools for self-control. As everyone reading this surely knows, it’s all too easy to lose valuable time endlessly browsing the internet or trying to fight off applications competing for your attention.

To figure out how I work best, I experiment. I’ve tried all kinds of them over the years. For a few months several years ago I even used a Gentoo install with no graphical system installed whatsoever as my main desktop. I used vim for coding, links for web browsing, mplayer and mpg321 for listening to music, pine for email, ircii for IRC, and ssh (naturally) for managing remote servers. I switched back to GNOME because doing serious CSS development wasn’t practical without a GUI. I’ve also experimented with the ideas outlined in Getting Things Done, The Pomodoro Technique, and Time Management for System Administrators. I care a lot about trying to hack my brain to balance efficiency, entertainment, and ingestion of information. I’m still not happy at all with my daily routine and probably don’t work any better than the average person, despite the diligence I’ve put into exploring my options.

If there’s one thing I’ve found that does help my productivity, it’s attention to User Experience (UX) design. Few can dispute that Apple is the vanguard of that space. Switching almost entirely to Apple products (from generic PC hardware running Linux) was probably the most success I’ve had managing complexity. I think they do such a consistently great (not perfect) job at making things I enjoy using with just enough minimalism.

Now that I have a fantastic desktop workstation at home, I find that I use my aging laptop only for mostly trivial things. I go to a lot of conferences, go on a lot of business trips, fly in a lot of planes, watch a lot of movies (or Star Trek) while browsing the web, and occasionally hang out at a coffee shop to ameliorate acute cabin fever. In these cases serious computer usage is not a priority. In fact, for these uses, most of the hardware and software of a laptop is a liability and only adds weight and drains battery.

For just about all the reasons that I use a laptop, the iPad would do the job better. The 8-10 hour battery life is fantastic and two to five times better than what I can get out of my laptop.

The iPad doesn’t have first-class multi-tasking but the authors of the productivity methodology resources I mentioned would likely say this is fortuitously useful. If I’m writing a blog post on my iPad in a coffee shop, does it really matter whether I can make a Skype call or browse the web concurrently? I expect OS upgrades to the iPad to add some level of multi-tasking in the future but, for what I plan to use the iPad for, I probably wouldn’t use it very much. Like the iPhone, I’d still get push notifications and be able to listen to music while I write so it does have the rudimentary mutli-tasking that I would personally care about.

Although I rarely use my laptop for serious programming anymore, I figure I could still do it on the iPad with the keyboard dock and a ssh terminal application connecting to my main development machine at home. This would be no different from my text-based Gentoo days that I enjoyed quite a lot. As MacRuby matures, I’m sure someone will build a Ruby development environment similar to TextMate in which I could program graphically. I don’t see why the lack of multi-tasking should affect the usability of that IDE much if the app is capable of executing the code and letting me switch to a modal embedded web browser.

iPad as an Innovation Playground

And then there’s my geeky imaginative side.

When I contemplate the iPad as a platform for applications and games, I can’t stop ideas from wildly popping into my head. The iPhone as a platform was nothing short of a success and I expect the iPad to have a lot of pleasant surprises in store (pun intended!) for everyone.

Whether you like the gadget or not, you have to admit that it’s a turning point in the evolution of personal computing. The long-fabled touchscreen paradigm is finally making inroads into the market. As a newbie iPhone/CocoaTouch developer, I look forward to writing iPad applications for a truly unexplored world of computing.

Constructive Criticism

Why wasn’t there this much criticism when Google Chrome OS was announced and seeded out to the developer community? If critics of the iPad have such a hard time imagining what a user would do with one, Chrome OS should seem like an elaborate exercise in pathological lunacy. I suspect we’ll never hear proportionately impassioned criticism of Chrome OS because objectivity isn’t their objective — unconditionally denigrating Apple is.

Granted, Chrome OS wasn’t hyped up to the the extent that the iPad was. I don’t think the iPad deserved so much furor — it’s unfortunate that others’ actions are backfiring on it. The first-gen iPad does feel like a letdown in a number of areas. Here are a couple things that annoy the crap out of me:

• The iPad marketing campaign, especially the promo video. Way too childish.
• Steve Jobs’ announcement keynote. Jobs is usually a great presenter. This was the worst presentation I’ve seen him give.
• The Micro-SIM dependency. This is absolutely outrageous. I definitely won’t be buying the 3G version. This is the sleaziest thing I’ve ever seen Apple do. Epic fail.
• The lack of a front-facing camera. I don’t care about a back-facing camera but video conferencing would be pretty sweet. Would I ever use it? Hard to say.
• The website saying “140,000 apps from day one.” This is only half-true. Except maybe some of the games, I don’t want to use iPhone apps on my iPad, Apple. It’s hard to argue with the critics who say it’s “just a big iPhone” when this is how they market it. I’m excited by the iPad-only apps.

Conclusion

Like I said, I experiment with varying levels of minimalism. I’m proud of the fact I bought an iPhone on the day it was released and I’ll probably buy an iPad also on its first day. Whether I’ll be proud of that remains to be seen. For my personal needs, the iPad seems to be the best thing on the market with which to replace my laptop and generally make my life more enjoyable when I’m not in my typical work setting. If I’m lucky, I’ll also get the thrill of building useful or fun apps for a totally new class of computers.

All things considered, I think it’s a cool little device.