3 Weeks of iPad: Some observations | Hacker News Reader

3 Weeks of iPad: Some observations

logiccolony.com

45 pointskenshi35 comments

"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.

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...

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.

That's pretty much been my experience as well.

Unless I'm working on work work, I barely touch my laptop at home anymore. And I barely have to use the keyboard and mouse to interact with the mac mini connected to my TV, which is a huge win.

I still use my livescribe for meetings (http://www.livescribe.com/).

Maybe with a stylus (they exist) you could take handwritten notes, basically treating it just like a paper notepad.

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.

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.

> 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.

I haven't purchased one yet but had the opportunity to stop by the local  store for a quick 30 minute demo. I was sold on the idea before even touching one and that quick session was enough to make it a rock solid deal (waiting for the 3G one).

The "tabs" on safari need an improvement. I instinctively tapped and held so I could reorganize them but they didn't budge. Still, it gets an 11 out of 10 stars in my book.

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?

I have about 20 total tabs open right now.

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

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.

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.)

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).

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

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

I completely agree with this usage case, but I still don't miss it on the iPad. I think this comes down to the fact that I'm never trying to balance work and casual browsing on the iPad. At work, I might have several 'tab queues' open in order to keep a hold on articles or sites I want to glance at between things. But on the iPad, I just go one article at a time, reading them in turn, browsing the comments too. I never feel the need to build the queue, because I'm not going to be turning away from the pages for work anytime soon, and even if I do, the work is being done in a different place, so I just put the device down. Then again, I also leave the iPad at home, as a purely entertainment and communications device. Couch and bed surfing, comic viewing, and video watching.

I know I use open tabs like a stack. I read the web breadth first.

Agreed. I'm also surprised how people find it comfortable. I found it physically painful to use relative to a laptop, due to the awkward head/hands positioning, needing to constantly slide my fingers instead of just hitting page down, etc.

Probably not most people, but I try to. Having 20 tabs open means that your brain must keep track of all of them. Having only 1 or 2 instead is a different story.

Having 20 tabs open means that your brain must keep track of all of them.

That seems backwards. If I have 20 tabs open, the browser is keeping track of them, not me. If I can only have one page open at a time, I have to actively remember other pages that are relevant to what I'm doing.

You have to keep track of what each tab contains every time you need something. We have seen this at work and it's always fun to see certain people who keeps clicking on tabs in order to find out where their stuff is.

...and how much longer would it take them if they had to keep track of the info in those tabs some other way?

Anyway, is the iPad really that different from the simulator? It was pretty easy to open "new" windows in the sim, so it had about 80% of the functionality of tabs built in.

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.

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

     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 * .

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.

How does Google Wave work on it?

"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.

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.

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.

I wonder if he typed that post on an iPad.

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.

Why was this down-voted? It would be interesting to know. It would show more of iPad's value.

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