The iPad at Work: Observations from a Programmer, Designer and QA Expert

I tend to agree. In fact, I find it's just as easy to load up an iPad with distracting notifications as a desktop.

So the extent to which people are discovering the benefits of a sort of digital 'cone of silence', but attributing it to a lack of multi-tasking is frankly puzzling to me.

I think the word "multitasking" gets way overloaded in these discussions. In this case, it's not that people are happy that their other applications' processes aren't continuing to be preemptively scheduled by the kernel. They're happy that all iPad apps always take up the whole screen. There's certainly a cost to that, but many feel there's a benefit, too.

It reminds me of the "I don't always want to be available" argument against cell phones I heard a lot in the late 90's. Surely those folks knew they were allowed to power the phone off whenever they wanted.

I don't see this as effective advertising (though that is what gets you to buy it) as much as effective UX design. I never thought I needed a phone with anything but the ability to call, but now I can't imagine not having an phone with internet, GPS, email, etc. That change wasn't advertising, but the best design and form factor made at the time of its release.

Advertising gets you into the store, but an innovative product creates the "need we never knew we had."

If that was an advertising-created false-need, as with, say, a Slap Chop, you'd expect the four-weeks-later stories to all read: "As it turns out, I didn't really need it."

It would be some powerful advertising indeed, that could trump a month of actual use.

Like others said, this has nothing to do with advertising. In fact, everyone interviewed in the article were already self-admitted Apple fanboys meaning the advertising probably wasn't all that important; they were going to buy it the second Steve Jobs got up on stage.

The important part is that after the initial "magic" has worn off, early adopters still love the device. They are not returning it or selling it. They take it everywhere they go and prefer to use the device over their laptop or desktop when it's possible to do so.

This is simply the effect of Apple building a really awesome product, not advertising.

I think it's the loyal fan base that allows Apple to define new products. They listen to Apple, because Apple has repeatedly delivered great experiences in the past. Very few companies have this power.

I think the Apple fayboyism may be coloring some of these statements. The idea of a touch-screen tablet is hardly new, and many people, myself included, have been waiting for someone to develop a device like the iPad for years. Look at all of the hype that surrounded the CrunchPad announcement, even when we rightly assumed it was vaporware.

Apple isn't really an innovation company. They're great at executing on ideas that no one else has yet turned into a viable product, which puts them on the cutting edge. But they've never came up with something entirely new and created demand for it where none previously existed.

And I can find plenty of points at which the iPad falls short of my tablet wish-list, but that didn't stop me from getting one.

I'm a coder and I have an iPad.

I haven't yet used my iPad for coding. I don't think I will. I do have a really great ssh/vpn app for the iPhone/iPad, so in a pinch, I can get to my servers and make a fix or check a log file. But other than that, I don't expect to use my iPad for coding. I'm just too bound to emacs and a keyboard to see it being a reasonable use of the iPad.

However, for almost everything else, I've been using and preferring the iPad. I had already relegated all RSS feed reading, Twitter and Facebook (anything that could distract me from coding) to my iPhone. Now using the iPad, I'm even more efficient with my time and the experience is more enjoyable. And as a general entertainment device, the iPad wins across my entire family: my wife and 5 year old daughter both love it.

All that said, there are definitely some areas in which I feel the iPad is deficient. I expect these to be resolved over time, but it's something to consider:

- Google Docs just doesn't work on the iPad. Considering how much I use Google Docs, this is a major blow to the usefulness of the iPad.

- The email client is weak. If you get a large amount of email or are on several mailing lists, then you'll still fallback on using some other web or desktop email client. I really wish I could use the iPad as my main email device, but its just not suitable yet.

- GMail for the iPad is actually decent except for one bug: you can't properly scroll when composing long emails that span one vertical screen space. Again, this just makes GMail useless on occasion.

- Some multitasking would be great. Honestly, I like the focus you get when you're dealing with one app at a time. But I would really like to be always signed into Skype and GTalk. I would like to be able to load more than one web page at a time and switch between them without requiring them to reload (ok, that's more a memory problem than a multitasking problem).

Also, I got the wifi-only version thinking I wouldn't really want or need the 3G version. Now I would strongly recommend the 3G version if you can afford it. The iPad is just so much more mobile than a laptop that I take it everywhere if I can. The battery life is amazingly great for a device like this. So having access everywhere would make the iPad even better.

I can promise you that I didn't downvote you! Not my style :)

Maybe hard to believe, but the three people I interviewed for the article were really that in love with their iPads. Maggie (QA) actually came to me with the idea for the article, because she wanted to talk about how she was using it professionally. So I got a couple people together that were also using it for work to give their opinions as well. But I do wish now I had tried to balance out the article with more opinions. Another guy at our company came out with a post on his personal blog last week, in favor of the kindle over the iPad, and I should have asked him to contribute to the article!

Thanks for reading though, I really enjoy the feedback!

There is a new generation of tablets upon us, expect to hear about them (from many manufacturers) a lot in the coming months.