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Comment by wiredfool | Hacker News Reader

My impression of GarageBand on the iPad 1 is that it's pretty laggy. But I might have a more demanding test environment.

  * pull up a drum kit.
  * give iPad to 18mo old
  * he bangs on iPad like a chimpanzee. That ain't working.
  * take away iPad
  * drum kit keeps playing for 20 seconds or more with no input.
  * he yells for a minute or more to get it back

But overall, its totally worth the $5.

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I'll have to try that experiment with my 15 month old. He's spent a lot of time on the keyboard, and he and I played with the sampler, but I didn't have him try the drums.

I didn't notice any lag, but maybe that's because my son can't stop himself from making the app go away: the home button is too irresistible. Someone needs to come out with a slip case that makes the home button unreachable.

I would buy that in a heartbeat.

My two year old loves too watch movies and look at pictures on the iPad but can't help herself from pushing the Home button. The iPad would be great for car trips with the right case - and the home button is the biggest issue.

Something tells me there is a big market for kid-friendly iPad accessories...

Maybe I'm overestimating the learning capacity of two-year-olds, but isn't that something you'd learn after a few times?

Oh, but buttons are fun. Especially ones that you push and things happen. The home screen is fun. The search screen is fun.

(and the big grey button on the ups in daddy's office is fun too. makes beeping noises.)

There should be a way to enable kid mode, and use the switch to disable the home button for a while. At least till he figured that out.

sounds like someone needs to make an app for kids that just lets them hit buttons

clicks triangle

No, actually. Here's my son's (17 months) usage pattern:

1: Open app. 2: Watch app for 3 seconds. 3: Close app. 4: Goto 1

you just need to not get involved they will figure it out eventually. I am not sure at which point my son started to use the home button properly but it definitely happened without our intervention in the last 6 months or so (he also started playing around with it at 2). I am worried that the ipad is bad for things like learning delayed gratification and attention span, as when he is watching dora he will let it finish but otherwise the smallest frustration leads to hitting home and starting over.

You could tape over the button and at the same time put the iPad into developer mode. Then you can use gestures to go back to the home menu.

How-To: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/03/13/want-new-gesture-controls-in-...

As a musician I would suggest giving a "real toy instrument" to your son such as toy drums etc. -- it will allow him to form an early understanding of how objects produce sounds (i.e., bigger cavity = lower sound, pressure on surface = higher sound, etc.)

Dude. There is one piano, 2 xylophones, one accordion, three real hand drums, several Remo kids drums, two kids violins, and assorted small percussion around the house.

There are no plastic electronic drums, keyboards or other things that say letters, squeak, or otherwise make non-real noises.

At extra special times, all three of them will parade around the house with drums and sing Whiskey in the Jar. It's quite an experience.

But as for the electronic bits, He just likes the ipad. All three of the kids do.

Kids usually get tons of stuff and will at one point or another own many real instruments. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with them also playing with tablets.

On my iPad 2 I also have seen this behavior if you wail with ten fingers on the drums just 'button mashing' style it keeps going for several seconds after you stop as the iPad is catching up with the inputs.

My six year old found this :)

This has to be some weird issue on your side, I don’t see any latency on my 1G iPad when playing the drums. (Otherwise there would be little point to the whole application, right?)

I concur, I dont think that something like that would be commonplace or it wouldnt even be allowed on the iPad 1.

I've done another test, this time with the 4yr old and I've now replicated the issue with two different test cases.

It's clear that the ipad is queueing the events and not dropping them if it gets lagged. Under normal circumstances, it's not a problem. But when you have wee monkeys, it does seem to happen with some repeatability.

Maybe it has to do with the amount of apps "open" (albeit dormant) at the same time?

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