An iPad success story | Hacker News Reader

An iPad success story

marco.org

28 pointsswilliams11 comments

I've been surprised with how well I can use my iPad in the car when someone else is driving. Obviously movies and games, but I've also spent a lot of time writing blog posts and planning product features.

Looking forward to when more of my workflow can be done on the iPad.

Floorplanner.com is free, online (no installation), the top search result for 'floor planner', and excellent, somehow existing for years without the magical iPad ecosystem or whatever. Of course it is Flash-based, so if anything iPad users actually have less options in this space than everyone else.

I'm going to take the contrarian viewpoint on his article, as it seems the author didn't try to find a PC solution:

>I wouldn’t have been able to easily find a good app to do this without being bombarded with spam in my Google search. (And many of them would be Windows-only.)

found in a second: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

>When I did finally find an app that looked reasonable, I wouldn’t have been able to find any trustworthy reviews, being bombarded instead by more search spam.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

>When I went to buy it, it probably would have cost more.

It's free

>I wouldn’t have trusted it comfortably enough to install it on my computer.

The fact that I can apt-get install sweethome3d makes it seem as trustworthy as being on the app store.

>If it did work, I’d probably need longer to figure out its learning curve, and navigating wouldn’t be as easy or fast with a keyboard and trackpad.

Possible - I don't own an iPad so I can't compare. I find it hard to believe though that a tablet content creator would be faster to navigate than a keyboard/mouse (or even trackpad) combo. Took me about a minute to learn sweethome3d.

>Taking out the laptop in the car, and passing around a laptop to show the final product, would feel much clunkier than using the iPad.

I'll give the author this. I'd rather be able to create the content on a regular computer though.

Try to do all those steps again, and look at them from the point of view of someone who does not work in tech...

Of course I have a huge advantage being a programmer, but these days being able to conduct a web search is a required life skill. Kids can't even get out of high school these days without knowing how.

The only real tech thing was the apt-get install command. No big deal: the less tech savvy linux user would use a GUI front-end, like kpackagekit. It's as easy to install something as in the app store. They could have even skipped step 1 and just searched kpackagekit for "interior home design". (Users on other OSes can just click the download button)

One of the big concerns that Marco raises though is that an app direct from the Internet has the potential to really ruin your day, especially if you don't know anything about the field you're searching.

With the App Store, you have a reasonable assumption that it won't be a trojan for malware.

That's fair as far as the App Store is concerned, but really states nothing about iOS (and really is a criticism of Windows). Any Linux distro has its own 'app store' which is just as trustworthy. And afaik macs offer a similar thing; it is just windows that is behind.

My main issues with this article are how hand-wavvy his comparison to PCs are. His evidence is enough to say that both home 3D and the iPad are awesome. It is not enough to provide any basis of comparison to a PC ecosystem.

If the author had searched, he would have come across Google Sketchup. I downloaded and used the same, although I had to read a couple of tutorials before hitting the road. And it served the purpose of designing my new apartment.

Not sure if the iPad app the author used was intuitive enough to use, because I did feel overhelmed by the vast options in Sketchup.

Read the post. It's specifically about why it worked for him on the iPad.

"I’ve had laptops and cellular internet connectivity for 7 years, but I never would have done something like this before. Why?"

He then goes on to list the reasons which basically boil down to the strong ecosystem the iPad has (ease of searching, finding, buying, etc.).

Well I mentioned the point because of the authors point

"I wouldn’t have been able to easily find a good app to do this without being bombarded with spam in my Google search. (And many of them would be Windows-only.)"

Anyhow, I guess the author feels the ease with searching on the iPad[which you have also mentioned], which is true about the iOS ecosystem. Very easy to use definitely.

Many of the comments here focus on the fact that: 1) There are traditional options that the author didn't take the time to search through and find. 2) Or the author missed an opportunity to go with a free solution.

I feel these comments miss the point of the iPad's success.

The argument this article makes is that the iPad creates a friendlier, clearer, and more usable application ecosystem. The lack of search clutter (from the flurry of links posted) is the actual benefit here, with the ability to create a cool mock-up on the fly an added plus. The community voice is a trust-worthy one. And though it may have cost $8, there was no negative outside of this (ads, malware, bad app).

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