A small group of people were having a meeting at the Coffee Zone this morning. I overheard them talking about “motions” and “seconds” and noticed one of the group was taking notes on her iPad. She had it in her lap and was pecking away at the virtual keyboard. A laptop sitting on the table would have been far more intrusive.
All god’s children are rushing tablet devices to market and it will be interesting to see if they can come up with hardware and software to compete with the iPad.
I almost remember my first computer mouse. The weird sensation of coordinating my hand movements with the cursor on the screen. And –once I got the hang of it– how wonderful to be able to click and drag and all the rest. From time to time, you had to take the little ball from the guts of the mouse and clean off the crud sucked up from the desktop or the mouse pad (remember mouse pads?).
I tried some of the early touch pads but found them klunky. So, when I got my first MacBook –which came with a touch pad– I made sure I had a mouse close at hand. But the more I used the Mac’s touch pad, the more natural it felt. In time, I left the mouse at home.
Apple recently began shipping the Magic Trackpad and I have to say I love it. It took a few hours to feel completely natural but I now find myself using all of my fingers to do lots of things that are much more difficult (if not impossible) with a mouse. And it all feels completely natural and ergonomic.
Nebraska Athletic Director Tom Osborne admitted Friday that he didn’t know a lot about iPads, “but the main purpose,” he said, “is for communication, so if Bo (Pelini) or an assistant coach needs to schedule a meeting, everybody can know immediately, whether they’re in the varsity locker room or the walk-on locker room at the Hawks Championship Center.
For compliance reasons, the iPads will be mounted into each player’s locker. The football staff will have the ability to send messages to the players via their iPads. The players will be able to acknowledge and respond, but their messages will be limited to football and academic personnel only.
The new capability will enable the football staff to post events to each player’s iPad calendar, so he will know the times of each practice, conditioning session, academic meeting or position meeting, even if it’s called at the last minute.
What about the capability to access all iPads remotely so they can play the same video at once?
“Wireless can cause a slight delay, but yes, that’s the plan – to get all to play at once when the situation calls for it,” said Chad Chiesa, a Nebraska Athletic Department IT specialist. “With the assistance of a software development firm that specializes in mobile device applications, our hope is to keep everything in sync.”
I’m sure the guys in Cupertino didn’t foresee this particular use of the iPad but they knew in their hearts and smart heads that there would be no end of creative uses. Do you think they pull these down and replace them with the new RIM Blackpads? Or Microsoft’s Slate?
Our local HP rep brought a new computer by the office yesterday for our IT guys to check out. It’s the HP 6000 PRO. I couldn’t resisit teasing him a little about the revolutionary design breakthrough.
“Whoa! That is so COOL! Everything built right into the monitor? No separate box?! Damn!
This is just the sort of thing that makes PC’s hate Mac fanboys like me. But I couldn’t help myself. Apple introduced the iMac G5 in 2005. 5 years is a lifetime in hardware innovation.
And then Phil dug out the HP’s power supply and I felt so bad for the rep I wanted to give him a hug. This thing is literally the size of a brick. The only good thing about the monster is you can rest your feet on it.
There’s nothing wrong with seeing a good design and emulating it. Shit, Apple does this. But if you go that right, at least try to make your design a little better than the one you are copying. And there’s the rub. Just can’t do it and keep keep the price down.
Barb really likes the iPad. She took it to a conference (leaving the laptop home) and had a great experience. Last week we loaded her music and pix and got her a wireless keyboard. I was pretty sure it was just one more device I could get by without. Until I saw Flipboard.
Like the man said, “The stuff you care about, all in one place.”
UPDATE: Okay. I have the iPad and configured my Twitter stream in Flipboard. And quickly determined that this is NOT an app I’ll use a lot. It is fun to browse the tweets of the people I follow but that’s about all I can do. You can’t copy text from the Flipboard browser. If all I ever did was just browse, read and retweet, Flipboard would be a good way to do those things. For my money, Pulse is a much better app.
A small group of people were having a meeting at the Coffee Zone this morning. I overheard them talking about “motions” and “seconds” and noticed one of the group was taking notes on her iPad. She had it in her lap and was pecking away at the virtual keyboard. A laptop sitting on the table would have been far more intrusive.
And then Phil dug out the HP’s power supply and I felt so bad for the rep I wanted to give him a hug. This thing is literally the size of a brick. The only good thing about the monster is you can rest your feet on it.