I’ve got a 13″ MacBook Air on the way. It was an interesting decision, long in development. It was worth considering formally because a Mac purchase is a 3 year technology commitment. And I think worth considering in detail here to illustrate a decision process.
iPhones are a one year commitment. At this point we all believe that the new version is going to be coming around each summer. AT&T has always given me the upgrade choice. I bought the original, had to upgrade to the 3G, skipped 3GS since I saw little reason to spend any money on it, then grabbed the iPhone4 which was a major advance. I await iPhone 5.
My iPad Experience: The Good
I’m glad I grabbed a WiFi+3G iPad on release. Its been a useful device, worth the money for the family just as an attractive media and browsing package. As a personal device, Useful, but not my companion. I never bonded with the iPad the way I have with my iPhone.
The iPad is great at a few things. Netflix streaming video, reading mainstream news sites (New York Times, Washington Post, etc), and Flickr. I think that iPad directed media will be an area for development and as a musical instrument, its got quite a nice start with synthesizer and drum machine apps. I’ve got a small collection. The twitter app is great.
Twitter is an interesting case because the experience is driven by the integration of the app with iOS. For interesting reasons, I had little interest in Twitter until just a few months ago. But the Twitter App on the iPad is one of my favorites. Its best feature is the integrated web browser. Click on a tweet with a link in it and a browser window slides in with the web page displayed. The iPhone app does the same. How oddly painful to have the Twitter app spawning web page after web page since there’s no similar integration.
My iPad Experience: The Indifferent
In the end, for me the iPad is a limited use satellite device. There are things I’d rather do on the iPhone or Mac. RSS feed reading has been a big problem for me on the iPad. I’m a longtime user of Google Reader, but I hated the need to do a two finger flick to scroll. It was something I constantly fought against but never found a better interface in any of the RSS reader apps that I tried. It odd that the Google interfaces on the browser or the iPhone but the iPad interface just didn’t work well. Reeder gets me part of the way there, but not enough that I don’t wait till I’m sitting with the laptop to look at feeds.
I was also disappointed with the iPad as an eReader. Its legible and fast, but its just too heavy for reading. Actually, my guess on the ergonomics is that its too dense. Its a bit heavier than a 500 page hardcover as judged by just picking them up. But the thinness and weight distribution of the iPad tires my fingers and wrists if I fail to support it. Web surfing sessions last minutes, but reading a book is a less dynamic activity and can stretch much longer.
A few months ago, when the latest Kindle was released, I bought one for reading. Its light, fast enough and the controls easy to use after a short period of gaining the right habits. At this point, there are no books on the iPad. I travel with a laptop and kindle, generally leaving the iPad
The lack of multiuser capabilities is another nagging problem with the iPad. While the iPad is a great cheap extra screen for watching movies or surfing the web, there’s no way to prevent other users from having access to the main user’s email and personal accounts like Twitter. Since its family using the device, I worry more about accidental deletions than malicious use, but it remains a situation in which a personal device is used by a group without a way to hide sensitive or important information.
Writing on the iPad
Extended writing on the iPad also has never really worked for me. The onscreen keyboard has works well enough, but has shortcomings for anything but casual text entry. There’s no apostrophe on the QWERTY keyboard. I think I’m not alone in thinking that the apostrophe is a pretty important part of english, what with its use in both possessives and contractions. Autocorrect is nice for simple writing, but get technical or expand the vocabulary and it increasing makes its own odd substitutions. Placement of the insertion point with the touch screen is really a pretty big step backward from the earliest onscreen editors like vi and emacs with their keyboard control.
I like the either/or world of mouse, cursor keys and keyboard shortcuts. The iPad enforces its tyranny of touch interface that’s slow. For a while I hoped that using a bluetooth keyboard would help with extended writing, freeing up screen space and giving me a full key set, but it doesn’t remove the conflict between keyboard and touch interface. I’d like to see how a bluetooth trackpad would do as a substitute for the touchscreen.
The bluetooth keyboard also locks out the onscreen keyboard, so that if you pick up the iPad from its stand and move to the sofa to read and edit, there’s no keyboard available until bluetooth is disabled. This is unexpected to me, since with my MacBook Pro, the bluetooth keyboard and trackpad don’t affect the function of the laptop’s own input devices.
Apps that keep their data in the cloud make notetaking on the iPad possible though. I mostly live in Evernote for note taking. It syncs perfectly across all of my devices- iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro and Windows XP laptop supplied by my employer.
Reaching a decision
Over the last month, I performed a face-off between three options- iPad, MacBook Pro and a theoretical MacBook Air. The first two started with the huge advantage that I already own them. If I could come to a workable solution without the Air, I could postpone purchase until the next round of Apple product announcements, postponing the next hardware commitment.
I optimized both as well as I could adding apps and honing workflow to optimize each. I found in the end that the MacBook Pro was my solution of choice except for work email and document generation or editing. My inability to get writing working well enough on the iPad meant that I needed more.
I decided that a little more formal exploration would be useful. My usual approach would be to build a Tinderbox map, but since I had been working on systematically exploring the tools I had at hand, I decided to create a mind map on the iPad using iThoughtsHD. Here’s the result of an hour’s work:
If you’ve never used mind maps at all, I’d recommend giving it a try. Once you get the right motor movements for iThoughts, it becomes a powerful idea sketcher. In fact, I’d hold it up as a great example of a perfect use of the iPad. Its graphical and perfectly suited for a touch interface, needing small amounts of text input.
A mind map is a hierarchical structured document, always a tree structure. It resolves into a standard outline with the central node representing the outline itself and the first set of branches the highest level of the outline. Child nodes are children in an outline. The advantages to mind mapping are due to the graphic nature of the technique. In the map here, I started considering contexts for device use, but realized that I’d need to represent devices within the map. So the pink nodes are devices or storage spots.
iThoughtsHD is nice because it has some nice nontraditional mind map elements. There are callouts, links (the read lines with arrowheads at each end). I didn’t use any here, but it also allows floating nodes so one could create the kind of flat map that’s so natural in Tinderbox. Adornments, background map zones in Tinderbox, would be a great addition to a mind mapping app like iThoughts. Mind mapping would be an interesting addition to tinderbox since it too is outline based.
What I learned from the mind mapping was that I have a huge number of tools, represented both by devices (iPhone, iPad, kindle, MacBook Pro, Windows XP, notebook) and places (Evernote, the weblog, Twitter, etc). Location and connectivity matter, but influence choice between tools more than the nature of the tools themselves.
But I actually have fewer tasks. There’s work email and documents. There’s reading, photographing and writing for this weblog and related projects. Then there’s note taking which is information harvesting from the environment both real and virtual.
For me, there ends up being no way around the conclusion that I end up needing a corporate laptop for work and a creative laptop for content generation. So the best solution for writing in the smallest Mac that will run Scrivener, Tinderbox, Evernote and MarsEdit well. So the MacBook Air 13″ is on its way.
