scott breakall

Remnants of the ancient past: Yellow Pages!

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:27:43 -0400

Sent from my iPhone

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Went looking for this little gem, and was told it had been thrown out. How do you throw something so tiny and funny out?!?!

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:59:47 -0400

Sent from my iPhone

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Untitled

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:07:25 -0400

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My thoughts about the iPad

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:24:40 -0400

My company bought an iPad to do some R&D on, and I was tasked with figuring out if it can be used for our software. I brought it home this weekend to do some research of my own – basically, to find out if I wanted to buy one for myself. Here are some of the things I’ve found…

For a reading experience, it’s the best device I’ve ever seen. The screen is bright and easy to read, and it’s got the tap-to-zoom feature that I love from the iPhone. (When I first got my iPhone and started reading news and blogs on it, I loved that feature and wished that normal desktop browsers had it.) I have kind of a circuit of a handful of blogs that I make laps around throughout the day – generally it’s Drudge Report, Techmeme, Memeorandum, and Hacker News. All of these blogs and the sites they link to look great and are a pleasure to read. Occasionally I’d run into a video that I couldn’t play because of the lack of Flash support on the iPad, but overall that wasn’t a big deal. Embedded YouTube videos, however, play very nicely right in the page instead of popping you over into the YouTube app.

But… while I think it’s great for just reading news and blogs, or watching video, there’s a threshold that you can cross where you’re doing more than just passive browsing, and the iPad starts to get in the way. I was doing some research on backpacking gear and wandering all over the web with lots of tabs open like I normally do, saving bookmarks to Delicious, and editing a Google Docs spreadsheet to make a list of gear and its weight and costs (don’t ask!). My first specific complaint is that Google routs you to the mobile versions of all its apps when using the iPad, which is good because the standard versions don’t work really well on the iPad, but also bad because the mobile versions don’t work so well either. Editing cells in an existing spreadsheet is laborious, and trying to add new rows and columns is confusing. My second complaint is that saving Delicious bookmarks on the iPad is just not as simple as when using Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V shortcuts on a physical keyboard.

Eventually, after getting frustrated with the experience, I put the iPad down and picked up my four year old 15-inch Dell notebook. For one thing, a full keyboard means keyboard shortcuts – I guess I hadn’t thought about how much I use them and how much time they save. And browsing the “real” web is actually worth something – the iPad is still the “kid brother” web for now.

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