Megatheriums for Breakfast

One year ago I bought my first iPad. Or I should say, my first two iPads, since I also bought one for my wife – an excellent decision in retrospect, as if we had had only one in the house I’m sure that we would have often argued about who could use it next.

So I thought that the anniversary of my ownership of one would be a good time to look back and reflect on what I enjoy about it, what I have used it for, and how I expect to be using it in the future.

I lusted for an iPad almost from before Steve Jobs announced it in February 2010, and I placed an order the moment they were put on sale in Australia.

My iPad usage has changed quite a bit from the first few weeks. This reflects both my better understanding of how I could best use it, but also, very importantly because of the development of more and better apps as the year progressed.

As it happened, the iPads arrived not long before we left for a holiday driving around Victoria, and so some of my earliest use of my 3G iPad was for the Maps application, remote email access, and Internet lookups. Free wireless access at all MacDonalds was a benefit! My wife is a keen family history buff, and the iPad was often useful to be able to check facts and find addresses via the Internet. The iPad is far more lightweight and convenient to carry and use on holiday than all but the smallest netbook.

When I returned to work, I did attempt to do such things as use the iPad to take notes at meetings, trying out apps like PaperDesk and a few other notebook apps, but found these apps far from perfect for this use. Mind you, at that stage my touchscreen typing skills weren’t very good. As a fairly fast touch-typist on a normal keyboard, I at first struggled with the on-screen keyboard on the iPad. In the time since then, however, I have abandoned trying to type with all my fingers on the iPad and instead reverted back to hunting-and-pecking with two fingers on each hand. Doing this I can achieve reasonable speed and accuracy even on the smaller touch keyboard available in the iPad’s portrait mode.

One of the reasons I wanted an iPad in the first place was so I could use it as an ebook reader. I owned something like 2500 to 3000 “dead-tree” books, and having moved that huge number more times than I want to remember, I was keen to start buying books that weighed nothing!

I also felt that I was spending far too much time during the day sitting at a computer desk. Both in the office and at home I was spending hours in front of a computer, and most of what I was doing, I realized, was simply reading stuff. Emails, web pages, documents for review, and so on.

I calculated that using an iPad instead, I could cut my time at the desk down by at least 75%. And so it has proved. Today I spend the majority of my time with the iPad in reading, in considerably more comfort than I could ever do while sitting at a desk.

In the past I have talked about the difference between “desk culture” and “couch culture”, and the iPad illustrates this beautifully. In desk culture mode you are working, somewhat tense, alert but a little bit uncomfortable. You are working on stuff, solving problems, being serious. Couch culture, on the other hand, is about being relaxed, enjoying yourself, absorbing information or consuming entertainment, reflecting.

The iPad, needless to say, fits perfectly into couch culture. Steve Jobs didn’t demo the first iPad while sitting at a desk, but while relaxed in an armchair.

So, 12 months later, what do I use my iPad for?

At the start of this post is my iPad home screen. There are several following screens, with apps crammed into folders. But here on the main screen I have placed the apps I use most often.

iBooks is right there in the very first position on the first screen. In the last 12 months I have read two dozen or so novels and a couple of non-fiction books on my iPad, and have bought far too many more.

Next to it is The Age newspaper, the well-regarded broadsheet which is the daily paper of my home town Melbourne. I subscribe to the digital edition for $18 a month, good value. The app takes an interesting approach in that it simply reproduces the layout of the physical newspaper, complete with ads, but adds hyperlinks and copyable text versions of every article. Pinch and zoom work, of course. The text is completely searchable.

I love this approach – after all, the layout of a newspaper, the way it gives different emphasis to stories depending on their importance, the placement of photos, have all been developing over the last 200 years or so, to a high degree of perfection. Why lose that for a digital version?

I start the day reading The Age over breakfast. Flipboard and Zite are next; these are apps which collect together blogs, tweets and website news, each excellent in its own way, each giving me a slightly different selection of the topics I am interested in.

Zinio is a magazine app, and through it I currently subscribe to New Scientist and National Geographic. These are for more relaxed reading over the weekends. I am also trialling a subscription to The New Yorker, but that is through its own dedicated app, on a later screen.

Then we have the usual suspects such as Contacts and Calendar.

Oz Weather is a wonderful app which ties into my local Bureau of Meteorology site to display forecasts, current conditions and animated rain radar. This also gets used daily.

I’m trialling Daily Notes (alias All My Days) as a journaling program, and for taking meeting notes. Not sure yet if I will keep it, but probably.

MSecure is a “password wallet” program, which I would be lost without as I have so many different user names and passwords in play at any one time. I also use it to store software registration keys. Needless to say I have used a very long master pass phrase for it! I love the way it syncs with versions on my desktop and phone.

ToDo and Due are pretty self-explanatory – task list and reminder/alarm program. I tend to use Due more on my phone though, and it might soon lose its premium position on my iPad home screen.

IM+ is an instant messaging aggregator, and I use it to keep an ear out for Google Talk messages from my colleagues. You do need to keep opening it every so often, though, so it stays resident listening for new messages. But it has proved useful several times, and again it is something which helps free me from the desk.

Then we come to Blogsy, which I am using right now to write this blog post. I realized that I had made some kind of transition when I decided a week or so ago that I would rather sit down on the couch to use Blogsy to write a post than do it at the computer desk. Love it, though there is certainly room for improvement, particularly in positioning images.

PCalc is the best calculator app I have yet found, used probably more on my phone than here, but still useful to have readily available.

Paprika is a recipe program, which I actually do use fairly often – I cook most of the meals in our house. It has a great method for incorporating recipes from web sites, though because of the way it treats ingredients as plain text it’s rather weak when it comes to making up grocery lists. Nevertheless it’s the best I’ve found for entering my own recipes. I’m old enough to remember when the earliest personal computers (I’m thinking 1979 Tandy TRS-80 here!) were marketed to homes as great devices to have in the kitchen with all of your recipes handy. I can’t imagine that anyone at all ever used them for that. But the iPad actually makes the concept practical – for one thing, it’s easy to wipe the screen clean of cooking splatter!

Westpac is my bank. Though this is still only an iPhone app, it is an extremely convenient way to check my balance, transfer money or pay bills. It is so focused that it is far more pleasant to use for this than their full web site.

The Melways mApp [sic!] is another delight. Melbournians are very attached to this street directory, and a huge percentage of cars in this city would carry a copy. But the physical directory is a big slab of paper, not something to be carried around with you on foot. But now we have the digital edition, which is brilliant. It’s great when out and about because all of the maps are stored locally, and so they are instantly available, unlike Google Maps. Melways maps are also easier to read than Google maps and are packed with useful local information. The app of course uses GPS to place you exactly on the map. I wouldn’t be without this.

Navigon is a turn-by-turn GPS navigator. Again I use the phone version (listening to the voice instructions only) more than I use the iPad version, but with a passenger holding the iPad, this version is really useful when travelling because of the higher resolution display.

And last up on this first screen is Wikipanion, which I use a lot to look things up when reading.

Mail, Photos, Safari, iPod, Settings and Apple Remote get pride of place in the dock at the bottom so they are always to hand. All of these get a lot of use, particularly Mail and Safari. Remote gets used to drive my Apple TV, another device I love.

On subsequent screens I do have a lot of other apps, but apart from games they get used far less often. I have the iWorks suite, but in truth have only used Pages and Numbers a handful of times, and Keynote not at all, though I can see its usefulness. I have used TouchDraw several times to draw diagrams which I would use Visio for on a desktop computer. It keeps getting better and better, to the point where I’m wondering if I need Visio at all. It’s astonishing to be able to compare a $9 iPad app with a $450 desktop program!

I don’t watch a lot of video on my iPad, but do occasionally watch TED talks or iTunesU lectures. When we are going on holiday I do appreciate being able to load it up with TV episodes and movies just in case we are bored; but in practice this rarely happens.

There are a bunch of other reading apps:

And some reference works:

And too many games, though I don’t actually play them very often:

So that’s a pretty good survey of how I’m using my iPad. Outside of office hours, it is rarely out of my hands, or at least, rarely out of reach.

For me, I would now consider the iPad all but indispensible. If I lost it, and could afford it, I would replace it immediately.

Well, at the sake of being seen to be the total Apple fanboy (a description that a few years ago I would never have dreamed could be applied to myself), I’m going to talk about my new Apple toy – the new Apple TV. The name is a bit of a misnomer as it isn’t a TV at all, just a media device which connects to your television.

At only AU $129 it wasn’t a major expense, and I figured it would be a modest enhancement to my existing television / hi-fi system.

It has actually exceeded my expectations already, and that got me to thinking about how Apple products compare with products from other companies. I have found through personal experience that a product which looks good on paper often turns out to be a disappointment in practice. That has never happened to me with an Apple product. Rather I usually find myself surprised and delighted that the product does more, or works better, than I had hoped. Perhaps this is one reason why Apple is now (by market capitalization) the second largest company in the world? Or maybe not, there are plenty of huge companies which produce awful products (viz Microsoft).

Anyway, I ordered my Apple TV not long after it was announced, and it arrived a couple of weeks ago.

The first amazing thing is how small this thing is – it literally fits into the palm of your hand. With its tiny size and sleek blackness, it is just unnoticeable in my audio-visual set-up – a visitor would have to have it pointed out to them.

I connected a HDMI cable from the Apple TV to my television, via a switchbox (I only have one HDMI input on my television), and to my hi-fi system via an optical cable. Neither cable is supplied with the Apple TV, by the way. Plugged in the power, turned on the television, and within moments I was being asked to set up a connection to my wireless network, a matter of putting in the network password (you do password your network, don’t you?). Bingo, I was up and running and could rent a movie, or view YouTube or Flikr. A little more set up (turning on Home Sharing in iTunes on my computer and on the Apple TV) and I could play all of the media I have in iTunes on my computer – all the movies, iTunesU lectures, and digital music I own. One more bit of set-up (pointing iTunes to the photo folder I wanted to view) and I could view all of my digital photos or turn them into a slideshow.

The quality of all of this media is just great, either viewed on my (modest) digital television or played through my (equally modest) hi-fi system.

The first night my wife and I picked out a movie we’d missed at the cinema (The Men Who Stare At Goats), paid for it with a couple of clicks, and watched it through. Sure, we could probably have rented a DVD of this same movie for a couple of bucks less, but the hassle of having to go out to the video store, find the movie, drive it back home, then return it has got to add up to a few dollars of inconvenience value. The only disappointing thing is that, so far, there are a number of movies I would like to see which aren’t yet available for rent in the Australian iTunes store, but, as they say, patience is a virtue. And there are still plenty of movies available for rent which I would like to catch up with.

But the best thing about all of this is when I installed the Remote app on my iPad. It turns my iPad into the media centre of the house. With this, I can sit down in my armchair and scroll through all my media on my computer and start playing through the Apple TV. Being able to scroll through all my music albums and pick one to play instantly through my hi-fi is wonderful.

Then there’s the Internet connection. My daughter came round and mentioned a YouTube clip that our son-in-law had posted. Within a matter of moments we were viewing it full screen on our television.

So I have to confess it – I’m an Apple (TV) fanboy!

Some time ago, I wrote about my feelings for books, and where I thought reading was going.

At that stage (March 2009), I had just discovered reading on my iPod Touch. It was long before the iPad was announced, but I’m pleased to find that my earlier comments are all pretty much still valid. I still treasure the feel of a “real”, dead-tree book and will no doubt still hang on to most of my current collection of some 3,000 volumes – at least until the next time we move house!

But since I bought an iPad in late May of this year, it has become my reading device of choice.

I have now read almost a dozen books on the iPad, and I find it a very comfortable experience, though I am appalled at how badly some e-books have been constructed by the publishers.

Apart from free classics, I have paid full price for all of the e-books I have acquired.

My favourite e-book store is Books on Board, which has a great selection, good prices and a really easy mechanism for selection and payment. Though I have bought a couple of books from Amazon to read in their Kindle app, and a few from Kobo books to read in their app, I prefer to use the Apple iBooks app, which I find is by far the best of the reading apps on the iPad. However, in Australia Apple are still only offering classics from Gutenberg (they haven’t been able to negotiate agreements with local publishers, it seems).

Getting my books into iBooks has involved some shenanigans to remove the Digital Rights Management. I’m not going to tell you how I did this, because it’s arguably against US legislation to publish such information. But I am confident that I am within the law to actually do this – I have paid for the books, after all, and all I am doing is format-shifting them. What nonsense that we even have to worry about this stuff!!

But as well as books, I have been reading a lot of other stuff on my iPad. There are newspapers, for example. I also regularly look at the New York Times. I tried their “Editor’s Choice” app, but though it is well-designed I prefer their web site, which has more varied content.

My local-city newspaper, The Age, doesn’t have an app out as yet (and judging by the offering from their sister publication, The Sydney Morning Herald, it won’t be worth waiting for), but their web site is OK, if a little tricky to navigate by touch. My wife and I both sit reading The Age in the morning on our iPads as we have breakfast. In this regard, I am very fond of the set of MoviePegs I bought, which enable me to prop up the iPad in a portrait orientation.

In the morning I also check out the local weather, using a great Australian app called Oz Weather HD.

I also particularly like the Guardian newspaper app called Guardian Eyewitness. Every day there’s a stunning photograph, complete with tips for budding photojournalists.

Looking rather like a newspaper itself, though actually a collection of my favourite RSS feeds, is The Early Edition, which I use to scan through what is new. Mostly, though, I shunt off longer articles to the brilliant app Instapaper. I’m particularly enjoying following the 17th Century blogger, Sam Pepys, this way.

My latest delight has been discovering that I could subscribe to New Scientist magazine on the iPad, through the Zinio app.

Over the last 30 years (!) I have tried to keep up with New Scientist in many different ways – a subscription to the hard copy through my local newsagent (expensive), a subscription on microfische (required a special reader, and uncomfortable), a digital version through an organisation called Newsstand (I could only read this on my computer, sitting at my desk – also uncomfortable).

But finally, I can subscribe at a reasonable cost (only a third of the cost of the hardcopy), and read it in comfort in an armchair. Brilliant! And much more pleasant and interesting to see all of the photographs, diagrams and sidebars (and even the advertisements) in their right place in the magazine, with excellent layout. The pinch and stretch zoom capabilities of the iPad make this a very comfortable way to read a magazine. I wish The Age was available in this way.

And then there’s… well, comics. OK, I know I’m now nearly 60 years old and I shouldn’t be indulging in reading the kind of escapist stuff I read when I was 13, but the fact is that I still enjoy it. Some time ago I bought a DVD collection of 40 years worth of Spider-Man comics, all in PDF format. I read some of these on my computer, but as usual, sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen is hardly relaxing. But come the iPad, and the excellent GoodReader app, I can sit and read my way through these with great comfort and lots of nostalgia.

Then there are modern comics, or graphic novels, whatever. Both Marvel and DC comics have their own apps (based on the same engine) and both have a good selection of free comic books. I particularly enjoyed ElephantMen, both for the quality of the graphics and the interesting story.

And if we want to get out of the graphic gutter and reach for the literary stars, then there’s always the excellent Shakespeare Pro app. Every play the Bard wrote, complete with line numbers, search capabilities, illustrations and much more.

Reading will never be the same again.

(I started writing this post months ago, but only recently rediscovered the draft).

Well, you knew that I was going to buy an iPad, didn’t you? Indeed in recent months I’ve become quite the Apple fanboy. I lusted after an iPad from the moment I saw Steve Jobs demo it a couple of months ago. I ordered one on the very first day that we Australians could do so, on May 10th 2010.

In fact, I ordered two – a 32 GB wifi only version for my wife, who will use hers mainly at home, and a 32 GB wifi plus 3G for myself. I figured that we would need one each so we wouldn’t have to compete for the use of a single device.

Annoyingly, though my 3G model was delivered on May 28th, none of the local carriers would let you order micro-SIM cards or sign up for data plans before that date. I signed up with Telstra, figuring that they have the best wireless coverage, then had to wait for the SIM card. It arrived just in time for me to put it in the iPad and go through the very annoying activation process before we left to go on a 10 day holiday, taking the iPads with us.

I decided not to take my laptop with us, even though our holiday was mainly going to be about researching my wife’s family history. It would, I thought, be a great test of the iPad’s utility.

And indeed it proved very useful in many ways. The GPS chip and the Maps app helped us out many, many times; I could keep up with my email; we could look up things on the Internet; I used it to read books and magazines; I even used it as a (rather large) alarm clock!