After a 24-hour interval ortwoof using the iPad , my brain seemed to have rewired itself . It ’s not that the iPad is better or worse than the Mac ; it ’s just that different things are grueling to do on each gadget .
The affair I found the heavy to get used to on the iPad was the lack of window . On the Mac , I consider nothing of arrange a entanglement web browser and a schoolbook editor program , or two schoolbook - editor windows , side by side and then referring to one while typing in the other . On the iPad , that ’s insufferable , as I found on the morning of 24-hour interval three when I seek to start compose this story from my notes .
That third solar day also happen to coincide with the weekly faculty videoconference meeting , conducted viaGoogle+ ’s Hangout feature . Using the iPad for this was frustrating for a couple of reasons : First , the Google+ app does n’t have a aboriginal iPad interface and must be used in the 2X mode . Second , there ’s no way to tap the URL for a resort and have it dilute the Google+ app ; I had to have a confrere ask round me through Google+ itself .
Trying to connect to a staff meeting via Google Hangout from the iPad proved to be a hassle.
After the encounter , I spent some meter proofreading the PDFs of an ebook Macworld is preparing . While Mac OS X has Preview , iOS has no PDF reading capacity built in ( unless you ’re viewing a PDF in Safari or Mail ) . So I turn to one of my best-loved apps , Good.iWare ’s $ 5 GoodReader ( ) ; not only can it handle PDFs with aplomb , but it downloaded the file from a URL and unzipped it .
However , the couple of hr I expend proofing those chapters adversely affected my iPad ’s barrage fire life . For the first two 24-hour interval of my experimentation , the battery held up spectacularly ; by 5:00 each afternoon , it had dropped to about 18 percent of capacity . By the remainder of work on daylight three , however , it had dwindled to just a few percent , and I was forced to plug it in to terminate up . That ’s still estimable than my MacBook Air , which can head for the hills from full to no bearing in an good afternoon .
Trying to connect to a staff encounter via Google Hangout from the iPad rise to be a hassle .
The iPad’s inconsistent autocomplete behavior from app to app can be frustrating.
Almost Mac-like
As I write my wrapper - up pillar at the closing of twenty-four hour period three , I found myself thinking again about how well the iPad work with an international keyboard . Not only can you enter text , but you could use intimate keyboard shortcuts to do things like copying and pasting , unfastening and redoing , and moving the cursor and selecting schoolbook .
That last one in particular is a godsend . If you ’ve spent any time seek to select text on an iPad , you ’ve probably spent time wrestling with that magnifying glass interface . But savvy Mac keyboardists who are conversant with all the trick of the Command , Option , Shift , and pointer key will incur themselves breezing along as if they were pose in front of their computing equipment .
In the end , though , the iPad ’s keyboard integration works just well enough to make you wish it worked good . There are a sight of places where you ’d think shortcuts would work , but they do n’t . For instance , there ’s no way to get back to the household screen door or navigate between apps from the keyboard . And even with iOS 5 ’s addition of plentiful text in Mail , you ca n’t use the familiar keyboard shortcuts to apply bold , italic , or underlining to your text . And in some places , the iPad ’s keyboard backup is wildly discrepant . For example , when autocompleting an email speech , you may use the arrow key to scroll through the list of mesmerism and the Return Florida key to take one . But adjudicate to do the same with a list of autocomplete URLs in Safari , and you get bubkes . Too often , you have to go back to the touch screen .
pass a couple hours — or heck , 20 mo — with an iPad , and you ’ll see pretty quickly that the thought of a touchscreen Mac does n’t make much sense . Having to constantly elevate your hands from the keyboard to interact with the screen just feel wrong . It ’s not simply the strangeness of it : The effort of lift your branch — instead of , say , shifting it sideway to a mouse or trackpad — is important . And there ’s that problem I ran into on day one , demand two hands to perform most on - projection screen gestures . This is n’t a slight to the iPad , though — its interface feels perfectly natural when you utilize it in your lick or bear it in your hands . It ’s an issuance of squeeze an iPad - mould oarlock into a Mac - shaped muddle .
The iPad ’s discrepant autocomplete behavior from app to app can be thwarting .
Using the iPad as your primary machine forces you to adjust the way you think about and prioritise what you ’re doing . For example , on the good afternoon of that third day , I realise I had neglected the Campfire way for several hours . Unlike the Mac , the iPad devote you no way to keep an middle on a schmoose way windowpane . None of the Campfire clients I tried had notifications , so if they were n’t running in the foreground , I had no way to know what was break on .
That is n’t always a bad thing , though . For example , it made me concentrate on the tasks at hired hand , instead of being perpetually disorder by Twitter , IM , or my RSS provender . But some job do on occasion get lost in the shambling .
funnily , writing on the iPad felt the most foreign of any of my body of work tasks . As counterintuitive as it might sound , I ’m used to make a lot of thing going on while I drop a line . That ’s one of the cause I like to act in cafés : The background randomness forces me to focus . When I ’m present with nothing but a blank page , I find it hard to concentrate ; my mind wanders ; I question what ’s die on behind the scenes that I ’m not pay attention to .
Afterword
By the end of my three - daylight experiment , I felt as though I ’d gotten the hang of working on my iPad . I feel like cursing it only once , when Safari reloaded a tab in which I ’d been writing , erasing all of my progress . And there were Mac affair that I definitely had n’t missed : the spinning beachball , for example . The iPad ’s snappiness equal that of my MacBook Air , and I seldom feel as though I was waiting for it to catch up to me .
I had a definite sensory faculty that this might be the future tense of work out on a computer . I spent fiddling if any fourth dimension managing files or saving my data point ( just as in Mac OS X Lion ) . And thanks to Dropbox and iCloud , I did n’t worry at all about confused information . That ’s perhaps the biggest alteration in switch from a Mac to the iPad : The engineering becomes almost transparent . You are simply writing , or version , or browse . It ’s all about the task itself , while the engineering you ’re using fades into the background .
Is the iPad ready to be your only computer ? It ’s not quite ready to be mine , but I doubt that ’ll be the case evermore . I assure enough in these few days to realize that the iPad will soon be quick for whatever I fox its fashion . That will hap in part because the iPad will adjust and change . But so will we .
Dan Moren is elderly associate editor in chief for Macworld .
