Today I set myself a challenge: to use no other device except for my iPad. Purely as an experiment to see how well it can handle the busy-ness that is my life. I will put to test the range of free and paid apps that I have at my disposal and see which ones excell at helping me with vital day to day goals.
8:56am – Pages – £5.99
I am writing this on the Pages app by apple themselves. It is brilliant. It has everything I feel I need to document this day and well worth the £6 I paid for it, basically a feature filled word processor for days like today. I was actually expecting the typing experience to be a little slow on iPad but I can tell you now, it isn’t. Writing this in landscape mode with my smart cover taking the load, typing is rather fast. I can almost say it is just as fast as a normal keyboard but there’s something about not having a physical key to press down on that is somewhat limiting to the speed at which you can type.
9:38am – Mail
The mail app let me check my 36 emails that I received throuought the night and it offered me a truly new way to browse through my mail by way of touch. I can find no faults with this app as I can do everything that I normally do on my desktop even with some features I can do better with the large touch interface.
11:03am – Koder – £3.66
I found myself needing to complete a C# server program that I have been working on for the last couple of days as a function just popped into my head that I can use to solve a performance problem that I was having. I remember a post I read on Gizmodo a while back that featured an iPad app that allowed you to code with colour formatting on the device. After downloading the app I realised that I needed to setup FTP access to my server back home so I can edit the files on the fly. A quick app store search and review reading later I found a decent vnc program that supports RDP so I can connect to my server 2008 machine back home. Overall I think the Koder app is great value as you can quite easily spend £50+ on some specialised IDE for the desktop. I can only think of two drawbacks to this app. Firstly is the fact that some of the commonly used symbols are hard to reach via the iPad keyboard which slows progress dramatically. Second is debugging, if I was working with PHP, HTML or CSS I could push up to the cloud in realtime and view my changes on safari. But with C# you cannot test without running the code that I have just written something that I can only do at a computer. And as all of you programmers know it’s very easy to miss out a semicolon or a double function in an IF statement, something that you can only fix either by spotting the mistake or by the compiler shouting at you.
14:36 – Safari
Currently there is no official Facebook app with iPad support so I turned to simply using facebook in the safari browser. While this worked perfectly I missed the chat and had to resort using the messages that they have integrated with the chat system. One drawback people seem to mention a lot with safari is the lack of flash support but using safari I. Ould not name one instance where I needed to use it, YouTube has HTML5 support and it’s own official app so no problems there. If you’re the type who likes to play flash games on your computer then I will simply quote apple by saying: “theres an app for that”.
Another thing that I would like to mention about safari and the general “on a whole” experience with the iPad is the smoothness of the animations and the transactions that are implemented into all of the apps on the iPad. You only need to watch a video of so done demonstratng maps or safari to get a feel of how smooth and clean the zooming and scrolling animations are.
17:52 – Battery life
I’ve just glanced up at the information bar and noticed that the battery percentage is at 58% which is startling as I have been bashing away at this thing for most of the day now and I’m only 40% down the battery life is truly outstanding for such a large display (my brightness is at 50%). Although apple advertise the battery life at 10 hours I think I’ll get a little more.
Overall I believe that this day journal has turned more into a review over anything else. I have reviewed a few of the apps that I will most probably use on a day to day basis and overall with my few days of experience I can safely say that the iPad is well worth the money and may even replace my current netbook and laptop for my day to day tasks.
