#513850 - 04/03/1010:10 AMRe: Just got my iPad…
[Re: John Rougeux]
MacBozo
Nut Dood
Registered: 04/20/02
Posts: 16629
Loc: Pinellas Park, Florida
zwei has his and Shawn King has scored one according to tweets. With my limited budget, I'll wait for the refurbs to show up at the Apple Store online.
Our UPS driver at work is a Mac user. They had a few iPads show up at the local facility on Friday instead of today. As soon as the first one was found they had to stop everything and start looking for more. It was like they had found a dirty bomb or something.
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#513861 - 04/03/1011:31 AMRe: Just got my iPad…
[Re: zwei]
six_of_one
Pool Bar
Registered: 04/19/02
Posts: 3902
Loc: Alexandria, VA
I have mine as well. I also purchased the VGA adapter but have yet to get to an external monitor to be able to check out how that performs. Video output I hear is limited to 1024 x 768, which I knew going in, although there's a "wide screen" option in the settings that sounds intriguing ...
Synced over Sherlock Holmes and it looks just gorgeous! Although I guess at this point the iPad doesn't appear to support the additional content that you can access on your Mac or an AppleTV ...
Bought and downloaded Keynote, since this was a main interest in my getting the device. Put a 170MB Keynote file on it and opened it up and was somewhat disappointed at all the graphics that had big ?s on them and the shifting of the artwork that did make it through the conversion process. I'll have to go through the original file on my Mac to se what the missing artwork has in common that the iPad doesn't appear to like ...
You have to use iTunes in order to xfer files from your Mac to the iPad, which means if you're going to be creating something using graphics, you'll have to synch over all the source images before assembling them in Keynote or Pages -- kind of a kludgy process if you ask me, and I'm not sure how one would be able to use imagery w/o and external computer from which to synch ...
Also, there are a limited amount of fonts available on the iPad and you don't appear to be able to add any, so content creation is somewhat constrained in that regard. Additionally, not all of the animation options are available on the iPad, so a lot of stuff just defaulted to a smooth fade. Long and short: it looks like a nice little version of Keynote right now, but one will definitely have to develop specifically to the iPad's relative restrictions in order to get something good-looking ...
Anyways, onwards!
I also grabbed the free iBooks app, which comes with a free copy of Winnie the Pooh! I had also synched over Classics, which I have been using on my iPhone. Suffice it to say that reading stuff on the iPad blows anything on the iPhone away. I have seen -- but not actually used -- a Kindle, which I hear is much lighter than the iPad, which I can see being a bit tiring if you're not resting it on something while you're reading (all the Kindle users I've seen tend to hold that in the air -- I would think your hands/arms would get tired lofting the iPad for any significant amount of time) ... But overall I can see actually reading a book on this, whereas (even though Classics is great!) reading something on the iPhone is reserved for moments of absolute boredom ;-)
Safari looks great and is petty speedy. I haven't tried any of the Apple-approved sites yet, though, so don't know how well the whole HTML-5 deal actually works in practice ... Typing on the screen keyboard is *much* better than on the iPhone, as one might imagine, and since I'm a hunter/pecker (heh -- he said "pecker") I don't mind the lack of tactile feedback of screen keyboards ...
Other than that, I really haven't played too much with it -- but the exploration continues =D