One Last Thing about the iPad

The inclination was to take both the Macbook Pro and the iPad to Apple's World Wide Developer's conference, but I still went back and forth on this, and finally decided to take just the iPad for the week.

PDF support was a big snag in that acrobat forms simply wouldn't work on the iPad. My co-worker said that it was Adobe's fault in that they purposely made it that forms created with Acrobat form wouldn't work with anything other than Adobe's products. I can't verify this, but the two pdf forms I got via email attachments simply gave me a message that I needed to upgrade Acrobat 9. I ended up using a friend's netbook running Windows XP.  However, I wrote my signature on the iPad using a Pogo stylus and Autodesk Sketch, exported it an image and mailed it to myself.

Other than that, and the stray web site that relied on Flash for all or most of their navigation, or the one web site where their embedded window with scrolling didn't work at all, it was as I expected in that it met my needs just fine.

While the Apple bluetooth keyboard I carried along was welcome for writing long emails, the onscreen keyboard ended up being used more overall. I think I could just leave the physical keyboard a home and probably will do that next time.

I bought Autodesk Sketch and Korg iElectribe. Both are great applications that show off the iPad in different ways. I bought iElectribe because I have admittedly experience with beatboxes and want to learn about them. Sketch is very nice and intuitive. However, Brushes won an Apple Design award at this conference.

In the end, the iPad is so almost, almost there. My friend with the netbook is selling his and getting an iPad, even though there is one web site he relies on for work that only works with Internet Explorer (they even warned people to not upgrade with IE 8 when it was first released). He's betting this will change and I think he is right. I think we are witnessing a big, rapid transition to HTML5, which all the major browser manufacturers are behind - including Microsoft. It is not that the iPad will singularly force this change, it is that it illustrates why this change needs to take place.

Stay tuned.