All entries for Saturday 17 July 2010

iPad, one month on

Follow-up to Dropbox on the CSC linux machines from Rudo's blog

Just back from a conference. Except for the presentation, I needed no laptop at all and in fact left it in the hotel room. But I did take my iPad. With the iPad, I could easily keep in touch with my research group, do pretty much all of the necessary email work, browse the web and do my editorial (hence serious) work. In addition, it was great for taking notes at the conference talks (which I could then with a simple click share with the people at home).

Originally, I had also planned to use the iPad for the presentation itself. For this, I invested in the [Keynote] app, Apples presentation software. But since I did the original presentation under MS Powerpoint, I needed to convert. In principle, Keynote can do this, but the result for me was appalling: format and position of material in the slides had been changed, no video play seems to be available in keynote, etc. So if you do presentations with PPT and then want to convert, expect unpleasant surprises. If you use fancy transitions and animations in PPT, again these may not work in Keynote. For more static content, this might be ok, but then why not use the PPT to PDF conversion and simply show PDFs via GoodReader?

Don't get me wrong, I expect that when one imports a Mac Keynote presentation, then things will work ok. It's just that with PPT, the current conversion is not good enough. Oh, and one more thing: presentation import has to be via iTunes, Keynote does not support DropBox, googleDocs or any other free service. I expect it will work with meMobile or iDisk, but then I do not use these Apple products.

What else? As the iPad does not have a USB dock, transferring files onto it outside of iTunes (and when you are travelling, you cannot simply expect iTunes to be installed everywhere) is a pain. Now I am using the FTP server [freeftp] which turns the iPad into a WiFi FTP server. So one can quickly move files onto the iPad and off again as long as WiFi access is assured. I also have some movies installed on the iPad via iTunes. Was watching them while on the train coming back from the conference. Works rather well and is a good way to entertain your tired mind on a train.

Rudo Roemer : 17 Jul 2010 17:39 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem