All entries for Friday 18 June 2010

iPad Day 2

Follow-up to iPad Day 1 from Rudo's blog

OK, day 2. Actually, still in day 1, I ended up reading with the iPad for about an hour one of their free ebooks. There are quite a number of ebook readers offering free content (70+ years old books mostly, so classics). No problem reading in bed, did not feel heavy in my hands and I have found a reader with a good "night" mode [WattPad].

Right, so now to day 2.

Battery at about 70% level at the start.

Back at work. eduroam works nicely, but I just cannot seem to get hotspot to work. I get the login screen up, type my credentials, but then nothing happens. People in the office say that this is also an iPhone problem. Not good. VPN also does not work, but this could be because it would need the hotspot to connect first. This is of course a big problem: trying to access any journals does only get me to the entry pages, downloading PDFs is out as the eduroam is not recognized as a Warwick U IP address and hence I am being asked for money to pay for downloads!

Installed "papers", an App which Mac users tell me works great on the Macs. Works fine for the iPad, except I can't really test it with published online PDFs because of the non-authentication issue (hotspot not working) above. Seems "papers" will seamlessly synchronize with Macs and iPhones, but does not do it for me since I have a Win7 laptop. Still, if you own a Mac, you will like this, I expect.

Then I got "PDF Reader Pro for iPad" which is a simple PDF reader, but which also allows you to simply (via iTunes) download PDFs onto the iPad.

Which highlights the BIG issue: my iPad has 60GB storage, but I can only access this either via direct download of data from the Web (browser) or by synchronizing with iTunes. So this is not useful as an external storage media! You simply cannot drag-and-drop anything from a Win7 laptop onto the iPad without going thru the iTunes application first. And going thru iTunes is not nearly as intuitive as the iPad itself.

Still, going back to the "PDF Reader", via iTunes I managed to make my PDF library available on the iPad. Sadly, PDF Reader is not as flexible as the "papers" app, e.g. no automatic extraction of bibliographic data, no search within the PDF documents, etc. It is in the end, simply a PDF viewer. But viewing it certainly can: two-column journal formats fit nicely onto the iPad, both in portrait and landscape mode. So this *is* useful as a scientific paper reader!

I then found myself in a meeting with a PDRA and two students, discussing a research project. Very naturally took the iPad and typed some notes into it. Easy to do, keyboard is quite workable althought the 10-finger system is not what it is made for. Still, had a set of notes at the end of the meeting which I managed to then send to all participants via email (one click). Great! This felt very natural, perhaps I can continue doing this! Tony Arber (a Macxpert) even suggested that there might be an App like "Mac Journal" to help me do this even better. Perhaps I'll give it a try soon.

OK, next I went up to Physics coffee to "show-off" the iPad to the other Physicists. Everyone was curious, got a good number of laughs out of it. But at the serious level, we were discussing how this could be useful for research and teaching. After some deliberation, we found that it might lead to replacing laptops. Afterall, much of what we do with laptops these days is emailing and web browsing. Here the iPad is clearly capable of both (good for email, great for browsing) and much easier to handle (both from a software as well as hardware angle - small, relatively lightweight, etc.). I guess this is particularly true for heavy computer users or theoretical people such as myself. One the other hand, I see that many of my experimental colleagues use their laptops also to have their data with them when they go on travels. And data analysis is something which the iPad will *not* do (just try transfering it from your PC!).

Last, I ventured to put the theory to test: I went home in the evening for the first time in many months *without* my laptop! Just the iPad this weekend for me. So stay tuned and see how I will fare.

PS: I do of course have a desktop at home for serious stuff.

PPS: Just spend some enjoyable minutes doing the weekly email leftovers on the iPad without having to go upstairs to the desktop. Although "enjoyable" is relative, did this while watching the game. Not a good day for Englands football (or Germany's for that matter). Battery level at 20%, needs recharging (the iPad, I mean).

Rudo Roemer : 18 Jun 2010 23:10 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Day 1b

Follow-up to iPad Day 1 from Rudo's blog

By the way, I am having to write this blog from a standard computer. The iPad's safari browser seems incompatible with the Java editors in SiteBuilder. I checked that this is not just a blog problem, it's the same for all SiteBuilder pages. So if we want iPads at Warwick, I am sure this is something which eLab will have to tackle.

PS: The raw HTML editor works. But it feels cluncky to have a 21st century device editing in what feels like a 19th century mode.

Rudo Roemer : 18 Jun 2010 22:24 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem