Thursday, Jan 28, 2010 iPad - I don't know what the heck i have to do with it...
The iPad… Steve Jobs calls it a revolutionary device.
Hm… I watched the keynote of the event. I am not convinced it’s revolutionary. I mean, compare with the launch of iPhone, it’s not revolutionary at all. People’ve been using crappy symbian and win-mobile devices for years. The iPhone is the first smart phone which is usable! Multi-touch, maps, the safari browser… everything is unprecedented.
This iPad thing… there’s not much “soft” innovation there. It’s mainly a content consumption device. I want new hand gestures, new ways to use word processor, new ways to read books… Now, it’s more a super-size iPod Touch to normal people. By normal people, I mean people who don’t care it’s IPS LCD, Apple’s own silicon or if there’s multitasking.
Ha… maybe it’s Steve’s plot. He purposely leaves rooms for us to innovate on those areas. Maybe, later, there will be a super cool NYTimes reader by NYTimes, super cool graphing and data analysis app and a super-sized Finger?
Haha… I don’t know what I will do with Finger for iPad…. That’s worth some brainstorming session this weekend :)
Apple’s presentation is definitely focusing on contents and entertainment. These are, well, straight forward innovation. This hugh multitouch screen + App Store offers golden opportunity for the publishing industry to innovate their contents for this new media. But, what’s other killer usage? Should an indie like me who won’t be writing my own memoir nor interested in gaming be excited?
Without multitasking and a hardware keyboard, I don’t think it’s possible to directly port traditional desktop app to this thing. I can almost certainly say it won’t be a pleasure to type simply because you can’t rest your fingers on the on-screen keyboard. Another bumper, user can no longer reach the whole screen with one thumb.
Hm… a large screen where there’s no multi-window support and multi-task support… should I layout my app with more data? Just layout tiered data on the layout instead of the drill down paradigm in iPhone?
That’s the challenge… I don’t know what what heck I will do yet…
Livescribe Pen SDK Wondering how to find the frame of status item?