I know what you’re thinking. “Two blog posts in one day? Oh, no he din’t!”
But yeah, I did. Even after whining in my last post about how I needed to limit my blogging, I was writing an e-mail to someone and it got me on a rant.
Been using the iPad a lot lately for a variety of things. Most of my web surfing, e-mail, and .pdf viewing has migrated to the iPad/couch rather than my desk, which has been a big benefit at making the desk a place of work, which in turn trains me like a dog into being productive in this space.
I’ve also been reading my first eBook, Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold. Reading prose on the iPad is, ironically, the hardest thing for me to get used to. Again like Pavlov’s dog, I am trained to think of electronic text as work. It seems impossible to take pleasure in such a thing. I miss the feel of a book in my hands, the feel of the paper. I expect I will push past it and it will get easier with time, but right now, it is weird.
On the other hand, the iPad is just plain perfect for comics in every way. If all the comics being produced today were available for the iPad with an easy on-easy off subscription service, I would never buy another floppy again and not miss it one bit. I hate fucking bagging those things. It’s why I switched to TPB’s, but with TPB’s, you have to wait at least 6 months between installments.
I’ve generally been growing more accustomed to the iPad’s Mac interface, as well. The organization is a totally different mindset from Windows, and gives you a lot less control. There are no confirmations that this file saved properly or that file reached its destination intact. You kind of have to trust that the computer knows what it’s doing and won’t fuck up. It’s like driving automatic for the first time after spending your whole life driving stick.
For the most part, I’m finding I miss the control less and less. It came with a ton of needless maintenance. The iPad has yet to fuck anything up, and it’s been a couple of weeks. The only serious glitch I’ve had was when I tried to load like 500 MB of .pdf files into Stanza at once and the iPad crashed. I expect this is Stanza’s problem and not Apple’s, but even so, I held down the power and home keys for 5 seconds and the whole thing rebooted in like a minute. The whole episode probably took about 5 minutes out of my life.
But I’ll admit, it was a looooooong five minutes. Five minutes where I was convinced I had broken My Precious, and broke out in a cold panicked junkie sweat.
Because that’s the thing. It seems like Macs work seamlessly and invisibly, but when they break, the whole thing just shuts down. There are no warnings. No troubleshooting options. One minute your iPod’s working fine, and then suddenly you have a little picture of a sad face on your screen, adding insult to injury while you book an appointment at the Apple Genius bar. It’s like trading death by a thousand cuts for the Sword of Damocles.
The Apple approach is more accessible, and the smarter move for capturing market share. I don’t even think I’ll miss fixing my own computer, if all I have to do is carry my light-ass iPad to the store and let someone else fix (or replace) it for me.
But I do think Apple would be wise to bend a little and also include some concessions to analytical folk like me, like a hierarchical filing interface that lets you keep your shit organized and better synching. I’m never going to be able to cut the umbilical to Windows/my desktop computer without that.
Posted on June 12, 2010 at 4:20 pm by PeatB
Filed under Musings, My Reviews, Tech, Writing
1 Comment »
I have made some alagai hora from some unknown coreling bones, Arlen must have left them for me. As the bones proved to be really hard I decided to paint them with tar. They tell me something… I think I can just see the paths that Jardir and Arlen will take… I can’t tell you though 
. These alagai hora actually glow with power, so powerful that they seem to resist a bit of sunlight. See for yourselves, alagai hora working FULL TIME!
