Comments on: iPad: The Missing Heart Of It

By: mikecane

mikecane — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 15:47:09 +0000

>>>What happens when you’ve got thousands of documents?

Yes, I thought of that too because I’ll probably run into that situation shortly after I own an iPad. It will be interesting to see if there’s an upper boundary on the number of files.

By: laura

laura — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 10:14:45 +0000

Yes, this sounds like it’s on the right track for sharing, but it’s still missing something. What happens when you’ve got thousands of documents? Will finding and presenting them in this way be sufficient?

To my mind, it will need something more. Something along the lines of Devonthink but with a simpler, more intuitive interface.

By: mikecane

mikecane — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:17:54 +0000

Wonderful article. Thanks.

By: mikecane

mikecane — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:14:32 +0000

This is why I said the iPad is incomplete. It’s just natural that people will tote their iPads around, meet with friends or be in business meetings, and have things they want to or need to exchange. I’m sure it’s coming and if it’s not added pre-sales, it will be shortly thereafter. Perhaps they need to put finishing touches on iwork.com beforehand.

By: laura

laura — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:20:45 +0000

This struck me too in watching the Keynote. I was surprised that Steve didn’t mention collaboration and that Apple doesn’t seem to have built that into the software suite they are shipping with the product.

OTOH, and as you mentioned, on my iPhone, I have applications that already enable simple peer networking applications–exchange of data or collaborative creation (canvas sharing), for example. That works via bluetooth or even in a cloud model.

So really, this is something that Apple can easily address in software releases later and perhaps it isn’t surprising that it wasn’t emphasized in the Keynote so as not to dilute the main message.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean to dismiss that here, getting collaboration right is not an easy problem to solve. Look at the mess of Google Wave. I’d love to see what Apple’s design talent could do with that.

By: darby

darby — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:03:03 +0000

Don’t panic, Appleinsider has noted the solution here:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/29/apple_reinventing_file_access_wireless_sharing_for_ipad.html

An interesting take on the ‘file-system’ aspect of the iPad.

By: Piers

Piers — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:13:17 +0000

>>> Why can’t two iPads discover one another, link, and share iWork files and photos?

Because then they’d need Shrek ears like the OLPC laptop?

By: mikecane

mikecane — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:51:36 +0000

I don’t know where you got that idea. It’s iWork, so of course the Mac and iPad can work on the same files. I’m talking about emailing them out. Which is probably possible because Steve Jobs mentioned to Mossberg in a video that he could do a Save As… to Word format and email that. You bring up a good omission there too: fonts. But I tend to doubt that.

By: William Donohue

William Donohue — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:46:21 +0000

I’m also hoping the next iteration of the iPhone/iPad OS allows for apps to pass data to each other. Education/research specific apps would be so much better if they could have data sets in common.

By: Blad_Rnr

Blad_Rnr — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:42:49 +0000

What makes you think a Pages document created on an iPad could not be opened on a Mac, or vice versa?

I am more interested to see how they are going to handle fonts. Is it possible to add new fonts to the iPad? Imagine a company uses a particular font. You can forget using it as a presentation device if they were not able to add that particular font to their iPad. Steve loves fonts. It was at the heart of the first Mac. I doubt he would dismiss that option.