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I'm a tinkerer with technology, and occasionally strike lucky with it. I co-chair the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and I'm in charge of designing O'Reilly's conference software platform, Expectnation.
I've written a few computer books, most recently "Learning Rails", in collaboration with my old friend and co-conspirator Simon St.Laurent.
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If you've been waiting to get versions of the productivity apps Omnifocus or Nozbe on your iPad, the wait will soon be over.
The makers of Omnifocus report that they are in feature freeze for their iPad app, and are just tuning performance and eliminating crashes.
Meanwhile, Nozbe are set to submit their app to the Apple App Store next week, complete with Evernote integration.
Penultimate is a really nice emulation of a paper notebook on the iPad. It's a great place to do some thinking, much as if you were sketching on a whiteboard or notepad.
Here's some ideas that would make it even nicer:
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I also found iBooks, Apple's book reader and store, easy to use, and read a couple of books on it. I consider the larger color screen superior to the Kindle's, and encountered no eye strain. But the iPad is much heavier than the Kindle and most people will need two hands to use it. The iBooks app also lacks any way to enter notes, and Apple's catalog at launch will only be about 60,000 books versus more than 400,000 for Kindle.
Quote above is from Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal, emphasis added.
Reading in bed is a reason I like softcover books (and ebooks on my iPhone), so you don't need two hands to hold a book. It would be a shame if I couldn't do that with the iPad.
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Update: I've revised these thoughts and posted them for broader consumption over at O'Reilly Radar.
Much has been said about the iPad, but I thought I'd pitch in with thoughts I had over the weekend.
After reading an article saying that the iPad was antisocial, because it wasn't hooked up to IM or had SMS, it struck me this was a restricted view of what it means to be social.
The iPad is real-life social in a way that a phone and a laptop just aren't. You really can just hand it to someone to show them what you mean: share photos, videos, writing with real people right next to you. I can see using it to learn with a child, share pictures with my mother, discuss house remodeling, and many other tasks normally done with paper. In conversation with friends last week I realized that, sat in its dock, the iPad would be the ideal cookbook.
In the office, the iPad offers a middle-ground I've found lacking in electronic devices. Bringing my laptop into meetings puts up a screen between me and others, is a hassle to unplug and carry around, and can be personally distracting. Taking my iPhone to make notes makes people think I'm bored of the meeting and sending text messages to friends instead. So normally I choose paper, and tend to lose my notes afterwards.
The iPad is a device that will find fans not only in a family setting, but in a creative setting where collaboration and comment is in person. Criticized for not being open because of digital rights management, the iPad is actually very open, in the sense that it erects few physical barriers to sharing.
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