Re: [PLUG] OT: Web development on an iPad

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:57 AM, Jonathan Simpson
<jsimpson@jdsnetwork.com> wrote:
>
> Truth is though, while it's fun to tinker with, I'd rather have a keyboard.
>

My general experience with phones/tablets/etc is that they're great
for browsing things, and not so great for creating things.  So, if
you're a manager who mainly reads emails and replies with yes/no,
they're very useful.  Maybe if you only create slide decks it actually
helps to encourage brevity.  However, anybody who actually creates
anything of substance is going to find the lack of keyboard very
painful.

So that then brings us to the docking station concept (whether it
involves actual plugs or just bluetooth.  Many suggest that this will
be the convergence between tablets and PCs.  I'm not convinced - the
UI model for something like a mouse is just fundamentally different
from that of a tablet.  If I'm dealing with tons of text the last
thing I want to be doing is trying to select and manipulate it with a
big fat finger.

However, as UI designers steadily force the issue by making PC desktop
environments steadily resemble those for tablets, the advantage of the
PC UI may go away, and once PCs have been made fairly useless it
wouldn't surprise me if they became a lot less common.

At work, I think half the appeal of iPads and such isn't so much that
the iPads are that much better, so much as the fact that there is no
corporate control over the experience, so it hasn't been made so much
worse.  My corporate PC takes about 30 minutes from being booted to
being moderately useful, and from time to time things freeze up for
30-60 seconds.  In some sense the advantage of the walled garden is
that some organizations really do need to be protected from
themselves...

Rich
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