I dunno, dock to your desktop and sync, then print - or maybe connect a USB printer via the USB adapter, or maybe print to a blue tooth printer, or output to a printer on your wireless network.
What a restricted device. <grins>
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Apple Features iWork Applications for iPad
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I dunno, dock to your desktop and sync, then print - or maybe connect a USB printer via the USB adapter, or maybe print to a blue tooth printer, or output to a printer on your wireless network.
What a restricted device. <grins>
Such a negative outlook. Who is going to do serious typing sat in a comfy position, drop the thing on a table I guess? or rest it on your lap while typing. I'm sure people will find a way, and I'm damn sure this has been thought of and will work just fine.
You make it sound like a bad thing?
This is a basic device for media consumption and light content creation. If people want the device to do more and are able to buy add-ons to make it do their bidding, then this is a good thing. There's no way that the big printer companies aren't going to produce simple drivers for this thing to print wirelessly to their blue tooth keyboards or over a wireless network, or via the USB adapter.
Jeez people like to moan about nothing.
Now *that* is the question I have been asking since I saw the presentation! Those apps have to support some kind of printing solution that doesn't involve sending the file to my computer.
I wish they would have said something about that already.
--DotComCTO
This is not designed to replace a netbook, or a laptop or a desktop. It is a new device in a new sector. It's for content consumption and light content creation, why don't people get this? It was described as better than a netbook (as netbooks are crap laptops for people without any money and not good at anything), not a replacement for one.
Printing seems a no brainer, this thing has wi-fi and bluetooth. Just the need the printing companies to provide drivers for their machines, but i'm sure Apple will have something with CUPS for basic print facility from day one.
I can answer that question in three words: "Eat up martha."
Simply drawing bitmaps with finger or a stylus of some kind is one thing But handwriting recognition just isn't yet possible at the levels of speed and reliability required. Apple, of all companies on the planet, knows this very well. It's possible that they're working on it and it's not ready yet; it's also possible that they've considered it carefully and decided it's just not worth the work it would take to get it right. For my part, I really couldn't guess which is more likely to be true. It could go either way.
It's a wonderful dream to imagine that someday we'll be able to scribble a mathematical equation and have it be instantly and flawlessly understood by the device. But we're just not quite there yet. It's a long road from recognizing a single simplified Chinese character to being able to interpret handwriting.
iWeb??
With its wifi and 3g capabilities, it would be totally awesome if Apple could have iWeb working on the iPad. I can see myself sitting on the couch, with iPad in hand, working on my website....
With its wifi and 3g capabilities, it would be totally awesome if Apple could have iWeb working on the iPad. I can see myself sitting on the couch, with iPad in hand, working on my website....
Keynote on iPad remote controllable?
Here's my question, with regard to Keynote on the iPad: Will it be possible to control iPad Keynote with a remote? For example, the iPhone/iPod touch Keynote Remote app?
I ask because right now the only way to control Keynote on iPad is by standing there at the iPad and swiping across it. But many, many times when presenting I'm in a position where the projector and my laptop are in the back of the room and I'm standing at the front talking. With my laptop and a USB dongle/remote (or Keynote Remote), that's not a problem. But if there isn't a similar solution/functionality for the iPad, then I can't ditch my laptop yet.
I know no one's had hands-on experience with it yet, but maybe some of the iPhone devs on the board have some thoughts on the likelihood/possibility of controlling the iPad remotely.
Here's my question, with regard to Keynote on the iPad: Will it be possible to control iPad Keynote with a remote? For example, the iPhone/iPod touch Keynote Remote app?
I ask because right now the only way to control Keynote on iPad is by standing there at the iPad and swiping across it. But many, many times when presenting I'm in a position where the projector and my laptop are in the back of the room and I'm standing at the front talking. With my laptop and a USB dongle/remote (or Keynote Remote), that's not a problem. But if there isn't a similar solution/functionality for the iPad, then I can't ditch my laptop yet.
I know no one's had hands-on experience with it yet, but maybe some of the iPhone devs on the board have some thoughts on the likelihood/possibility of controlling the iPad remotely.
Good grief! I hope that's not true because if it is, that's a complete oversight and utter nonsense.
--DotComCTO
I realize that hand writing recognition isn't easy but the Newton did it fairly well 20 years ago with ancient hardware.
Apple used to be a leader in this technology. Surely they could have built a reasonably good hand writing recognition package into the SDK for use in productivity and note taking apps.
Besides the pad format just cries out for pen sketching and pen note taking. Even if Steve is afraid of using one. I guess his hand were slapped too many times in penmanship class.
For me holding the ipad with one hand while writing with the other would be much more natural than trying to hold the ipad with one hand and type on a keyboard that takes up half the screen.
I think Bill Gates is right on this aspect of the tablet device and if the MS courier device actually comes to market as Gizmodo has stated, then Apple's ipad is going to look very lame in comparison. Granted it is rare for MS to actually produces something as interesting as Apple but MS appears to be headed in the right direction.
So I just asked an Apple rep via online chat about printing. They basically don't know the answer yet. That said, I got the impression that it may be a future feature and not baked into the current version of the OS.
That is a major disappointment if that support isn't there.
--DotComCTO
That is a major disappointment if that support isn't there.
--DotComCTO
Me too. I currently use my iPod Touch with the excellent GoodReader App. I have hundreds of government documents I've been wading through for our farm's big project and this lets me take the documents anywhere. I can be out tending the animals and sit down for a break to get some reading done while I wait for a birthing or observe animals, etc. Ironically, I think the iPad is going to be too big. I would like something about twice the size of the iPod Touch. Hmm... maybe we need a stretchable device - shrinks down to pocket size like an iPod Touch or you can stretch it up to 30" diagonal...
I ordered the case for both my iPads. $39 is pretty fair price and you can set it tilted for typing or more upright for video, etc. And of course my bluetooth keyboard will work too. I have tried just walking around typing on my bluetooth keyboard with one hand. It is pretty easy to do, found I can type 20 WPM that way. Holding the iPad and typing one hand should work as well or better. Going to be a lot easier than you think, I beleive.
Because people have such awful handwriting and it is slow. With the PalmOS they had great handwriting recognition. I could write very quickly with very few errors at about 40 words a minute. On the other hand I can type at about 140 words a minute with almost zero errors. The problem with the PalmOS is one needs to learn their special alphabet. Not a big issue for me, I was a calligrapher for years, but some people balk at learning a new character set. If you write neatly they'll understand it very well. But most people won't make the effort. Apple already figured this out a long time ago. They're right.
I want the USB/WiFi storage device too but GoodReader App is a good solution if you're looking for a document reader. I've been reading tons
of PDFs in it. Does JPG and other formats too.
I suppose it is possible that third parties might actually build a bluetooth keyboard into the opposing side of an ipad case. That would make the device more like a netbook for those that prefer a physical keyboard.
I get the impression that iWeb, like iDVD and maybe GarageBand, is effectively end-of-lifed. The world has moved on since iWeb was conceived. These days, the average individual puts stuff on the Web through services like Flickr and Facebook and Twitter and what's that other one Tumblr or whatever it's called. I have the sense that it's been a really long time since the average individual cared about renting out server space and putting up his own Web pages.
Apple's done this quite a few times in the last decade or so, I think. They ship a product that's really fantastically cool but then things change, and the product becomes obsolete. Not because something better came along, but because people simply stopped doing what that product existed to help them do.
If you're a happy iWeb user, and assuming I'm not totally wrong in my little amateur analysis, then you are clearly not the average individual, and it's a shame that the iPad isn't a good choice for you yet. Of course, as in all things, if there's demand, sooner or later there will be an app for that.
I assume that for the 1st generation of the iPad, users will have to rely on the same convoluted printing "solutions" that we have on the iPhone and iPod Touch - apps that require a server application on a desktop or laptop. As much as people here tout the iPad as a device for people who have no need for a full-fledged computer, you'd think that Apple would offer a real printing solution.
You are comparing typing on a physical keyboard to handwriting recognition. I am talking about one hand typing on an onscreen keyboard versus writing with one hand.
Besides have you ever tried typing math equations or create quick charts and shorthand symbols on an onscreen keyboard. Sorry your argument doesn't hold water.
Steve doesn't know how to hold a pen so he has banned it from his portable devices. Fine that's his choice but it would be better in the long run to have an option and I will bet that as the device progresses Apple will eventually cave in.
Are you talking about something similar to the touchpad in the back of the Adam?
Yeah, it did, but what people learned from that was that "fairly well" and "reasonably good" weren't sufficient. And it's not hard to see why if you think it through.
If you're scribbling down notes on paper, then short of the paper catching fire or something, information absolutely will not be lost. You might smear the ink, or you might have a hard time reading your handwriting later, but in general, everything you put onto that piece of paper will be there forever.
But with handwriting recognition, an error in transcription means information is lost permanently. If you're scribbling furiously, you might well not notice that the iPad interpreted "cancel contract" as "counsel contact" or whatever, and by the time you go back to look at what you'd written, it's too late.
It might be possible to work around this by storing everything you write as a bitmap as well as interpreted text, so you can go back and compare what the device thought you wrote against what you actually wrote. But that'd be kind of complicated, and it might not help you unless the device's interpretation is totally garbled and obviously wrong. If the device gets it close, you might not ever notice that you actually wrote something else and forgot about it.
Handwriting recognition is one of those weird things that needs to be virtually perfect in order to be even marginally useful.
Oh, no question that the vision behind Courier is really cool. But the vision behind the Knowledge Navigator was pretty freakin' awesome too, and none of that ever came to pass. Given Microsoft's track record over the past twenty years, does anybody have the slightest confidence that a product reminiscent of the Courier concept will ever hit the market? And if it does, does anybody really expect it not to suck?
It's always possible to be surprised, obviously. With a few exceptions* the Courier concept looks really cool, and I'd love to have one of my own. I hope those ideas actually end up in a product someday, instead of as quaint pieces of historical trivia on Youtube.
* What is with those cryptic gesture controls? I don't want to fumble with my device like I'm a nervous teenager on prom night searching frantically and fruitlessly for my date's little-man-in-the-boat. Touch controls are supposed to mimic direct manipulation of physical things, not force people to learn a new dialect of sign language.
It could be something like that or just a book like cover with a flat touch sensitive bluetooth keyboard built into the inside cover.
That wat you could open the ipad book in landscape mode and type on the inside cover leaving the complete ipad screen free for display like a normal netbook.
This would offer the choice of either using the ipad in native touch screen mode or in a docked typing mode but built into the case.