Favorite iPad apps
WordPress: If you have a WordPress site, this is pretty essential. The iPhone version is pretty good too, but obviously the iPad is perfect for this. I’ve found the WordPress admin to be wonky on Mobile Safari, so this is the best way to edit a WordPress site on iPhone OS.
MaxJournal: This app is a great example of an iPad app -- it does one thing and it does it well. It looks great, has elegant date navigation, and strips a journal down to the bare bones. It needs a password feature, but apparently, the feature is done and waiting for approval. The developer is very responsive to feedback, which is a good sign.
Kindle: Kind of obvious. The advantage over iBooks is that the books you buy are available on the iPhone or your Mac or PC (some books have a limit, I hit that with one of my books)
Tweetdeck: Free and supports lists and other custom filters, which are essential for reading Twitter.
NewsRack: RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. Well done, stable, with some nice touches.
And the disappointments:
CraigPhone: This is an iPad version of Craigslist. Tons of bugs. The app has an apology right on it (they put it in the AppStore without testing it on a real device). It’s free, so I guess that’s ok. Something about the interface just feels wrong though -- I suspect that they are using HTML views with some JavaScript drawing parts of the UI.
Tweetdeck: It’s the only usable twitter client for me, but it is crashtastic. Tweet-boom, tweet-boom -- move a column, buh-bye. Anyway, it’s free and I assume that they are working on it -- they need to check out my post about debugging memory crashes on the iPhone and it probably wouldn’t hurt to run a Build and Analyze once and a while.
NYT Editor’s Choice: First, you can’t find this app by searching the store for “NYTimes” or “NY Times” because they named it with NYT. And, you don’t get the whole paper? But, I do if I go to the website? I don’t get that -- just charge me.
No Google apps or Facebook: Pretty surprised that these big players with great apps are absent from the AppStore on day one. Google made GMail work great on an iPad, though -- if they had done the same with Reader, I might not have bought an app.
What the iPad needs to be your only computer
And this article explains the difference in computing habits between the Gen Xers that came of age during the PC revolution and the generation before and after us.The darndest thing happened in the last five days and I was fortunate to be privy to it. Apple has gotten people excited about computing. But this time, it’s not nerds or geeks and certainly not IT industry analysts. It’s everyone else. I had a curious set of three conversations this week. One with a grandma, one with a technophobe and the third with a self-proclaimed luddite.
Both of these articles make a great case, and although, I need a regular computer to do development, I would like everything else to migrate to an iPad.The reason I’m starting to think the Old World is ultimately doomed is because we are bracketed on both sides by the New World, and those people being born today, post-iPhone and post-iPad, will never know (and probably not care) about how things used to work. Just as nobody today cares about floppies, and nobody has to care about manual transmissions if they don’t want to.
I started to use Macs again after ten years when I got a digital camera. I read the instructions for the Windows software it came with and then just plugged it into a Mac I inherited -- it just worked. Since then, I’ve used a Mac for everything except my job (.NET SDK development).
Which brings me to my first problem with the iPad -- how do I connect my digital camera? Steve Jobs talked about how great the iPad would be for photos, but how do they get on the iPad to begin with? Undoubtedly, this will be solved, but it’s a problem that will make the iPad useless for a lot of people if this is their only computer.
Secondly, I don’t take a lot of pictures and almost no video and I have about 10-15 GB of photos (and 20-25 GB of music). 64 GB is just completely inadequate if this is going to be the only place to store them. For the iPhone, synching gives me downsampled photos and music if I want to save space, but I can’t do that to my primary copy. I’m sure iPads will get to bigger sizes, but I’m also sure that we’ll need more too.
Even if the iPad had a terabyte, I really need some off device storage -- iPads can be lost, which would be bad, but not as bad as losing all of my data. It’s unclear how the iPad can be backed up if it’s your only computer.
I know that these problems will be solved eventually, but right now -- it’s not really possible for the iPad to work without a host computer -- if it’s like the iPhone, it depends on synching too much.
I’m not sure what the solution will be, but I have a Time Capsule -- if the iPad had Time Machine, and if the Time Capsule could suck the images off my digital camera (perhaps using the iPad as the UI), then I’d be most of the way there.
How the iPad will affect the Kindle
This will be hard for Amazon because, before the iPad, they were clearly the differentiated premium market-leader, but now that market has been subsumed. The only hope for Kindle is to become the cost-leader and to let third-party developers turn the Kindle into cheap niche devices.In his 1980 classic Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analysing Industries and Competitors, Porter simplifies the scheme by reducing it down to the three best strategies. They are cost leadership, differentiation, and market segmentation (or focus). Market segmentation is narrow in scope while both cost leadership and differentiation are relatively broad in market scope.
Once the KDK is available, we’ll see the top end come down to about $400. Amazon can do this because they’re set to make money from their free 3G, in the form of subscription applications. I’m sure a significant component of the $489 price is to offset the expected 3G use that isn’t offset by book sales.
This strategy is more in line with Amazon’s online retail strategy. They currently compete on price and let third-party stores focus on niche markets. Even though Porter cautions against trying to have two strategies, it can be overcome if different business units focus on each strategy independently -- what could be more independent than a third-party.