Rich Mintz  

I’ve written before about my attempts to use the iPad more aggressively as a laptop replacement, and I am starting to have some success. In particular, the combination of the Twelve South Compass iPad Stand (more here) and the Marware Sport Grip iPad Case have made the thing much more useful. The rubberized (actually silicone) Marware case improves “lap grip” for casual typing, and the Compass makes the iPad more suitable for tabletop use in 3 different positions.

I’ve also started using my Apple Bluetooth aluminum keyboards (at home and at work) with the iPad, and aside from temperamental pairing (basically, any paired Mac laptop within 1/4 mile takes precedence over the iPad, so you constantly have to un-pair your laptop and re-pair the iPad), this works great too. Now I’ve started to fiddle around the edges of the system to make it incrementally more usable.

One thing that drives me crazy is that (unless you buy the custom keyboard dock) there’s no keyboard shortcut for “press the Home button on the iPad,” and so no way to activate fast app switching without fumbling with the iPad touchscreen. Except, wait a minute — as I learned this morning, there is! It takes advantage of VoiceOver, the iOS accessibility scheme.

It’s actually quite easy (click through to the source post for more).

First, you activate VoiceOver on the iPad, and specify that a Home button triple-press will turn VoiceOver on or off. Then, you just learn a few simple commands and practice, and a lot of common quickie things (like app switching, scrolling through web pages, etc.) become possible without taking your hands off the keyboard. This is most useful when, e.g., you’re writing a blog post on the iPad, in the WordPress app, using the keyboard, and you want to hop over to a web page for a second to check something. Now you can do that without your hands leaving the keyboard, as follows:

1. press ctrl-opt-H twice to bring up the app switcher
2. press right-arrow to move to Safari, then ctrl-opt-spacebar to tap
3. press opt-down-arrow to scroll in Safari (or, if needed, right-arrow to move to the page selection button, etc.)
4. when done, switch back, via ctrl-opt-H twice, then right-arrow as needed, then ctrl-opt-spacebar to tap

It’s easier than it sounds. And this is without using Quick Nav (as described in the article, which for some kinds of operations is faster). Try it and see.

Since (thanks to weather) I have 2 unexpected hours to kill in the United pier of LGA’s central terminal — one of the least pleasant places I can think of to spend 2 hours, but nothing to be done about that now — I’ll offer you a few brief notes about today’s airport experience:

I scared the TSA by accident

Apparently the Compass iPad stand, when folded and stowed in your bag, looks like a shiv on X-ray. My bag got stared at on the X-ray, then searched, then stared at on X-ray again, then searched again. It wasn’t until five minutes had gone by that I realized I had an idea what they were looking for.

Unfortunately, if you ask a TSA agent “what are you looking for?” he isn’t going to tell you, so I tried again with “there’s a steel iPad stand folded up in there that probably showed up as a long, thin metal object.” That enabled him to find it in the bag and I was sent on my way.

Skype is changing more than voice calling

I’ll have more to say soon about Skype 5 — which I downloaded over the weekend — as I start rolling it into my everyday life. I no longer have a landline, iPhone call quality is spotty, and even the voice quality over VoIP in my office leaves something to be desired, so given that Skype tends to deliver better-than-the-available-phone-options voice quality, I’ve been using it more. Now that it supports multi-way video calling, I have even more reasons to play with it.

But the aspect of Skype 5 I’m most surprised and pleased by is what they’re calling Skype Access, which is basically the ability to use your Skype credit balance, via Skype’s billing system, to pay by the minute to use public wi-fi networks (such as Boingo Wireless in the airport) that were previously available only by daily or monthly subscription. If you keep the Skype menu in your menu bar or your system tray, like I do, this means that whenever you’re within range of a commercial public network (which includes most of the time I find myself looking for a quick fix of Internet access, except when I’m actually in motion), instant-on pay-by-the-minute access is just a pulldown away.

The per-minute cost is high-ish, in the range of $10-12/hour (promoted at 14 cents, but I was actually just charged 19 cents, presumably including taxes). But on the other hand, if you keep your eye on the meter, and stay disconnected except during the minutes you actually need data, it can be convenient — and for short bursts of Internet, it’s certainly cheaper than paying by the hour.

I’ve never been much of a customer of pay-by-the-hour wireless providers, because I usually feel either ripped off (because I don’t use anywhere near an hour), or forced to make a commitment to a longer-term plan without knowing whether it’s justified. Using this kind of plan, even if I pay more, I feel better, because I’m controlling my own spend. Everyone wins here: Skype sees me spend down my balance faster, the ISP gets a premium rate from a customer who otherwise wouldn’t bother, and I get the few minutes of Internet I needed without having to spend a fortune.

In practice I’ll rarely use this (I carry a mobile hotspot), but it’s great to know it’s here, and I’ll certainly use it occasionally. And as free wireless becomes more ubiquitous, I may ditch the wireless hotspot entirely and just try to go with Skype. God knows I’m tired of paying separately for quadruply (now quintuply) redundant Internet access which I can’t possible eat all of at once — but that’s a topic for another post.

After a week I’m happier than I expected to be with the folding Compass iPad stand, one of the few iPad accessories I’ve seen that’s as beautiful a designed object as the iPad itself.

The Compass is a steel tripod that collapses into a sleek oblong mass slightly larger than a cigar, with a velveteen case (which I don’t always bother with), so it can be carried in a large pocket or tossed into your bag. It flips open to hold the iPad in 3 positions:

• like an easel, to hold the iPad in portrait mode (for reading) or landscape mode (for watching video)
• holding the iPad on a table at a slight tilt, in typing position

In all 3 positions, it’s stable on a table, and there’s enough resistance to make the touchscreen usable even when the thing is in portrait mode. It’s not so usable in typing position on your lap, but this can be done too if you set it on a large, solid hardcover book. I find I’m using the iPad a lot more often now that I have an easel to set it in.

Most of the buzz this year is all about the device (iPad, Galaxy Tab, Android, netbook, MacBook Air) and how it’s used (Facebook, Twitter, “liking,” “poking,” etc.). But I think the infrastructure story — the Cloud story — is more meaningful.

I’m not talking about the business story (how companies, including mine, are gradually moving their data storage and management offsite, and outsourcing their application provision). I’m talking about the individual story: how, for more and more people, access to the data they use in their personal and professional lives has become not only a platform-agnostic affair, but a device-independent one.

Consider:

• Almost all the information I need to use to conduct my life now lives “on the Internet.” That includes not just email, contacts, and appointments; I’m also talking about documents I produce and share professionally, reference material, entertainment content, etc.
• The few exceptions (e.g., the photos I took last week, which are sitting on the hard drive of my laptop) are, more often than not, a matter of me not taking advantage of existing channels to the Cloud, rather than such channels not existing.
• Google knows everybody. At some point about two years ago — and note that this is after I started my current job — I stopped keeping people’s contact information, because I realized that every new person I met who was 70 or younger could be found on the Internet if I remembered their name. Technically, if I meet them through work, I may not even remember their name, because most people I meet professionally can be found again online with a smart Google search using a few snippets of descriptive information (employer, job title, etc.)
• Google knows everything. By analogy to the preceding: I no longer keep factual or business information around because I “might need it later.” The nature of research has largely changed: now it’s a matter of asking the body of Internet de facto public record for what I need, rather than consulting a formal compilation (directory, etc.) and/or (re-)finding information that I (personally) squirreled away in the past.

I now live in a world in which I can potentially reach for almost any computing device that happens to be at hand (whether it belongs to me or not) and conduct almost any information transaction that I wish. In my daily life I use an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook largely interchangeably, choosing one over another based mostly on convenience in the moment and on form factor, rather than on suitability. Sure, at the margins, one device will be “better” than the others for certain transactions or in certain settings; but in the main, they all do most of the same things acceptably well.

And this is the beginning of the transformation, not its end state.

In the context of all this, it’s important to note that I didn’t really have to do anything special to make all this happen. I just lived my life, making choices (e.g., following or not following my employer’s recommendations, buying or not buying devices, signing up or not signing up for online services) as they were presented to me in the course of my ordinary affairs. Sure, I work for a technology company, and I’m an early-ish adopter; but I don’t live on the bleeding edge, and don’t have time to waste on unproven technologies or tactics. I don’t try something new until I’ve seen evidence, from others, that it works. And all this stuff works more or less as advertised.

Just checked out the streaming Amazon Instant Video offerings that are now available to me free as a benefit of my Amazon Prime membership. There’s some watchable content there, and I was all ready to watch some vintage Doctor Who — but alas, the damn thing runs on Flash, so it’s not iPad-compatible. Advantage: Netflix. (Not to mention that the Netflix content reserve is quite a bit deeper than Amazon’s Prime-eligible content.)

I will say that Amazon’s search-and-browse interface is more lightweight than Netflix’s, which I’ve never particularly liked. But I won’t be canceling my Netflix membership quite yet.

I’m surprised to be saying this, but after a week, I’m mighty impressed by The Daily, News Corp’s attempt to produce a daily news magazine optimized for the iPad. The UI’s still a little ponderous, but it’s not terrible — and I think the fact that I find myself deliberately reaching for a Murdoch publication on a regular basis, expecting to be happy with what I find, speaks for itself.

It reminds me of the value of curated content, as opposed to the endless flood of largely undifferentiated stuff I usually spend my time with. The bloggers I read in Google Reader are smart people, or uncover treasures, or both; but I largely consume that stuff in bits and pieces. In no way is it a well-rounded or deliberately shaped experience. I do buy the NYT more days than not, but I spend less time with it than I used to.

In the Daily, the editors have created something that’s just meaty enough to make me wonder how they manage to do it every day, without feeling overwhelming (like the Times sometimes does). They make good use of photographs, are experimenting with interactive features, the ads are unobtrusive (so far). I even caught myself reading part of the sports section today, which is unheard of.

I would in fact pay 40 bucks a year for this, and that’s the real test. When my free period lapses (soon), I’ll probably subscribe. So put this one in the “more successful than unsuccessful” column.

So I invested in this iPad (original model, for now) about a year ago. It got a lot of use when it was a new toy, but then the iPhone 4 came out, and I upgraded, and with the speed improvement and fast app-switching, I now find the iPhone faster for a lot of the things I was doing on the iPad. Plus it’s right there in my pocket anyway. So I find myself reaching for the phone incrementally more, and for the pad incrementally less.

Besides, the iPad has some undeniable drawbacks. It’s a little too heavy; it’s awkward to hold at reading distance for long periods; the backlight eventually gives me a headache. And (surprisingly) for short bursts, anyway, it’s easier to type accurately on the phone.

But I’ve paid for this thing, and there are a lot of things it does well, even elegantly. And given that my alternative for heavy computing is a 17-inch MacBook (which I love, but it’s an awkward hunk of metal that I hate taking out at home), I’m trying to practice using the iPad more seriously as an intermediate computing tool rather than just as a consumption channel.

Much has been made of the decline in netbook sales over the past year, but (in contrast to some others) I don’t really think you can blame the iPad for that. If netbooks were better made, and faster, and easier to use, and less limited by what has to be left out of them to make them that small, more of them would sell. As things are, they have a nice chunk of the market, and it will grow as they get better — and as the gap between big, heavy, feature-rich smartphones and small, light, streamlined computers continues to narrow.

I like what I’ve seen of the new feather-light mini MacBooks, and perhaps I’ll experiment with one the next time I have a thousand bucks to blow. But first I’m going to try to get better value out of the iPad for a while.

I have one of those folding cases (the Macally) that turns into a triangular support for the iPad, so that you can put it in typing position or stand it up on a table. I’ve become fairly good as an accurate iPad typist — the problem is that I’m so fast on a real keyboard that extensive data entry on the iPad still feels too slow.

So except when I’m actually sitting on a train while trying to power-use the iPad — which, to be honest, is relatively rare — I’m experimenting with a solution that’s right at hand: the aluminum-cased Bluetooth Apple Wireless Keyboard. I already have one at home and one at work, so I just have to get in the habit of reaching for it, and also of throwing it in my briefcase (packed in a little jersey bag I happened to have around the house) when I go out of town.

The iPad-plus-keyboard combination works great on a table; to get the angle correct on my lap, I need to set a big heavy book on my knees and lean the keyboard against it. Here you see this tactic demonstrated with a copy of Egypt: Gods, Myths and Religion which happened to be at hand.

I’m going to test out using the iPad-plus-keyboard combination in various ways over the next few weeks — as a high-volume Gmail processor, as a simple document production machine, as a blogging platform — and I’ll keep you posted.

A few things I already wish this combination had:

• The keyboard support on the iPad is fairly good (this WordPress application fully supports the arrow keys in edit mode, for instance), but I wish the keyboard had an equivalent to the iPad Home button! I know Apple sells an iPad keyboard dock, but I already own this one.
• I wish the iPad would support a Bluetooth mouse (without jailbreaking, I mean). That’s so obvious a need that I imagine it’s on its way.

More to come as the experiment plays itself out.

… consists of 3 iPhones, 1 iPad, 1 copy of the official Scrabble iPad app ($9.99), and 3 copies of the official “Scrabble Tile Rack” iPhone app (free). Actual retail value approximately $2,400, not counting 3 iPhone data service plans. If you’re really cheap, just buy 3 iPod Touches instead (bringing the total cost down to about $1,000).

Or just buy a Scrabble set at your local drugstore ($14.99). But what fun is that? There’s nothing to click or push or slide, it doesn’t beep, and you have to rotate the board yourself.

Below are a couple of photos demonstrating that, yes, this complicated Bluetooth-enabled setup does in fact work. The game even keeps track of where you’re sitting, and rotates the board to face you when it’s your turn. (The first few times, this is really creepy.) Photos are reversed, because they were already uploaded that way and I’m lazy.

Since a couple of people have asked me: I still like the Macally BOOKSTAND iPad case, but after about a month it’s already showing its wear. It picks up grime (and it’s hard to clean), and the leather on the tongue is starting to split because that’s a point of strain that you’re constantly shoving into the slot when you open it. I’ve attached a few photos to show what I mean.

I give this thing about a six-month lifespan before it falls to pieces. Then again, the iPad inside is absolutely pristine AND much more usable with these new configurations available, so it’s doing its job.