3 ms·

I also do a not insignificant amount of content creation in my iPad.

by Fomite 12y ago

agumonkey 12y ago
Great to hear that; what kind, and through what apps ? I'm amazed at the loss we're facing. Something is odd. In the 80s game developers created their own tools from scratch. Now it seems people lost the desire to take advantage of computers. If it's not a desktop then you can't edit a video or compose music, etc, etc ...
- Retra 12y ago
  Have you tried using a touch-pad to rotate or move something lately? Twist your wrist in all kinds of unnatural directions, slide your fingers at unintuitive rates, and maintain the perfect amount of pressure as you drag something without dropping it in a location you can't easily 'undo' from... No thanks.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    It's a software issue, it tooks a few years for people to develop desktop widgets, plus a few more for highend software to find better paradigms. I think people just dropped the ball on tablets because the money is made on other apps.
    - Retra 12y ago
      I'm not sure that it is. I think it's a hardware issue: our screens are too flat, and our hands didn't evolve to use flat surfaces.
      - agumonkey 12y ago
        That's a valuable point. That said, let's not underestimate the capabilities nature built in us; our hands didn't evolve to play piano or guitar either. I won't ask people to grow internal and external skills as refined as actual musicianship, but with proper understanding of human memory and tactile sense, I'm sure one can find an interaction paradigm that will turn a tablet into another kind of bicycle for the mind.
- Fomite 12y ago
  Mostly written stuff - I'm a computational epidemiologist, so not heartbreaking works of art or the like. But for me, and actually "doing work", the iPad has the following really nice features: - For whatever reason, the iPad does not do the thing normal computer screens do when reading papers, which is to make my eyes slide right off them. So while not content creation, it's way nicer than hauling around a stack of journals. I use Papers for this. - I use either iA Writer or Pages to actually write content, and cut away all the distractions of working on a laptop (like say, Hacker News...). Usually commentaries, discussion sections, introductions - things that need more writing and less clever table formatting. I also use this to write posts for my blog (www.variancehammer.com) which is about Warhammer 40K and my mostly data-driven musings on the game. - iSSH for SSH access to the cluster, and the sweet, sweet computational power that follows. There's something thrilling about launching cluster jobs from my bedside. - Keynote for presentations - PythonMath and Textastic for some musing and prototyping. - TouchDraw for brainstorming model flow diagrams and the like and having them on-hand later.
  - mturmon 12y ago
    > ...it's way nicer than hauling around a stack of journals. I use Papers for this.... I also like Papers on the iPad. My reading mode for academic papers, using the dedicated app on the iPad, is different than on my laptop (or the laptop tethered to the big monitor). I'm better able to deeply read on the iPad because it's dedicated to that one task. I probably spend about equal clock-time reading papers on both platforms -- on the laptop I read 2 pages from each of 20 papers, and on the iPad I read 15 pages from each of 4 papers. But I have to note: I don't create content there, I consume it.

I also do a not insignificant amount of content creation in my iPad.

by Fomite 12y ago

I also do a not insignificant amount of content creation in my iPad.

Great to hear that; what kind, and through what apps ? I'm amazed at the loss we're facing. Something is odd. In the 80s game developers created their own tools from scratch. Now it seems people lost the desire to take advantage of computers. If it's not a desktop then you can't edit a video or compose music, etc, etc ...

Retra 12y ago
Have you tried using a touch-pad to rotate or move something lately? Twist your wrist in all kinds of unnatural directions, slide your fingers at unintuitive rates, and maintain the perfect amount of pressure as you drag something without dropping it in a location you can't easily 'undo' from... No thanks.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  It's a software issue, it tooks a few years for people to develop desktop widgets, plus a few more for highend software to find better paradigms. I think people just dropped the ball on tablets because the money is made on other apps.
  - Retra 12y ago
    I'm not sure that it is. I think it's a hardware issue: our screens are too flat, and our hands didn't evolve to use flat surfaces.
    - agumonkey 12y ago
      That's a valuable point. That said, let's not underestimate the capabilities nature built in us; our hands didn't evolve to play piano or guitar either. I won't ask people to grow internal and external skills as refined as actual musicianship, but with proper understanding of human memory and tactile sense, I'm sure one can find an interaction paradigm that will turn a tablet into another kind of bicycle for the mind.
Fomite 12y ago
Mostly written stuff - I'm a computational epidemiologist, so not heartbreaking works of art or the like. But for me, and actually "doing work", the iPad has the following really nice features: - For whatever reason, the iPad does not do the thing normal computer screens do when reading papers, which is to make my eyes slide right off them. So while not content creation, it's way nicer than hauling around a stack of journals. I use Papers for this. - I use either iA Writer or Pages to actually write content, and cut away all the distractions of working on a laptop (like say, Hacker News...). Usually commentaries, discussion sections, introductions - things that need more writing and less clever table formatting. I also use this to write posts for my blog (www.variancehammer.com) which is about Warhammer 40K and my mostly data-driven musings on the game. - iSSH for SSH access to the cluster, and the sweet, sweet computational power that follows. There's something thrilling about launching cluster jobs from my bedside. - Keynote for presentations - PythonMath and Textastic for some musing and prototyping. - TouchDraw for brainstorming model flow diagrams and the like and having them on-hand later.
- mturmon 12y ago
  > ...it's way nicer than hauling around a stack of journals. I use Papers for this.... I also like Papers on the iPad. My reading mode for academic papers, using the dedicated app on the iPad, is different than on my laptop (or the laptop tethered to the big monitor). I'm better able to deeply read on the iPad because it's dedicated to that one task. I probably spend about equal clock-time reading papers on both platforms -- on the laptop I read 2 pages from each of 20 papers, and on the iPad I read 15 pages from each of 4 papers. But I have to note: I don't create content there, I consume it.