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Thursday, May 26, 2011

Enjoying my iPad 2!

Enjoying my iPad 2!


Enjoying my iPad 2!

Posted: 26 May 2011 06:00 AM PDT

A month or so ago, I finally succumbed and bought an iPad 2. For me, it was the combination of convenience, the camera (that my kids have used more than me, honestly), and having some of those newer apps like Garageband and iMovie.

And so far, I’m enjoying it!

The main reason I decided to get an iPad was writing. In the next year or so, I have a couple of large writing projects (working on my second book right now!), and I’m often in places where whipping out my laptop isn’t so easy to do.

For example, right now I’m on a plane (well, I was on a plane when I wrote this, anyway). I hate whipping my laptop out on a plane. I’m not terribly fond of watching my laptop screen bounce back and forth in the turbulence (which we’re having now). I’m also not fond of scrunching up in weird laptop-y angles when the dude in front of me decides he needs a nap, and thrusts his stupid seat into my lap (which he’s doing now).

But this iPad thing. It works really, really well in these types of situations. It turns on fast, there are a multitude of easy-to-use word processing apps (I’m using Plaintext right now), and no scrunching required. It works on my lap or on the tray table just fine.

I’m still getting used to typing on it. Honestly, for the most part, the virtual keyboard works great, and is easy to use. What I do miss is easy access to a couple of my favorite keys – namely, that dash ( – ) I just used. I have to hit a shift key to access it, and that interrupts my flow.

The iPad also corrects funny sometimes, and it does this silly “auto correct” thing where it decides I have finished a sentence, so it adds a period and capitalizes the next word for me … which works great, had I actually finished that sentence. I think it’s something I’m hitting, or holding down too long … I haven’t figured it out yet.

Otherwise, I’m loving it. Besides boring typing stuff, there are some really fun music creation apps that I’ll be playing with a lot. Here’s a video I made of me trying out Morphwiz (a cool synthesizer app).

And my kids wish I downloaded many many more games.

So, a question. Who has an iPad, and how/why do you use it? What are your favorite apps? For those of you. Experimenting with other tablets (see? It did that weird ending the sentence thing again…) like the Nook (which now comes with Android tablet functionality) – are you liking it? Why? I’d love to hear more!

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