iPad First Impressions

Ok, I've had an iPad for just over two weeks now, so I guess it's time for some first impressions.

Let's start at the very beginning.  The very first thought than ran through my mind when I pulled the thing out of the box was "oh, that's heavy!"  I'd seen the keynote video of Steve Jobs flipping flipping his iPad around like it's a feather.  He either practiced that, or they made a special lightweight version for him to play with.  It's not like it's super heavy, but a little to heavy for comfortable reading while standing up on the train.  I suppose that half of the weight is battery though.  And I'm not sure I'd sacrifice the amazing battery life for a lighter device.

But on to more substantive concerns...  The iPad is basically a big iPod Touch right?  How come the iPod Touch comes with so many built-in apps that were just plain left out of the iPad?

Apps that come with iPod Touch but not iPad:

• Stocks
• Weather
• Voice Memos
• Clock
• Calculator
• Uno (just kidding, I bought that one.  Cool game though)

So what gives?  I'd gotten used to these as staples of iPhone OS.  I'm used to seeing them on my iPod Touch and iPhone.  Why did Apple leave them out of iPad?  I suppose you could argue that with a fuller web browsing experience, you don't really need these apps, or that they spent all their time working on the new YouTube app and didn't have time to re-vamp these once.

LightTrac for iPad

LightTrac for iPad is a simple application that shows the sun angle at a given location at a specified time of day. Colored lines showing sun angle at sunrise, sunset, and the specified time are superimposed onto a Google map. The map can be toggled from regular to satellite mode.

This is a great tool for anyone shooting outdoors or indoors with available light. I recently used this to plan ahead for a wedding shoot. I knew the time and location of the wedding, and pulled the scene up in LightTrac to get a feel for where the shadows would be, and where to place my strobes. Of course I also visited the site before the wedding, but getting a top-down view of the setting before going onsite was very helpful.

At USD $3.99, outdoor shooters can't go wrong with this app!

Penultimate for IPad - Just like real paper... Unfortunately.

(this is a copy of an app review that I posted to the iTunes AppStore a day or so ago)

Penultimate for iPad is an amazing digital rendition of the traditional paper notebook. The on-screen writing is smoother than any other handwriting or drawing app I've tried, and I've tired several. This is the only app in which writing and scribbles actually look acceptable. No straight lines or blockiness, even when you write fast. Other apps seems to have trouble keeping up with the speed of on-screen writing or drawing. After trying several drawing and writing apps I thought that this was a hardware problem, but this app manages brilliantly so obviously this is a challenge that solid development can overcome. Really great job with the handwriting part!

The line thickness gets thinner when you write faster. The is a very nice touch and looks like real pen strokes on paper.

If I was rating the handwriting function alone, this would be a five-star app. But the overall usability is somewhat lacking, so I have to give it 3 stars. The problem is that this app functions just like paper notebooks, and replicates all the problems inherent in it's analog counterpart. This would be a 5-star killer app if the developers could combine the smooth handwriting with digital features like thumbnails.