Someone mentioned to me recently that they thought the iPad was a pretty nice “toy” but it didn’t help them do real work. I found this sort of stunning, since I push my new iPad pretty heavily and I know I’m not even anywhere remotely close to maxing out the things I can do with it.
While talking with this person, I began to get a better understanding of the underlying issues. It wasn’t necessarily a problem with the iPad, nor with the apps on it. The problem really existed in two major areas. The first area was the fact that their work network is completely locked down and they have no access to it via the iPad, which fundamentally makes it more of a challenge to transfer information back and forth between the iPad and their desktop. The second area was in a fundamental disconnect in how to operate with the iPad as an integral part of the work flow.
Now I certainly can’t do anything about the first point they raised except shake my head and commiserate. However, I can take a pretty good stab at the second part.
We often say that the tools should adapt themselves to how we work, not the other way around. This isn’t really true all the time, though. If a tool enables a more efficient workflow or exposes an inefficiency, we don’t do ourselves any service by stubbornly sticking to how we have done things in the past. Yes, we shouldn’t necessarily have to throw out everything we know when something new comes along but we shouldn’t allow ourselves to become hidebound or stuck in how we accomplish a task either.
One of the things that I’ve discovered about using an iPad in my day-to-day activities is that most people want to imagine it in their heads like it is a laptop, and then when things don’t operate within that paradigm they get angry, frustrated and disappointed. They continue to try and shove it into a laptop box and when it doesn’t fit they perceive it as a limited platform.
In fact, the iPad is an extremely powerful general purpose computer. As a reference point, I am currently writing this on my iPad using a bluetooth keyboard. I have Pages (a spreadsheet application) running with my financial portfolio graphed and outlined. I have some very good news readers (such as pulse) running to keep me up to date on what is happening, my email is here and I am even listening to music as I work. I can bring up a VNC connection and remote desktop into my work computer and check on something if I need to or access a remote server. I can do pretty much anything I normally do day to day except for writing actual programming code and once I jailbreak my iPad (which I will do eventually) I can do quite a bit of that too.
What the iPad is *not* is a laptop. I can’t simply drop my files onto a USB drive and open them up in excel. I can’t fire up Xcode and test a quick algorithm. These aren’t limitations of the system, they are simply artifacts of the fact that the iPad is a tablet computer that operates in a fundamentally different way.
This person complained to me about transferring data back and forth and I understand how it can be different. However, it doesn’t have to be hard or onerous if you change your way of thinking about the workflow. For example, when I need to take notes in a meeting I fire up plaintext, take my notes, and these notes are automatically saved to my dropbox account. When I return to my desk, the notes are already there and synced, waiting for me to integrate them into whatever I need. If I need to share spreadsheets or presentations back and forth, I use my iwork.com account in a very similar fashion, publishing my document to it from one system and retrieving it from another.
Some people might find this hard to do, but in fact once it is integrated into the way you think about your appliance it becomes second nature. The important thing, though, is to realize that whatever you are using is just that… an appliance. You fundamentally use things differently on a laptop, desktop, tablet, or even your phone. You cannot expect your phone to do the same things your desktop does no more than you’d expect your tablet to replace your laptop. Instead, I find these things all work as extensions of each other. This is just a further extension of my entire “right tool for the right job” mentality.
I encourage you to get a tablet and see if you are mentally flexible enough to adjust your own workflow to take advantage of it. Yes, you may run up against limitations when you are learning to use it. Just be sure those limitations are truly platform limitations, though, and not just limitations in your own workflow.
