iPad as paper analog

Here are the things I wanted to be able to do with my iPad, in order of importance:

1. Go to the park and type out inspired paragraphs at lightning speed.

2. Skype with my friends in other countries/states/cities while simultaneously surfing the internet.

3. Store documents for projects and assignments on which I am working in neatly organized folders.

4. Read the occasional book.

5. Check email.

Here is what I ended up doing with my iPad:

1. Taking notes.

2. Reading/transporting PDF documents.

3. Reading the occasional book.

4. Making designs with the punctuation marks using the notepad app.

5. Checking email.

I've heard other people describe writing in the most loving of terms; this is the way I've always felt about typing. I type fairly quickly, and I love being able to stream my thoughts live, as it were. When writing I can become frustrated at the lack of speed involved in the process, but typing-- typing is as easy as breathing.

So I was upset when I found out that with the iPad I would essentially have to learn to type all over again, because-- and this would have been so easy to fix-- because the semicolon was not in the right place. I would be typing away and I'd reach for the semicolon key and Lo and behold! no semicolon would appear. This threw off my thinking and frustrated me to a degree where I found it easier to type with two fingers, and it was sweet, sweet relief to turn back to my laptop's keyboard and type in the way to which I had become accustomed. I felt similarly to the way I felt upon returning from Paris. At last! I could communicate in my mother tongue!

So typing out paragraphs at lightning speed was out of the question. Skyping turned out to be more trouble than it was worth-- one of the benefits of Skype, to my mind, is that you can do other things while talking to your friends. I've often enjoyed the screenshare function and the ability to view videos simultaneously with my friends. I've watched my friend the artist sketching in photoshop when she was miles away in California. All of these functions were out of the question when I had the Skype app. If there is a way to multitask using the Skype app, I have not found it.

Storing files has proven to be more of a challenge than I originally anticipated, as well. It isn't the storing files which confounds me-- it's the opening of them. My laptop came with a zillion programs for opening different sorts of files. In the iPad, these are sadly lacking. I downloaded a program which synchs with Word files, for instance, and it always messes up the formatting, which makes it great for jotting down notes in class but horrible for editing or creating files which are actually going to be used for anything. I would never write a report on my Word file converter, for instance-- the lack of actual paragraphs I just find incredibly distracting.

For a long time I was also displeased with the process of reading books on the iPad. I still have a few problems with it--I can't flip through pages in the way that I'm used to, people won't comment on what I'm reading, and my gloriously overstocked bookshelf is scanter than it would otherwise be--plus my discomfort with my inability to "see all of the book at once", as it were. I understand paper and the way books are bound and how and to what degree water will warp paper. When the iPad breaks, on the other hand, I will not understand why. When the data is corrupted, I'll have to depend on the experts to retrieve it for me. But my attitude towards the iPad softened when I became almost as irritated at my paper books for different reasons-- I would press the paper, attempting to highlight a word and thereby obtain the definition, and nothing would happen. I would want to search for a particular phrase and would look in vain for a search bar. I eventually concluded that both formats had pros and cons, but this didn't make me any less irritated. I look forward to the day when the two shall be somehow synthesized.

The iPad is also a spectacular way to check email, but that doesn't impress me very much, since my phone can do the same thing and doesn't take forever to turn on.

So in every category except performing as a book, the iPad has not met my (admittedly unrealistic) expectations. Let's talk about the areas in which the iPad has proven to be unexpectedly stellar.

I enjoy taking notes with the iPad. Truly, I do. I love writing on paper, but I can't keep anything organized. On the iPad, each of my classes has a separate document and I just give each day a title and proceed to write stuff down. I can find everything effortlessly. I'm sure some people can do this on paper, but I've never been able to. The con is that I can't doodle. I've tried to remedy this by opening that little yellow notepad thing and making designs with the punctuation marks, which is tons of fun. I also like to invent words which might possibly be Nordic.

In addition, the iPad is a stellar PDF substitute. My favorite app, in terms of my expectations being exceeded, is the blackboard app, because I have access to every PDF document in every class I have ever taken, and I can carry them all around with me at all times. The inability to annotate has been a lot less annoying than I at first thought it would be-- for me, at any rate; I know other people have had different experiences--so I've quit printing out PDFs entirely. I just bring my iPad to class. Problem, of course, is that while the PDF is open I can't really take notes. Oh, well.

I would like to see the iPad become more compatible with different forms of documents. If it could "talk" to my computer and my phone, that would be positively splendiferous. I would like that on-screen keyboard to be updated. But the Blackboard app has actually been incredibly useful--not worth a couple hundred, but useful nonetheless. It would be better if I could MULTITASK, but I'm sure that will be fixed with some software update in the near future. Mainly I find myself using the iPad as a paper analog, a substitute for books and documents-- but then, I'm not sure that's a bad thing, especially since this paper analog has a lot of nifty abilities. But I would like it to become more like a computer-and-paper-analog-in-one, which for me, right now, it isn't.

Hope that satisfices. Have a spectacular break, everyone!