my name is taken

It's not as bad as all that

Marc and jimcloudman both chime in today with some legitimate criticisms of the iPad as a device to do, as Marc puts it, “work of any significance.”

The biggest shortcoming, says Marc, is support for background apps:

What I’m dying for is the ability to manage multiple clipboards and the ability to transform or expand text based on typed input. Basically, I want utilities like TextExpander and Pasteboard to be able to work fully in iOS with all apps, including Safari and Mail.

jimcloudman, meanwhile, takes issue with getting access to his data, specifically:

…a way to quickly and seamlessly move your work between apps so that you can manipulate your work with several apps and not just one. Sometimes you can manage to handle it with Dropbox, or copy-paste if it’s text, but there has to be a better way…

Jim’s not the only one to share this sentiment. Just a few days ago, Walt Mossberg took up the issue in his Personal Technology column, In and Out of the Office: Putting iPads to Work.

Both Marc and Jim are right in noting that “there has to be a better way.” But my experience with using my iPad to do “real work” has not been nearly so bleak. In my post challenging Mossberg’s article last week, where Apple’s platform has been deficient, clever application developers have stepped in to fill the void, and have, in many cases, done an exceptional job in creating a solution for their customers.

My focus in that post was on the data sync issue and how native Dropbox support pretty much eliminates this problem for me. But I am starting to see the same kind of developer creativity take on Marc’s problem, too.

When TextExpander Touch was released last year, Smile Software included clever hooks that allow developers to integrate its text expansion capabilities into their apps using their free SDK. Developers have been very receptive, and Smile now lists over 70 iOS applications that offer native text expansion.

Of course, the onus is on the consumer, who must make native support for DropBox and TextExpander part of their application buying criteria. In my own case, it has lead me to applications like Writer, PlainText and the native Twitter client.

(To Marc’c credit, the clipboard utilities he needs still appear to be M.I.A. on iOS.)

Obviously, this is far from ideal. Asking consumers to think about “native support” for anything is a non-starter for all but a minority of users. This is probably fine for people like Marc and Jim (and me) who lean to the geekier side of technology usage, but it is clearly so far from Apple’s philosophy that it would be foolish to consider it a true long-term solution at all.

Which brings us back, obviously, to Marc and Jim’s original point. Things like data access, synchronization and background processes ultimately need to be built into iOS by Apple. Developers of future applications should not need today’s “hacks” to develop viable solutions for their customers. On this, I entirely agree with both gentlemen.

But to argue that the lack of OS-level support for these things from Apple has rendered an iPad insufficient for more than, as Marc says, “consuming email, web pages, RSS feeds, and other content” is simply not true in my experience. In fact, by carefully selecting my applications, I was able to replace my 13” MacBook 6 months with my iPad.

Sure, I had to bring my Official Apple Nerd card along to the party sometimes, but there’s no denying that my iPad is now a tool that I use to create things, not just consume them. Going iPad-only has worked for me, and I’ve never looked back.

Source: marc