Worse, it's often not good for videos. For instance, I've almost given up on watching Apple's own videos on it, which really is a bit embarrassing for Apple. They download like a crippled snail.
And until iOS4, you can't change to another app and let it download in peace, because all activity stops in an app when you go to another one.
Worse, you can't even change to another page in Safari and come back to the video later, because for some reason (unlike Safari on Mac) Safari re-loads every page each time you select that page, which means that the video starts downloading all over again! Gawd.
And it's not my Net connection's fault, because on my Mac, they download like horny lightning.
Update:
Michael said:
Just about every new thing I hear about the iPad makes me not want one. This is surprising, because I'm normally a real Apple fanboy.
Well, perhaps you just don't need/want one, and that's fine. Anyway, don't mind me, this does not bother me often, and all these things are just the normal little weaknesses you find in anything complex product. I'd say that especially for a 1.0 product, the iPad is enormously well done. I really like it.
This seems an erratic problem only on some machines. No problem at all on mine. Wherever I go, it works.
ReplyDeleteMy own problems with iPad are different.
1) Mail sometimes (twice so far) "jumbles" emails together. That is, I receive a mail with a sender and a header, and the content is from another email! Now this happened twice with messages on yahoo groups and (opted in) advertisement from Amazon.
2) Pages. While it is a delight to work on it for producing quick documents, the PDF font embedding just doesn't work. On any win machine, I get all sort of weird results: warning that fonts are not embedded, type not displaying at all... just because the default Helvetica is generally NOT installed on Windows platforms (if I switch to Arial or Times Boring Roman, no problem...). I mean, Apple has pratically invented typography on computers, can't they just learn to embed fonts in their pdfs? Or maybe I'm doing something wrong. What's the point of doing a nicely formatted PDF and being able to send it with the touch of a finger if it won't show up properly on other machines? Wasn't that the whole idea behind PDFs?
A quick search on the apple search forum tells me to make sure you have the same fonts installed in the other machines. So fonts are not embedded at all.. how lame...
Yeah, pretty lame.
ReplyDeleteBut Apple's wide-audience apps sometimes have some odd weaknesses. One of my fave apps ever was/is AppleWorks, in the old days called ClarisWorks. It was a very compact, really nice all-in one app (writing, drawing, database...). But Apple only developed it for a couple of years, which is a pity, because it still has some crude edges, like the ends of lines disappearing under the margin with some fonts.
Ganesha Games said...
ReplyDelete"...Times Boring Roman..."
Funny you. :-)
A friend suggests that Helvetica is NOT a free font and Apple might have chosen not to embed it for this reason. Well, there are some free alternatives out there.
ReplyDeleteTC,
yes while I find it a perfectly fine font, making it a default font on the world's most used machines made it boring. I have switched to Georgia as a default, everyday font on my machines.
Yes, and Georgia (like Verdana) was designed from the beginning for readability on screens.
ReplyDeleteanother very nice font is Myriad Pro. Comes in a gazillion variants and reads fine on screen and in print. Very expensive though.
ReplyDeleteGanesha Games said...
ReplyDelete"...while I find it a perfectly fine font, making it a default font on the world's most used machines made it boring."
I understand and agree.
"I have switched to Georgia as a default, everyday font on my machines."
That's a nice one...until you get bored of that one! ;-) Good thing there are many! Hopefully Apple will do better w/the fonts, eventually. (weird mail issue, too.)
(I never had that mail issue.)
ReplyDeleteJust looked at Myriad Pro. I have it, probably bundled with my Adobe collections.
Yes, very nice, very clear, very balanced.
Just about every new thing I hear about the iPad makes me not want one. This is surprising, because I'm normally a real Apple fanboy.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I'm getting old...
Well, perhaps you just don't need/want one, and that's fine. Anyway, don't mind me, this does not bother me often, and all these things are just the normal little weaknesses you find in anything complex product. I'd say that especially for a 1.0 product, the iPad is enormously well done. I really like it.
ReplyDeleteI suppose if I were comparing the iPad to a Kindle, I'd be very impressed. Instead, I've been comparing it to what I call "Magic Paper," an imaginary device I've been wishing for ever since I got a Newton in the early 90s. It was what the Newton should have been, if only magic were real.
ReplyDeleteIt's more than an e-book reader or a media player. It's a more convenient alternative to a laptop, capable of doing anything the laptop could do, with a user interface tailored to handwriting and touch.
Magic Paper was technically impossible when I first imagined it. Technology has marched on, and I believe it's completely up to the job nowadays. In some ways (video and audio, in particular) it's far surpassed what I had originally imagined. The iPad seemed sooooo close, but in this iteration, at least, it's not what I was hoping for.