iPad goes under the gauntlet at universities, article.
I feel the iPad has a fantastic potential for education. Although for higher education, it needs better and more specialized software (notes inside documents, networking, etc), and preferably an even higher-resolution screen for diagrams in textbooks. I think version two or three of the iPad may fulfill these wishes.
Oddly, the software may be the biggest hurdle. Higher education is a specialized market, it would need special and very good software, and as we've seen many times, this is very, very far from a trivial task, and the question is if it would be lucrative enough to attract the needed talent and work hours. And collaboration. I think Linux shows that while free software is very powerful, making it user-friendly is not something anybody in that community has sufficient interest in to really make it happen. For those people, "modify it and recompile it" to make it work is good and obvious advice, but not for Jim and Jane.
A friend of mine who is hugely intelligent once tried to install a simple, or what *should be* simple, text-reading app on a Linux machine. It turned out to be absolutely mind-bogglingly complex. He wrote an article about it too, it's quite funny, do read it. I mention this just to show that good higher-education software for the iPad would need to commercial.
Eolake Look at the date on that article.
ReplyDeleteScott
Your friend's article is complete nonsense ...
ReplyDeleteOmissions like this require that entirely new fonts and font families, called pkfonts, must be created. The UNIX world likes PostScript Type 3.
Believe me this is no different than if I wrote: Mac users like to watch polka dots dance on their TP holders.
He thinks he is writing about Unix (or Linux), but he is writing about TeX. And TeX is not even a Unix tool to begin with!
“The UNIX world likes PostScript Type 3.” My ass!
I suspect you'd correct me or him on something. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteScott, way old, I know. But complexity of *that* order of magnitude does not change overnight, if at all.
ReplyDeleteThe worse error may be comparing creating a PC/Unix app to creating an iPad app. But I still can't see it happening successfully for such a big project unless it's somehow undertaken commercially.
Hey guys, author of that original article here. Before you beat me up too bad, remember that ten years ago the world was different. Scholarly articles were generally composed in Tex and the tools were quite messy to install - expecially if you were a lone researcher working out of your bedroom without a sysadmin to help you out. Unix systems used Tex (or its clones) almost exclusively so if you wanted to read PostScript Type 3 formatted documents you had to get Tex and you probably used UNIX and you had to go through some sort of rigamarole as I described.
ReplyDeleteIt's mostly different now, of course, but I wrote that story over ten years ago. Don't blame me if I didn't have a time machine.
Del Miller
Thanks, Del.
ReplyDeleteIt is nice if it's different now. But like I said, things change only at certain rates. For example, you don't remove all the poverty in Mexico in five years.