Many of you have an iPhone or an iPod touch. And as Gadget Lab readers, you probably also have a notebook of some kind. And despite the notebook being way more capable than the little handheld, we bet you use the iPhone more and more for checking e-mail, tweeting and a large part of your web browsing.
With the iPad, this “casual” use will just increase. Why bother pulling out a laptop when you have the tablet with you almost always? Unless you are rendering video files in the background, we can’t think of much that would need an old-style computer.
The iPhone already has a lot of apps that are better, fuller featured and easier to use than their desktop equivalents. Tweetie (a Twitter client) for iPhone does way more than Tweetie for the Mac, in a much more elegant way. All of the current iPhone applications should “just work” on your shiny new iPad, albeit at original size in the middle of a big black screen, or scaled up to fit. Better will be the tweaked, iPad-specific versions that should be around for the launch in two months’ time.
Here’s a list of applications we can’t wait to see on the iPad.
NewsRack (
http://www.omz-software.de/newsstand/)
NewsRack (formerly Newsstand) is our favorite RSS reader for the iPhone. It walks all over the previous RSS king, NetNewsWire (in both Mac and iPhone forms) because it is both richly featured, very fast and easy to use. It works in concert with Google Reader.
NewsRack is so good that I can start my working day in bed with a cup of coffee and my iPod touch, triaging news stories and shuffling them off to e-mail to cover later (I could use Google Reader’s “star” function, but the desktop NetNewsWire still doesn’t support this).
NewsRack is one of those applications that couldn’t have existed without the iPhone, and I’m very excited to see how it’ll be improved for the bigger iPad. Just the addition of bigger pictures and less scrolling would be enough, but a pop-up feed list would make it better than any desktop reader out there. Bonus: Imagine the gorgeous NewsRack view (left) on the big screen.
Stanza (
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/stanza-v20-the-iphones-best-e-reader-just-got-better/)
Another old Gadget Lab favorite, Stanza, is an e-reader application. It doesn’t have the eye-candy of the iBooks app (yet) but when you’re reading a book, that doesn’t matter at all — all you want is text.
Stanza has the ability to read and organize books from many different sources, from the legit to the more underground. It even supports various forms of ePub DRM to keep the publishers happy.
The one problem with Stanza is that it is for the iPhone, and the screen, for some at least, is too small to be comfortable. The iPad fixes this immediately, and if the current owner (Amazon) decides to update the app for Apple’s new device, Stanza could be the go-to default e-reader for iPad owners outside of the United States, who will not be allowed to use Apple’s iBooks.
Kindle for iPad (
http://itunes.apple.com/app/kindle-for-iphone/id302584613?mt=8)
We know, we know: another reading application. This kind of reveals my thinking about the iPad — I’ll be doing a lot of reading on it. Kindle for iPhone should scale nicely for the iPad, although of course a native version would be welcome.
What’s that you say? If I want a large-screen Kindle, why not just buy the DX? Because it costs only ten bucks less than the iPad, and does a whole lot less (Kindle PDF support is still a joke, for example, and the video is awful). And by using the iPhone or iPad Kindle app, it is a lot easier to trick Amazon into believing you are in the United States so the company will deign to sell you its full catalog.
Lightroom (
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/lightroom-3-first-look/)
Here’s our left-field, wishful thinking choice, and probably something that will never happen. Lightroom is Adobe’s excellent photo-editing application, and a rival to Apple’s Aperture.
With the news that the iPad will work with a camera-connection accessory, we immediately thought that the iPad would make a wonderful tool for photographers. At the least, you could upload pictures mid-shoot to check them on the large screen and make a quick back-up.
But if the iPad’s photo app is as bad as iPhoto, that’s pretty much all you’ll want to do until you get back to your “real” computer. We want a Lightroom Lite, which would sync to your main catalog at home, but give you all the Lightroom organizing and image-tweaking tools out on the road.
The touch interface is perfect for photo editing. It’s all sliders and zooming, after all. With some creative re-thinking, I can’t see that there’s much in Lightroom that couldn’t work on the iPad. Other than the fact that it’s from Adobe, and that it uses Adobe’s own RAW converter, not Apple’s. Also, $200 is steep for an App Store listing.
