Apps

The only way to evaluate new hardware or software is to use it for real. Test data is all well and good, but until you actually try to do something, you don't get a true understanding of what you're dealing with. Particularly with a new type of device such as iPad, this is the only way to understand it.

One of the key questions about iPad has been in what way it can be used for work, the business world, and productivity apps (take your pick of terminology). With two weeks of hands-on experience, the answer is positive and, in some ways, surprising. This post is based on fairly intense use of Apple's iPad productivity apps: iWork (Numbers, Pages, and Keynote), and Bento for iPad (Apple owns FileMaker, the creator of Bento). The work was not systematic and deliberate in terms of a testing plan: it's just been what I've been working on in the last two weeks with the tools that I normally use. That has meant minimal work with Keynote (I don't have a presentation coming up for a few weeks), and a lot of work with the other apps - particularly Bento. (There will be some important Bento news in a week or two from this site. Make sure you've registered for an account. Make sure you don't opt out of e-mail notifications. It's a very low-volume list. The last mailing was several months ago, but there will be one shortly.)

Back to our regularly scheduled iPad analysis.

John Cook at Skeptical Science has worked on an iPhone app (free) that provides a wealth of double-skepticism (skepticism about the skepticism). It's a great consolidation of the arguments, and a wonderful example of how apps can find a very specific role to play in public discourse.