OneThingAtaTime

I have a new iPad, or perhaps we (Opal and I) have a new iPad. She is passionately fond of it. And I have a new view on two of the more common complaints about the iPad; it's for content consumption and it does only one thing at a time.

I took the iPad out of the box, and got it to do something. Unfortunately, I wasn't on a network, and couldn't get it to do anything other than the apps pre-installed on it. Opal, seeing that I wasn't USING it, seized it from my hands -- so she could run Notes, and type something. This idea that the iPad is not good for creating stuff? It belongs to word-obsessed people with big hands. To Opal, the pop-up on-screen keyboard is most excellent, and when it got its own apps and she could use DrawingPad? DrawingPad successfully recreates the seductiveness of a box of crayons. Sure, sometimes she uses its stickers. She even brought up a pre-drawn alien planet background, and added stars. Yellow stars, in the sky, like a good, rule-bound child. Then she put a heart in each crater, carefully stuck a bandaid on each heart, and filled the sky with a family of space gerbils. She likes playing games on and watching videos on the iPad, but she finds the iPhone possibly more satisfactory for that. The iPad is the creation platform she's always wanted.

Then I added ArtStudio and SketchBook Pro (the latter partly for the sheer joy of buying AutoDesk software for ten bucks; it's like buying a matchbox Rolls Royce). I'm drawing on it too. (And Opal discovered the drawing lessons in ArtStudio.)

As for doing one thing at a time, it's not actually true that iPads and iPhones do only one thing at a time. They have a limited number of things they'll do in the background, but when I'm playing music, downloading a file, and running another program, I don't feel like I'm doing one thing at a time. The prime limitation on the number of things I can do at once -- on any platform, including my multi-core computer -- is the user interface. My laptop's willingness to theoretically do many things at once is moot if Opal and I want to watch a video. Another screen is required, one way or another. If I'm running Photoshop on the laptop? It isn't really doing anything else. I need all the screen real estate, most of the CPU, and almost all of the memory. It's easier for me to use another device if I want to do something else. (Sure, I could fix that, if I had the house real estate to devote to more screens and whatnot, but I'm not sure it would be cheaper or in the end more convenient.)

Which is not to say that it's perfect. My theoretical issue with it is that Apple is not guaranteed to be not-evil, and they control the platform quite tightly. Untheoretically, I'm still having issues moving between iPhone and iPad, which are a lot alike but not identical. Plus it likes to put "Go" where I expect return to be, screwing me up when I try to fill in multi-line forms.