The Apple iPad, it’s for presentation not creation

So the new creation from Apple turned out, as pretty much everyone expected, to be a tablet computer. The iPad, in fact. Announced yesterday, the iPad is already filling up blogs everywhere, but I just want to have a look at how it might be useful to a designer such as myself.

First off, despite the criticisms being levelled at the new device, let me say that I like it a lot. It’s not flawless, but I can see it being a useful tool that I’d like to own. But I already have an iPhone and Macbook Pro, so why (apart from Apple geekiness) would I need another device that falls inbetween?

Why I would want an iPad

Well, what is immediately obvious is that this is not intended to be a production tool for the old-school Mac crowd. The iPad is clearly more about viewing things than about creating things. For that reason it has a huge amount of potential for creatives as a presentation device. Client pitches, demonstrations of design work in progress, digital portfolio (especially great for anyone who deals with moving images of any sort), a convenient way for photographers to view images as they shoot them without having to resort to a full-blown laptop… the list goes on.

And yes, you could accomplish all of this with a regular laptop. But consider these two points:
Firstly, the iPad is smaller, lighter, and generally easier to cart around;
Secondly, at least until they are seen in iPhone-like numbers, demonstrating your wares to a client on one of these babies is going to look very cool. Presentation is a big part of any pitch or work review, after all. So now, instead of plonking your laptop on the client’s desk and hinging it open and fiddling with the trackpad and keyboard, you can fish out a thin slab of science fiction and start ‘Minority Report’ing your way to closing the deal. As long as the work is there to back it up, your presentation is going to be interesting and memorable. And people are swayed by stuff like that.

Of course, it’s not all wine and roses. Much has been made of the lack of iBook support outside of the US, at least for the time being. Others have lamented the lack of a camera, the absence of multitasking, or the fact that the battery can’t be removed. Frankly, I don’t care about any of that. My issues (‘concerns’ is maybe too strong a term) revolve around the things that might hinder the presentation aspects that I mentioned above. For example…

MAMP

The web designer in me would want the iPad to be able to run MAMP. That way I could have a local development environment on the device allowing me show clients how their database-driven site is progressing in-the-browser without having to put files on a remote server. And after all, unless I get a 3G model, I can’t guarantee that the client’s office will have wifi for me to piggyback on.

Colour Management

Being able to colour calibrate the screen would be another big tick in the ‘plus’ column when it comes to showing clients design work that is destined for a printing press. Otherwise I may as well just email them a PDF, with all the colour fidelity problems that brings.

And a few other things

It was also unclear from Steve Jobs’ unveiling of the iPad quite what happens to your data if you uninstall one of the excellent-looking and keenly-priced iWork apps. On the iPhone your data is lost. Is that the case here? How does the work that you have produced with your iWork-for-iPad app get back to your main computer (and vice versa)?

Lastly, although I assume that the iPad will allow me to read PDFs in all their glory complete with access to bookmarks and so on, I saw no explicit mention of that in the coverage of the announcement event yesterday. Much said about iBooks, yes, but PDFs didn’t seem to get a mention. As someone with quite a few reference books in PDF format (eg. Sitepoint books) the iPad would seem to be the perfect way to read them, especially whilst travelling (which is when most of my reading gets done). Maybe it was so obvious as to not need stating… but I think that I’d want to confirm that before I slapped down my credit card.

So: a beautiful device, with its fair share of little niggles. Much the same as the first iPhone was. I bought one of those, and I’ll probably buy one an iPad too. If only to make my client presentations that much more sci-fi.