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AP News for iPad a missed opportunity
Having made most of my living in the news business, I'm pretty much a news junkie. As a result, I've loaded my iPad up with a lot of news applications so I can keep up throughout the day. I'd taken some pretty strong issue with the failings of the AP News app for the iPhone, but the iPad version hits a new low in design and function. Let's start at the beginning. When you launch the app, you are presented with a screen that has little strips of news on what appears to be a cloth background. Each strip is a story. You can get about six of these strips on the iPad screen. That's pretty silly, since the screen is so large and the strips are so small. You would think the people that designed this app would use the extra space for more content, but that isn't the case. The home screen also has a large window which is a gateway to AP photos, and another window that leads you to video. More about those later. %Gallery-92052%
Reflections: A day and a night with the iPad
Getting an iPad was an unplanned part of my day. My original idea was to wait for version 2, but I found myself at a local Best Buy taking pictures and interviewing people in line, and the manager came out and said there were some available. Bingo. Reality distortion field. Up went my hand. I spent yesterday afternoon and last night getting a pretty good idea of what this baby does and doesn't do. Here are a few preliminary thoughts: Setup is easy, but a bit slow. I plugged it into iTunes, selected what music, movies and apps I wanted to copy to the iPad and I was on my way. It seemed like the sync took forever, and subsequent syncs are VERY slow. Lots of spinning beach balls. Maybe it's my system. Maybe not. The iPad alerted me that there were quite a few app updates that gave direct support to the higher resolution screen, so I was happy for that. How is the iPad to use? In a word, interesting, liberating, sometimes frustrating. It's heavier than I thought it would be. I think for most people, it is not a one-handed device. Sitting on my lap, or on a table, it's just dandy. As others have noted, the iPad is very snappy. Web pages render quickly, graphics are quickly updated. The screen is beautiful, and movies and photos look striking. The screen is very reflective, so you may have to fiddle around with angles if you are in a room with sunlight streaming in.
