ipad

My credit card is quite ready to dump some money on the following, when they're released:

• Coda for iPad: We need a good IDE for the iPad, and Coda screams iPad, already; I would be willing to heft over a pretty penny to have Coda on my iPad... even without terminal support, or the useless CSS editor.
• Podcasting Suite: Something like GarageBand lite; just enough to record multiple tracks (maybe 2-4, with the ability to split right and left channels from a USB audio input (like the iMic) into separate tracks. Then add in a small library of music beds, stingers, etc., and I'm in love.
• Tabbed Browser ala Safari on the Mac. Even if I can only open three or four tabs, it would be so nice to leave them open for later viewing, without having to leave my current browser tab/window.

Coda is the only one for which I really have a pressing need. The others can wait, but would be awesome.

Read on: Review of Apple's iPad Camera Connection Kit.

Since purchasing the iPad, I've constantly been amazed by how fast everything works—switching between large apps is no longer a game of roulette, and browsing the web is a breeze.

I ran some tests on Safari on my iPad, just to see how things compare to my MacBook Pro...

SunSpider Javascript Benchmark

Here's the screenshot from my iPad (14068.6ms):

And from my Mac (406.8ms):

The MacBook Pro (2.53 Ghz 15" with 4 GB of RAM) is about 34x faster than the iPad in raw JavaScript performance... not too surprising, but I'd guess this margin will be trimmed in the next five years, when everyone's carrying around a tablet :-)

Acid3 Test

Here's the screenshot from my iPad (took about 5 seconds):

[UPDATE: It looks like there's a nice app available to jailbroken iPads via Cydia called 'Display Out' that will allow you to use the iPad with any external display, the way it was meant to be! Also, some other interesting comments down below...]

I bought the iPad VGA cable at the store today, hoping to be able to browse the web via Safari, show presentations using Keynote, and view slideshows on my monitor and on the projector, using the cable. A couple of these things are possible, but right now the VGA cable is pretty weak, and probably not worth the money.

You can:

[UPDATED: The developer of iSSH emailed me this morning with a couple of tidbits that will be useful for any early iSSH adopters on the iPad - see my updated notes in bold.]

One app I haven't had a lot of time to work with (yet) is iSSH on the iPad. I tried the iPhone version, but the tiny iPhone screen simply couldn't keep up with a productive SSH or VNC session.

The iPad changes the game, though; I can actually log in via SSH, do some real work, then go back to doing whatever I was doing on the iPad. Since the iSSH developers didn't have a ton of time to work on an actual iPad, there are some pretty annoying bugs right now—but these bugs will be fixed soon. Some of the bugs:

Just posted in the Articles section of the website:

How to Tether Your iPad to Your iPhone (via WiFi)

It's a pretty simple process, and it works great! The only downside is that the iPhone runs out of juice relatively quickly. To compensate, consider plugging it into the wall charger while it's tethered.

This is my first blog post from the iPad. Unfortunately, the iPad doesn't work with CKEditor, which I am using on this website, so I have to use the plain text editor. Luckily, typing on the iPad isn't too much of a chore, although it is pretty easy to lose your finger positions while typing.

I think that's all I'll type for now, because my hands are getting tired, and it's about time to go to bed. But hopefully Ill have some more time to test out typing on the iPad tomorrow.

As an aside, you can't use Drupal's built-in file uploading (via FileField) with the iPad, at least not natively. I'll have to investigate this more over the next few weeks. There's got to be a way to add a picture to a blog post!