iPad Things the iPad Does Not Do

[pshrynk]

Originally Posted by scottjl

you mean upload a picture from your laptop? no. can't do that one..

I haven't found a way to get a pic from the iPad, either.

[Faenad]

Originally Posted by scottjl

looks like we might be able to take printing off the list

It's now official, you can print directly from the Ipad.

[scottjl]

yeah. old joke..

[athlonkmf]

Originally Posted by pshrynk

I haven't found a way to get a pic from the iPad, either.

Not that hard really.. Upload the pics to photo bucket with their app, or send them to your flickr account. Use the imagelunk as your avatar and done

[scottjl]

there's an idea... thanks.

[Solicitous]

Originally Posted by lifevicarious

Can I ask what you want USB for? People keep saying this but what do they use USB for aside from a printer (and there are solutions for that). And the dock connector actually is USB but that's besides the point.

Simple, "oh here are my photos on my thumb drive....er you have an ipad, never mind I shall get them to you somehow". Me like the rest of the world use USB thumbdrives, if I were to have a device. Yes, the dock connector is USB, but not a standard USB connector on the iPad. Majority of my devices have a small USB port, so I leave a cable plugged into my PC and just connect whatever device as and when needed without having to try and locate the correct cable. Just making my life simpler and not at the mercy of a particular company.

Originally Posted by lifevicarious

Flash is dying. Also, keep in mind that most flash utilizes mouse overs, how can you use mouse overs on a touch device? Not to mention the battery life and system resources utilized. Go to a flash site and check out your system resources, you will see what a hit they take because of flash. I am on the latest iMac with 8 GB of RAM, the cartier.com flash site uses the vast majority of my system resources on a computer orders of magnitude greater in power then the iPad.

I do go to flash sites and my resources are not that heavily utilised (core duo 1.6, 2gb ram, Ubuntu). Who says flash is dying? People said years ago that Java was dying, then claimed Perl was dying, even to the extent that Cobol was dead. They may not be as heavily used now as they once were, but there is something called LEGACY support. Who uses CDs now? DVDs are so much cheaper and hold far more data, better remove the functionality to read CDs on all news PCs.

Originally Posted by lifevicarious

It's not meant to be a desktop/laptop replacement. You can use a bluetooth keyboard, which many of us Mac folks already have (again negating the need for USB) and you can print. THere are a number of apps for that.

I am being serious and not rude or demeaning towards the iPad, I think the concept of the device is good, but I don't quite understand this statement. iPad doesn't print natively, but there are apps you can install to provide you with the printing ability. Why in this day and age is it acceptable for some devices to no perform the most basic functions out of the box that we all perform?? Is printing like Flash, dying and Apple are moving us into the future?? Heck even my mobile phone will print to a printer (don't know why you'd want to print from a mobile phone, but it does).

[scottjl]

Originally Posted by Solicitous

Simple, "oh here are my photos on my thumb drive....er you have an ipad, never mind I shall get them to you somehow". Me like the rest of the world use USB thumbdrives, if I were to have a device. Yes, the dock connector is USB, but not a standard USB connector on the iPad. Majority of my devices have a small USB port, so I leave a cable plugged into my PC and just connect whatever device as and when needed without having to try and locate the correct cable. Just making my life simpler and not at the mercy of a particular company.

you can pay $30 for the photo adapter and load your pictures off of a usb jumpdrive. you just need to stick them in a directory called DCIM and the ipad will read them just fine. same works if you put them on a SD card and use the SD card adapter. a little extra money spent, and a little hackery to get it done, but it can be done.

I am being serious and not rude or demeaning towards the iPad, I think the concept of the device is good, but I don't quite understand this statement. iPad doesn't print natively, but there are apps you can install to provide you with the printing ability. Why in this day and age is it acceptable for some devices to no perform the most basic functions out of the box that we all perform?? Is printing like Flash, dying and Apple are moving us into the future?? Heck even my mobile phone will print to a printer (don't know why you'd want to print from a mobile phone, but it does).

most phones don't print natively and the few that do require specific printers and don't have global drivers. that's the hardest part with printing off an ipad. what drivers do you load? and with what mechanism? it isn't in the 3.x OS currently, but jobs has hinted that is is coming. given that it is a software upgrade it hopefully will be something that all versions of the ipad will be able to do. for now, you use a 3rd party system, or you transfer back to your desktop and print from there.

[Trubu]

Originally Posted by Solicitous

Is printing like Flash, dying

For me it is - with network scanning, cloud storage and email, I very rarely find a need to print anything anymore. And with the iPad, it's even more infrequent since I can easily carry around all of the PDFs and docs I need.

It'll still be nice to have that capability, though, for the rare occasions when I need it.

[scottjl]

I'm with you trubu.. only print when i absolutely have to. my 64G iPad has plenty of storage and i have about 300 technical PDFs that work beautifully with GoodReader. I have some 1600 notes saved in evernote (many emails, easily forwarded from mail.app) stored on the ipad that i can search quickly. everything else is in the cloud (sugarsync). i save web pages off-line with atomic browser, or to review later with instapaper and readitlater (i'm still deciding between the two).

so, unless i have to sign something or hand a document to someone who has no electronic access i have no reason to print.

[Tamara]

Originally Posted by Trubu

For me it is - with network scanning, cloud storage and email, I very rarely find a need to print anything anymore.

Same here.

[dmaul1114]

I print a ton of stuff--but I'm a professor so it's just the nature of the job since I'm always working with documents, doing research reading etc.

I read a TON of scholarly journal articles--and I print those out to read and mark up as there's just not a good solution for reading and marking those up electronically currently.

Which is again why I'm dying for someone to steal the good parts of the iPad and make an A4 or close sized tablet with good stylus support so I can start reading and marking up things electronically in a manner that's just a quick and easy as doing it on paper.

That said, I don't care that much whether the tablet can print. No big deal to move files over to the PC to print. I don't have wifi printing in the home or office currently anyway.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by dmaul1114

Which is again why I'm dying for someone to steal the good parts of the iPad and make an A4 or close sized tablet with good stylus support so I can start reading and marking up things electronically in a manner that's just a quick and easy as doing it on paper.

.

Hmm. Everyone agrees that printing is a waste, yet so many PDFs are still formatted for letter / A4 sized paper, as if everybody is going to print it. Why does this convention still rule?

Wouldn't it be smarter to format the PDF page size a wee bit smaller (e.g. 6"x8", more book sized) so it will work better on a iPad sized screen? This would obviate the need for a larger screen and all that entails (power consumption, bulk, faster processor). This would also be friendlier for facing page viewing on laptop and many smaller desktop displays, which tend to be too short to display letter/a4 size at 100%.

Looks like there is an app called iAnnotate PDF that does markup.

Wonder if Adobe ever intends to do a viewer for iPad with all the bells and whistles of annotation, digital signing, password protection etc. But without the ability to view embedded swf of course.

[athlonkmf]

Originally Posted by Solicitous

Simple, "oh here are my photos on my thumb drive....er you have an ipad, never mind I shall get them to you somehow". Me like the rest of the world use USB thumbdrives, if I were to have a device. Yes, the dock connector is USB, but not a standard USB connector on the iPad. Majority of my devices have a small USB port, so I leave a cable plugged into my PC and just connect whatever device as and when needed without having to try and locate the correct cable. Just making my life simpler and not at the mercy of a particular company.

If me, or my friends want to share pics or whatever, we'd just give eachother the link to album online, or we'd just share the pics through some cloudbase thingie like dropbox, or simply email the pics.
It's much more practical. Esp with the iPhone (and now iPad). The friend select the pics he/she wants, and click send. Nowadays, with the huge mailboxes, this is no problem at all.

USB sticks, yuck... I've only found one practical use for it the past few years, and that's to put some boot-OS on it. Or to install a new BIOS-firmware.

I do go to flash sites and my resources are not that heavily utilised (core duo 1.6, 2gb ram, Ubuntu). Who says flash is dying? People said years ago that Java was dying, then claimed Perl was dying, even to the extent that Cobol was dead. They may not be as heavily used now as they once were, but there is something called LEGACY support. Who uses CDs now? DVDs are so much cheaper and hold far more data, better remove the functionality to read CDs on all news PCs.

Difference is, most people paid for the CDs/DVDs. No consumer every paid for the flash app itself, so they won't be furious when the video player suddenly looks a tad different. It's the content that count.

(on a sidenote, I've been creating ISO's from my DVDs so I can just put the DVDs away. With the network-streamers nowadays, I don't need these kind of mediacarriers anymore. Put all the content on my NAS and I can watch it through the streamer at high-quality.)

Originally Posted by Trubu

For me it is - with network scanning, cloud storage and email, I very rarely find a need to print anything anymore. And with the iPad, it's even more infrequent since I can easily carry around all of the PDFs and docs I need.

It'll still be nice to have that capability, though, for the rare occasions when I need it.

Would be nice if I don't need to print my boarding passes anymore...

[Maggie Leung]

Athlonkmf, some airlines let you check in by scanning your boarding pass from your smart phone. They just zap the barcode thing on your screen. I'm a little paranoid that I'll get stuck should my phone or their scanner fail, though.

[scottjl]

you can use your iPhone as a boarding pass with delta depending on which airport you are departing from. works great out of o'hare in Chicago or atlanta. don't worry Maggie, if your phone fails when you get to the airport you can just have them print a regular ticket.