yes, that's right. this late adopting, pay-as-you-go-Zack-Morris-phone toting gal has one of these new-fangled devices that does everything save flying me to the moon. sweet. however, i've quickly found that you can lead a technologically backward 31-year old to water but she doesn't completely know how to drink.
i'm catching on. slowly. remember people, i don't have an iPhone so i've missed the boat on things like urban spoon, iFart, etc. sadly i spent the first few weeks using iPad for things like:
- playing Paper Toss (amazing waste of time that i can't seem to stop letting consume me)
- playing hangman
- using the iPad as a digital cookbook. the cover i bought has two heights i can choose from to stand iPad up. handy!
- looking for the video functionality (really? how does this thing not have a camera in it!)
however, things like "app of the week" and corporate lunch n' learns are helping me to see the light, so i'm making my way into more interesting apps beyond those that provide mindless amusement. last week's app was penultimate, which was on sale for £.59p and very exciting to me, because it made me think "maybe i could use this bad boy at work for, gasp, productivity!"
visions danced through my head of combining my various to-do lists, client notebooks, etc. into one beautiful application that organised it all AND allowed me to email everything to myself. imagine the trees i'd save, the impressed looks i'd get from clients when i whipped out iPad in meetings. "isn't she savvy!" they'd think as i scribbled effortlessly, digitally, all the fruits of our labour into the wonder that is iPad.
eager to make these visions a reality, i dashed off to curry's last weekend to pick up a stylus. of course you need a special stylus for such magic, and of course apple don't make one. luckily, proporta saw a gap in the market (ok, so the stylus is actually for the iPhone but nevermind) and it only set me back £9.99. such a small amount for such an incredible investment! i couldn't wait to get the four-inch, rubber-tipped stylus out of its clamshell packaging and onto the touch screen.
in all the excitement, it seems i forgot that nothing is ever as easy as it looks and that like anything else, it would take time to perfect my ability to make a piece of rubber and a small computer produce something that looked remotely close to jen writing. i spent the first night desperately hoping to achieve greatness but alas. not so much. what i DID achieve were a lot of scribbles, mess ups, and generally illegible characters. after twenty minutes or so, i managed to produce this (never mind what it says):
twenty four hours, many failed attempts, and one very sore hand later i was able to produce something that actually looked like my handwriting (again, not the work of shakespeare but merely an attempt to write basically ANYTHING):
it's all in the angle, is basically what i discovered. i had the system down to a t when i realised that to achieve such perfection, i had to be curled up on the couch with the iPad resting on a raised knee. maybe not the best for client meetings?
needless to say, i am still practicing how to write on this thing when i am in a respectable position e.g. in a chair at a table. i did, however, discover that it is more fun to draw with the stylus than with my finger:
back to the mindless entertainment again, it seems, but i haven't given up and have been using iPad all week at work. it's for internal meetings only at this point, until i can get my skills to the next level OR until i can remember to turn off the eraser tool when i'm through editing. we'll see which comes first. in the meantime, i'm working on some serious calluses for my thumb and middle finger. ;-)
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