My iPad 3G arrived on Friday, so after watching other people's shiny new toys I finally got to use my own.

The main use we're planning at my company (or excuse, if you prefer) is to use the iPad as a demonstration device when we exhibit at trade shows. Right now we ship a large iMac to set up in our booth in order to show off our web-based reporting tools. The iMac is a good platform for this, since it gives us an attractive, large display which helps draw people into the booth but doesn't detract from what we're trying to show off.

The iMac has it's downsides, though: it costs over $100 to ship and insure (even ground) each way; the padded shipping crate is heavy and unwieldy; and since we only have one, we can only do one demo at a time, meaning that at busy times we have a lot of people crowded around the one scree

The iPad seems like the perfect alternative. It costs nothing to ship since several will fit into a briefcase to carry onto a flight, it's easy to carry on and off a trade show floor, and we can have several in the booth so we can give multiple one-on-one demonstrations at a tim

After receiving the iPad Friday, I loaded it with a variety of productivity software and tools (mainly Apple's iWork suite, Omnigraffle, and OmniGraphSketcher) on the theory that we may want to actually use the iPads when we're not at a trade show to do real work.

First Impressions

Thursday afternoon, before my 3G model arrived, I was at a technology committee meeting for a local school. Since the non-faculty members of the committee are all technophiles like myself, I wasn't surprised when the pre-meeting discussion was about the iPad. Both of the other non-faculty members had brought a few (non-3G) iPads into their organizations to evaluate, and both had essentially the same conclusion: the iPad is more useful as a business and technology tool than they had expected.

After playing with mine for the weekend, I have to agree. The productivity applications on the iPad are necessarily more limited, but for basic tasks they are significantly faster and more natural to use than the desktop equivalent. The small form-factor, touch interface, and instant-on-always-available quality of the iPad allow the machine to get out of the way of whatever task may be at hand. The fact is that 98% of business tasks do not require advanced features, so it becomes natural to just grab for the pad rather than open the laptop.

A case in point is the OmnigGraphSketcher application. I evaluated this on the desktop a while ago as a charting package and came away unimpressed. The concept is that rather than start with numerical data in a table like every other graphing program, you draw the graph you want freehand and the program makes it look pretty. This didn't work (for me) since I've always found drawing freehand with a mouse to be unnatural, clumsy and imprecise, and I couldn't see why you would want to get away from numerical input data.

On the iPad, however, OmniGraphSketcher becomes and entirely different experience. Sketching a chart with a touch screen is about the most natural thing you can do, and the program takes what you draw freehand and makes it look pretty and professional. The experience is like using a magic whiteboard which takes your rough ideas and turns them into something which looks like a professional graphic artist created it.

Drawbacks

There are some surprising glitches and limitations (which I fully expect will be addressed in a future software update). For me at least, the lack of Flash and multitasking are not problems at al

However, long popup menus render in a way which doesn't look scrollable, meaning that items at the top or bottom of a list can get lost. For such a polished user interface, this usability mistake is surprising.

The lack of printing capability and the clumsy mechanisms for sharing and synchronizing files limit the iPad as a serious workhorse. Right now about the only way to move files on and off the iPad for most programs is through e-mail which, while functional for small files, is really not acceptable for big documents.

I also discovered that while most websites work very well on the iPad, some advanced AJAXy things don't work at all. The touch interface has no way to hover the mouse pointer over things, and there is no way (yet) to do drag-and-drop operations on the touch screen (the drag motion of the fingers is interpreted as a scrolling action and doesn't get padded to Javascript).

I'm typing this article entirely on the on screen keyboard (works surprisingly well) but the fancy WYSIWYG text editor I use on this blog does not work on the iPad at all (so after typing this, I will be cleaning up the formatting from my laptop).

Stray taps also seem to be a problem, and when I type too fast I seem to get a little sloppy and occasionally hit the screen outside the keyboard, moving the insertion point in my text and wreaking havoc on what I'm trying to type.

On the whole, these are minor complaints, and I fully expect they will be fixed in months not years. I can definitely see a day when the iPad or it's successor becomes my primary computing device, with the laptop or desktop only hauled out for particularly demanding tasks.

When the original iPhone came out, my first reaction was, "Cool, I want one!"

She Who Puts Up With Me was less enthusiastic, viewing it as "an expensive toy and we already have two perfectly good phones so why do we need this?"

Despite these objections, my old phone just happened to fall apart within days of the availability of the iPhone (no, really, it was an old Treo and the screws kept falling out and it was being held together with one screw and a piece of Scotch tape, and besides the web browser was a piece of junk and I couldn't get it to work right with my e-mail anyway). So it came to pass that just a week after they went on sale, I came home with two brand-new iPhones.

For the record, my wife has become a true believer and now plans to upgrade her iPhone (still the first generation one, now starting to lose its battery life) this summer when the next generation comes out.

So it should come as no surprise that when the iPad was announced, my first reaction was, "Cool, I want one!"

She Who Puts Up With Me responded with "it's an expensive toy and we already have five perfectly good computers so why do we need this?"

Let's not fool ourselves. I've basically not grown up past the "give me the shiny new toy!" stage which for most people ends at about three years old. That makes me the perfect target consumer for an iPad--I just needed to find some way to distract the rational side of my brain from the price tag. The mental equivalent of pointing off in the distance and and shouting "Look over there! What in the world can that be?"

My excuse is that the iPad looks like the perfect gizmo for a tradeshow booth where you need to do one-on-one demonstrations of a web-based application. It's very portable (saves shipping), you can have several of them in the booth, prospective customers can hold it up and touch the application (better than huddling around a mouse and screen), and the novelty value alone will bring people into the booth.

It just so happens that my company's reporting system is web-based, and we spend a lot of our time when exhibiting at tradeshows doing one-on-one demos.

So I've ordered an iPad--of course this is to "evaluate its suitability for use in our tradeshow demos," but we all know the truth.

1. I've seen lots of commentary along the lines of "It's doomed to fail because it doesn't have X" (where X is a camera, flash support, desktop-style OS, multitasking support, a hardware keyboard, HDMI output, an open app store, or any of a dozen other features various people consider "must have"). This is wrong. No gizmo can do everything--the question is whether this one does enough.
2. The iPad isn't intended as (or even capable of being) your primary computing device. It will succeed if it's a more convenient laptop for casual web surfing. It will fail if it's an iPhone which doesn't fit in your pocket.
3. iPad is a clunky name, but so is MacBook. If it succeeds, nobody will care about the name.
4. Nine years ago, when Bill Gates announced that everyone would be using Tablet PC's, I don't think he meant "made by Apple."
5. I have no idea if the iPad will be useful, but for the price I may be willing to take a chance. I've certainly spent more than this on gadgets which didn't meet my expectations in the past. The $500 price is critical in this decision--if it had been $1,000, I would look at it more like a new laptop than a potentially useful toy.
6. Apple clearly intends to upend the accepted practices of user interface design (practices which Apple was instrumental in popularizing). On the whole, this is a Good Thing, since the desktop user interface is (or has become) far to complicated and technical for a large population of users to properly manage.

Our trusty Braun coffee maker (a wedding present from almost 16 years ago) recently died. I wanted to replace it with something which wouldn't die on us after a year or two, so the cheap $20 Mr. Coffee from Target was out.

I've heard people rave about vacuum extraction coffee makers, so I decided to investigate....and bit. For $75 (including shipping from Amazon), I picked up a Bodum Santos 34-ounce vacuum extraction coffee maker.

This is an entirely different way of making coffee from the usual automatic drip.  There are two chambers, a lower one which you fill with water, and an upper one filled with coffee grounds.  You boil the water in the lower chamber, which forces it up through a tube into the upper chamber where the hot water and grounds mix.  Then you remove it from the heat, and as the steam in the lower chamber cools it sucks the coffee back into the lower chamber through a filter.

As soon as I got the box this afternoon, I brewed a pot of decaf (it being past my usual hour for stimulants).  Following the advice of many people online, I preheated the water in the microwave to save time on the stove (a good idea).  And by golly, even though I don't consider myself a coffee geek, I really can taste the difference from our old drip coffee maker.  It has a much stronger coffee flavor with less bitterness.

Plus, it's fun to watch.

So the scorecard for the vacuum extraction coffee maker is:

Advantages:

• Fun to watch
• Simple: nothing electrical and no moving parts
• No replaceable filters, and easy to clean
• Brews a fine cuppa joe

Disadvantages:

• Fussier than a drip coffee maker
• More expensive than Mr. Coffee (though not more expensive than a high-quality coffee maker).
• Makes a smaller pot than a large coffee maker