Marty's Bon Mots (Selections found in: Glad You Asked)

The iPad and Me

For my 60th birthday, and behind my back, my kids chipped and bought the most useless gadget in the world that I cannot live without.
You guessed it. They collectively schemed and got me an iPad 2. It’s the WiFi model not the 3G.

Let me start off by telling you some of the things about it that I found a bit of a nuisance.

First of all, there is no Flash support. A fair number of videos out there are made using Flash. So you will need a legit computer with Flash capability in order to view these things. I hear that there are workarounds for this type of thing, but I remain skeptical.

Secondly, there’s no real multi-tasking. In other words, you can’t have two or more application in front of you simultaneously. You have to open and close and open and close. A bit of a nuisance.

Thirdly, constant use of the thing can drain the battery in a day. This is unlike my wife’s Kindle where it can be used for days on the same charge.

Fourthly, before this thing starts to install, you have to USB connect the thing to a computer that has iTunes installed.

Fifthly, the thing that annoys me most of all though is that there is no open directory structure. In other words, if I’ve created or downloaded a file and it resides all comfy and cozy inside of one application, I can’t just grab that file and copy and/or move the thing wherever my whims and caprices beckon. No. This thing is all application driven. Meaning that wherever that file is … there it is.

Now, for the good stuff.

First of all, it’s so cool looking and so cool feeling. It has an absolutely gorgeous screen (hence the power drain) and, assuming you haven’t turned this function off, the screen will adjust its orientation based upon whether you are holding the thing in a landscape or portrait position.

The most expensive application (app, for those in the know) you can get for the thing I’ve seen so far is a cool fifteen bucks. Most of them are ninety nine cents.

You get a handful of applications to start with. You get this admin function type of thing. You get Facetime. This is a Skype sort of thing which is actually much better than Skype. If you’ve never done a Skype thing, you owe it to yourself.

There’s iTunes, of course. Contacts, Notes, Videos, Camera, iPod, Calendar, Game Center, App Store and the Apple net browser Safari. And then you start scouring the App Store for free stuff. So I got the following things for free: Netflix, Skype, Digits Lite (a calculator), Pandora, Youtube, Mail, Facebook, DropBox (An absolute must have) Evernote, Twitter, Weather Channel, Google Earth, AP news, Chess, Flipboard and, of course, Kindle. I’ve paid for a handful of apps: GarageBand, Maps, GoodReader, and DocsToGo.

Everything is activated with a finger tap. When you need to type in something into a form like a name or an email address, you just tap once on that blank space and then the iPad presents you with a keyboard. The keyboard is a little funky in that you have to touch one key to get a keyboard with numbers and special characters. But with just a minor bit of fumbling, that turns out to be no big deal. There’s even a ‘.com’ key to slightly ease your typing burdens.

At this point in time I have to say my favorite ‘app’ is a thing for which I paid a cool ninety nine cents called TuneInRadio. This thing has the radio stations that stream across the internet as well as the air waves. And these stations are categorized: Talk, Rock, Hard Rock, 60s, Jazz, Opera, Classical, Bluegrass, Comedy, etc. So you just tap here and there and you can listen to your stations. This, by the way, is the only multi-tasker I have. That is, I can navigate away from this as I do something else on the iPad and the music still plays. Also, with the included recording clock, I can configure the settings in order to record stuff in the night so that I might listen to the file it creates the next day. Very cool.

But I have to say, the apps I use routinely are Mail, Weather Channel, Facebook and AP News.

With a tap of the finger I can read my office and personal email in the time it takes my wife to boot up the laptop. Some of my emails actually require responses. To that end, I just tap to get my reply keyboard, tap tap and type away and tap to send. After that, I check out the weather, news and my Facebook stuff. By this time my wife is just beginning to get to her email site.

Oh yes, this thing is all finger centric. If I need to see the ‘next’ page, I just put my finger somewhere on the right of the screen and drag that finger to the left of the screen. Voila! The ‘next’ page.

If I need to zoom in to get a better look at something, I merely put my thumb and forefinger together in the middle of the screen and then move my fingers apart. Voila! Bigger screen. If you want it smaller, just take your spread fingers and put them on the screen and bring them together. Voila! Smaller. I do this with the New York City subway map.

But here’s the thing that turned me on to the iPad before I started even thinking about it as a serious addition to my arsenal of cutesy ass man toys.

I’m a musician. Make no mistake, I’d starve to death now if I had to rely on this as my only source of income. But I do get paid for playing at restaurants and weddings and parties and such. So I guess I’m a musician. Unfortunately, as all musicians know, when you obtain sheet music, there are no standard formats. Some sheet music comes in larger books. Some manuscripts are in single sheets, some are in spiral notebooks some are that high. Some are that high. Now, wouldn’t it be cool if I could just scan my working repertoire into one environment and one manuscript would look, more or less the same as the other? That would be nice.

Instead of lugging around a bunch of different sized manuscripts, there they’d all be in one thin little device. Cool no? Well … almost. There’s still the pesky task of having to turn pages as you’re playing.

We’ve all seen the poor slob that has to sit behind the piano player while he watches the manuscript as the musician is playing. Then he turns the page at precisely the right moment. Right? This guy is paid. With the amount of dough I collect at my gigs, there’s not a small chance I’ll be hiring anybody none too quickly in order to just turn a couple pages. No. I’d have to reach over to the music stand and turn the page. A deft maneuver at its best. I’ve seen disasters complete with crashing music stands.

The iPad by itself offers a small solution; and that is all you need do is to give a mere little finger flick and lo and behold, your virtual page turns.

Sounds great, right? Close. But no cigar. This still means I have to break concentration and touch the iPad. There’s this new kid on the block making the following claim: for musicians: It’s a wireless Bluetooth foot controller page turner sort of thingie. Step on the right one, your page turns forward. Step on the left one, your page turns backward. This little device ain’t cheap, though. I mean, in the larger scheme of things, it’s not going to break the bank at Monte Carlo. But still at about $175 its almost 1/3 the price of the unit itself. Technology has to improve and competition has to stiffen before I venture into this territory.

But obviously, this too is around the corner. In the mean time, I’ll just be amassing my repertoire.

At this point in time, I’m sitting here typing and I’ll just have a listen for a while to whatever my jazz station in San Francisco was doing at one in the morning.
Like I said: Totally useless. But just too cool for fools.

Thank you very much, kids!! Love you all!!

posted by Marty Brounstein @ 2:11 PM