Waiting is easier with an iPad

Well, I've been home now since last Friday and while I am feeling much better, that just means I can go for more than two hours without pain medication and still not be reduced to tears. Ken is doing the best he can, and Ian has really been good about stepping up to doing more around the house and also helping me when I need it. I am getting used to the iPad - its good things and its limitations. The soft touch keyboard is amazingly simple to use, especially in landscape mode. The addition of helps to offer things like spelling corrections or inserting a space between two words is very nice indeed, even if it is not correct on occasion. And, of course, it still can't tell if you meant tow or two in a sentence. But I think I can forgive it that.

It is not, however, a replacement for a laptop or desktop machine, and there are a couple things that really bring that home. First, the inability to print. It seems minor until you need it, then it becomes quite awkward because you have to send the thing you wanted printed to yourself and pick it up at a machine that can print. This is, no doubt, the biggest PITA for me. Of course, the amount of printing you have to do is reduced greatly by the extremely high screen resolution, but sometimes a gal just has to print.

The other problem for me, and again it is a mixed blessing, is the absence of Flash. On the one hand, not having to deal with the stupid dog-and-pony show introductions at commercial websites is a true blessing. On the other hand, I miss being able to play bingo. What is interesting though is the number of sites that use very little flash, if any, and the number of content providers willing to create a version of their products that do not use flash. Zynga (the Farmville people), have a non flash version of their popular Farmville game that actually works quite well. And the Article 19 group, who make the best jigsaw puzzle engine bar none, also has a non flash version of their flagship product, Daily Jigsaw.

The ereaders available all seem to work fine. Of course you can get a Kindle reader for free, and the generic iPad e-reader is quite nice. I wish the mail client had a way to tag junk mails, but that is minor for me.

The last thing I really miss are directional arrow keys and a tab key. It makes navigation on long webpages or documents much easier. But I'm sure either Apple will add it later, or some one will create an app for that.

So, here I sit, just me and my iPad, waiting for my body to heal.