The Teckki Says

If there is someone who should know how Apple's latest technologies will fit in or complement the business world, it's Charlie Havens, of the Apple computer consultancy Wooded Isle Computer Consultants. If there is someone who is still trying to figure this question out, it's also Charlie Havens. This is not a knock on his expertise, he's first rate. It does demonstrate the flux these new products are creating, and since they are directed at the consumer world, it also shows the complexity of making the crossover to the business and non-profit worlds. In comparison, Research in Motion's (RIM) Blackberry products went the other way, from the business to the consumer world. That is a much easier transition.

Havens' first thoughts were that his iPad was a lot more fun to use than his iPhone, but quickly found some quirks, such as the way either device displays the keystrokes of a password before it hides them on the screen. The iPad’s screen is much larger, magnifying this effect. Typing, while better, is not as easy as it is on a laptop, so most heavy interaction will continue to be on a big box. For the features the device shines at, like reading eBooks, web browsing and email, Havens gives the iPad very high marks.

Havens’ experience has been that of an early adopter. He encountered this a few years earlier with the iPhone. Both experiences are still fraught with growing pains. Apple makes it child-like simple on the consumer side to operate its devices, but something that businesses want, and take for granted, is integration of services on the back-end. Email, Google and Facebook work extremely well on the iPhone, but you are talking about systems that have hundreds of millions of users, and the experiences of each user are rather generic. Customized solutions for the iPhone OS-based devices yield mixed results at best, and some horror stories, as Havens can relate in trying to make Apple work in a still Microsoft-dominated world. I expect this to continue as Google becomes more pervasive in our computing experiences, and Apple continues to develop divergent paths with its new rival.

Havens’ job going forward will be to sort out this mess, and find new ways to use these devices. One such way was the use of an iPad as the server of a Keynote (Apple’s equivalent of Microsoft’s PowerPoint) presentation he made at a seminar back in May. First, hardware connections, like VGA adapters, had to be purchased, since they are not built into the device. Another challenge is getting that laptop-built-but-excellent presentation over to the iPad, since there are no disc or card slots. Finally, he had to deal with differences in laptop machine fonts that were used in the presentation, but were not natively loaded onto the iPad.

It struck me as curious that days prior to his presentation, he downloaded several different presentation applications from the App Store to get a feel of how each app might work with one. Apple had developed Keynote to the iPad, but it is easier to create more robust presentations on a laptop. To him, it seemed that every app had something that he wished was on all of the others. He settled on Keynote, and after the technical hurdles, everything was plug and play. Havens was able to do a great presentation, and his audience was wowed by the sight of an "everyone wants’ one" device demonstrated in the real world.

It might sound like a reinvention of the wheel here, because Havens had his laptop and could have easily done the presentation using that device. Havens wasn’t doing this as a part of an ego trip, but I am sure that advertising had some role to play here. More importantly, a client is going to clamor for a solution that involves the ability to use an iPad in this manner, and the client will expect Havens and Wooded Isle to deliver. That will require more than a Keynote presentation of how this might work.