Chatting with my office neighbor, (a programmer, smart guy, and future iPad owner) a light bulb when on for both of us. The iPad is all about sharing!
Remember when the Zune introduced sharing (uh, “squirting” right?) of a song to another Zune owner? Steve Jobs was quoted as saying that isn’t sharing, sharing was letting someone listen to the music on your iPod with your headphones (teens do not worry about headphone sharing ick). That is what brings people together.
The iPad does the same with it’s screen from the overall size of the hardware to it’s ability to reach out to the world network. It is no longer about looking at a little iPod Touch screen (it’s huge compared to other devices but we are talking iPads here) over the shoulder of a friend to share in the fun of a YouTube video.
Notebooks have a keyboard between you and the screen that is handy to type on but creates a frame of mind that causes a person to rotate the whole device from you to someone next to you and back. The iPad brings a good size screen in a thin and light package that makes it comfortable to both work on a project for yourself or share a view with others. This will take us way beyond a fun video, we can now share tools for work and play.
Tools can be working on numbers in a spreadsheet, editing a picture, creating a mindmap or creating a todo list for a project. The iPad is more towards a electronic whiteboard than it is a mini notebook computer. As users start getting into that frame of mind, more and more will be showing up in the board room as well on the subway.
The very well known creative shop IDEO has taken their deck of Method Cards from paper to the electronic world as a ‘app’. I have enjoyed using the cards to walk through the process of thinking like a client when formulating a solution to their problem. This is great on the iPhone for my use, but the iPad now makes it a group process. I can work with my team, all looking at the cards and then the process text as we work through the steps.
IDEO’s Method Cards app is free – includes 8 cards of the deck. For the full set of cards in the process they charge $4.99 as an ‘in app’ purchase
