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iPad annoyances
written on and posted to the wiki from my iPad

Things that don't work very well on the iPad, or are not what I expected:

  • apple store in palo alto Stanford shopping center sold me an extra ac adapter claiming one was not included in the box with the iPad. An ac adapter is in fact included, much smaller than the replacement adapter they sold me for 30 dollars.
  • iPad says iPad is not charging from usb when hooked up to some laptops like my gigabyte 912x, although the ipad may actually be charging slowly
  • iPad will not work out of the box until you download and install iTunes and do a first sync with iTunes
    • so you must have an apple account
    • you must agree to several incredibly long license agreements
    • 100mb download of iTunes, safari for your windows laptop, etc, may take a long time over a mobile connection, a big delay for starting to play with your iPad
    • iPad will be useless to you if you try to make it your only computer, unless you can talk a friend into letting you use their computer for syncing to your iPad
  • iPad internal storage cannot be mounted like a hard drive under windows when the ipad is attached via USB. There is a HD air sharing app available, but it seems that stuff copied to the ipad in this way is not accessible to the rest of the iPad, for example to the music software - still doing research on this
  • at this time, April 2010, there is no way to upgrade your iPad from 32gb to 64gb
  • While using the notes app, i lost another annoyance I was going to cut and paste to here because after selecting the text, I must have hit a key and it replaced the text and there is no undo capability to get the text back (Repeated in the sections on notes, but duplicated here because losing your text typed on iPad is a major annoyance)
    • Note: The iPad does have an "undo" button on the keyboard but it is hidden underneath the ".?123" view.  This isn't a great place for this button but thankfully it does exist.
  • no documentation in the box, or on the device
    • I just noticed a bookmark in safari to iPad users guide http://help.apple.com/ipad/mobile/interface/. be nice if that was more prominent, the apple store employees at the Palo Alto Stanford Mall store didn't know to tell me about it, they said that apple had written no manual at all for the iPad and was waiting on some third parties to do so
  • I set my ipad for my local time zone, but every time I sync with my laptop, which is set for new York time because I use it for stock market trading, the iPad time zne gets set back to New York.
  • Syncing stops your music playback
  • Various apps may be exposing access to their individual document directories over Wifi via various ports on the IP address the iPad has been given, and you may not realize it

Keyboard and screen tapping related iPad annoyances:

  • The keyboard does not have onscreen cursor keys to move around text
    • sometimes it is hard to get to specific places in a note by pointing to the screen, often your cursor will be off a bit from where you wanted to be, some cursor keys would make it easy to get to the right place.
    • I just spent at least ten taps trying to get the cursor after end of  a word in the notes app that was at the end of the line and very close to the right margin, and i never succeeded. I rotated the screen orientation to get the text to wrap differently, and was finally able to get the cursor in the right place at the end of the line
    • if you accidentally select the previous line to where you want the cursor, it mat be hard to tap the next line. So tap somewhere farther away, and then try again to tap at the place you wanted
    • if you accidentally type a long run on word, like accidentallyntype, it seems there is no way to position the onscreen cursor in the middle of the word via onscreen tapping. You have to position at the end, and be content to use backspace erasing to insert the missing space, and then retype the erased word
    • update: press and hold the screen until magnifier comes up, then without releasing slide finger to move cursor to new location.
  • Asterisk is very hard to get to on onscreen keyboard, requires three keystrokes. This because the regular onscreen keyboard has no numbers, so going into symbols mode, a lot of the keys are taken up with numbers

Apple App Store iPad Annoyances:

  • you can not cut and paste from App Store descriptions when browsing the app store on the iPad. This makes creating blog posts, or wiki pages, about iPad app store apps more difficult
  • App store app on ipad also does not let you post reviews.
  • App store allows program authors to claim features, and reviewers to make favorable comments on, features that Apple has supposedly demanded that they remove from their application
  • You can view your account records which includes account downloads, but you can not cut and paste from the receipts.
  • For any category, there may be dozens of pages of apps. Everytime you pick an app to install, you bounce out of the app store app, and when you return, it forces you to return to page 1 of that category, or page 1 of your search. It can take more than a minute to get back to where you were
  • There is no way in the iPad app store app to sort the responses by price

itunes with iPad annoyances:

  • even when browsing the itunes store via the itunes application on your desktop pc, you still can not cut and paste from the descriptions for applications, meaning you must retype any information about an Apple app store product that you want to include in a review on a website, wiki page, or blog post.
  • iTunes app on desktop, when i browsed to the page for this app, did not seem aware I had already bought this app from my iPad, and seemed to be offering to sell it to me again for $3.99, but the itunes app did recognize i already bought the application when I actually tried to buy it a second time.
  • iTunes crashed when I was dropping a group of PDF files on the Goodreader viewer application file sharing
  • Cryptic errors such as:
    • Tried to sync with a different computer, told itunes to transfer my purchases, then got this error repeatedly: itunes was unable to load provider data from sync services
      • I'm having this issue as well. 64 bit Vista, not Windows 7 like almost everyone else, latest iTunes and a 3gs iPhone. Same errors as everyone else. Rolling back iTunes, that should work. Really strange that nobody at Apple noticed that the new version of iTunes crashes 100% of the time when syncing...
  • Can only sync an ipad with a single computer. When trying to sync iPad to a second computer, iTunes prompts you to entirely erase your ipad, and then sync with only the songs registered on the new computer. (Repeated under iPad digital rights management annoyances.)
  • itunes doesn't ignore trailing spaces on artists names: "Alan Parsons Project " will be listed as a separate artist from "Alan Parsons Project".
  • Solved annoyances:
    • When looking at my music library, show items as a grid, one laptop shows buttons for selecting by albums, genres, or artists, and slider for changing the size of the icons in the grid, the other does not have these buttons. Just looked and looked, but couldn't find a way to get the 64-bit copy of iTunes to show these buttons and slider. Both are running the same version of iTunes, 9.1.0.79.... OK found how to enable it: Menu -> View -> Grid View -> Show Header

PDF viewing annoyances on the iPad

  • Every PDF reader on the iPad that i have tried takes 300DPI scanned PDFs and displays them as if they were scanned at about 75dpi
  • The help for the Goodreader app for iPad has the best explanations of why the iPhone OS makes problems for the apps that are relying on its libraries to decode and display PDF files.
    • JPEG2000 compression will not be decoded properly

 
iPad digital rights management annoyances

  • Downloaded free books directly into iBooks, but the next time I synced to my computer, the computer got an error message about syncing some of them because the computer wasn't authorized to play them:
    • smash words book marketing guide
    • catfish is cat talk 
    • all employees are marketers
    • profit upgrade
    • these books were all marked free in the store and seemed to download ok - but after my next sync iTunes removed them from my iPad!!!!!!
  • itunes conversion from .wma to apples audio format is slow
  • unknown artist songs are not grouped together in artist view, but instead all get separate entries as artists, potentially making the artists list very long at that point
  • Can only sync an ipad with a single computer. When trying to sync iPad to a second computer, iTunes prompts you to entirely erase your ipad, and then sync with only the songs registered on the new computer. (Repeated under itunes with iPad annoyances).
     

iPad safari annoyances:

  • no vertical scroll bar within text edit boxes on safari - it is not obvious you must use two finger scroll to scroll within the box
  • no vertical scroll bar on framed pages - again you must know the undocumented two finger scroll to scroll them
  • first attempt to select all and copy from a safari web text edit box, and then paste into iPad notes did not work, but the second try did.
  • Can't save copies of a web page
  • Difficult to get the cursor positioned at the end of a long url to add an extra letter, for example fixing typing .htm instead of .html. One solution is to select all the text, copy it, repaste it, and then you will be positioned at the end of the text.

Annoyances with iPad notes application:

  • this one is major: after you have selected text for cut/copy/paste, it is very easy to accidentally delete the text
  • this one is also major: if you accidentally delete a block of text in this way, there doesn't seem to be an undo!   And since there is no save or save as, you have no way to go back to a previous version of your note to get the text!
  • While using the notes app, i lost another annoyance I was going to cut and paste to here because after selecting the text, I must have hit a key and it replaced the text and there is no undo capability to get the text back

Annoyances with third party apps for the iPad:

  • PDF reader pro edition for iPad didn't work for me - could not get my laptop to see their app over wifi, and could not get the sync through iTunes feature to work, which feature their app store page claims is a new feature and user reviews claims works, but after you buy it and find it doesn't work then you see their website claims apple forced them to remove the feature
  • used HD air sharing app to put PDF onto the iPad via a wireless connection, and some of the graphics based PDFs seemed to render at about 75dpi, even though they were probably 300dpi scans, and look brood on both adobe PDF acrobat, and also on a sony ebook reader
    • several of the PDFs failed to properly copy over the air, the PDFs were corrupt, and windows complained of delayed write failures, but there was no indication of failure from the hd air sharing app.
    • it seems that stuff copied to the ipad in this way is not accessible to the rest of the iPad, for example to the music software - still doing research on this

iPad email annoyances:

  • I was not yet able to log onto my own servers email with POP or SMTP, but I was able to log into Google gmail.

Annoyances of developing apps for ipad, iphone, and ipod

  • I haven't yet done any real development, but I am trying to get setup to do development for iPad. This process is annoying in many ways.
    • You must signup to become an apple developer, and the agreement requires you to use a macintosh for your development. You could buy a cheap iMac for this, or you might pursue a windows alternative for developing for the iPad, but you'll probably still need a Macintosh for the final stages of bundling your code, and without an imac, you probably can't run the iPhone simulator to test your iPad application.
    • Apple then charges you $99 a year to consider your apps for the ipad app store, the apple app store being the only annoying way to get software onto your iphone, ipod, or ipad
    • You must have at least Mac OS X 10.6.2, which if you have Mac OS X 10.5.x, you must first buy and install Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for $29

Other annoyances with the iPad:

What Apple got right on the iPad:

  • the volume is really good. My iTouch was a real disappointment, you can not hear it's built in speaker except under the most quiet of conditions, but the iPad has good volume, and good sound quality for a mono speaker device. I have not yet tried headphones with it.
  • If you want a web tablet, and a bigger iPod with much better volume, and some light email duty, this device will probably be ok for you. I was not yet able to log onto my own servers email with POP or SMTP, but I was able to log into Google gmail.
  • The onscreen keyboard is surprising useable, I can touch type at a very fast rate
    • the spelling correction works very well, making me look like a better typist than I really am on the screen.
    • I am even getting to the point where I can do most of my typing while looking at the text instead of the keyboard, but this often has me pressing n instead of space bar
    • if you have long fingers you even holdnit at the sides and thumb typemwith bothnthumbs like the iPad is an oversized blackberry
  • safari is surprisingly good
  • the apple store is not a place to go if you have no resistance to sales: they are very knowledgeable and evangelistic. I almost paid $30 for a pair of earphones that I would not have paid $8 for elsewhere.
    • that said, the store was not very well stocked with iPad accessories: there were no ipad screen protectors, and there were no cases that would have had some hard protection in front of the screen of the iPad.
  • the iPad and onscreen keyboard is even usable while sitting on the toilet. 
  • Not getting the cursor positioned real accurately for editing the text on the first try at tapping the screen is frustrating
  • the notepad app has some nice photo realistic touches to make it look like a real notepad on a leather backing
  • battery life is good, but don't believe people who say the ipad battery lasts for weeks (or maybe even days) unless you don't use it much. Typing this list into notes, doing some web browsing to update it on the wiki, and listening to music at 90% volume, used 10-15% of the battery in about 1 hour.

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