iPad Changes the Game

The last few days have been exhilarating for all of us new iPad owners. Apple has unleashed a new device on the world that is no less paradigm shifting than the original Mac was 25 years ago. There are more positive reviews of the device than you can swing a dead cat at. If I were to read just two, I would make them Jason’s and Andy’s.

I’m not going to do a thorough review. Instead, I plan on sharing just a few observations and then returning in a month to write about how the iPad fits into my life.*

Game Changer

I suspected it before. Now that I’ve used one a few days, I’m convinced. I’ve written before about my experience with tablet computers. Apple finally got it right. Others will catch on. The answer is not trying to bolt a mouse based operating system on a tablet. You have to start from scratch.

I’m already getting real work done on the iPad. I wrote a brief today (and this post) using Pages and a bluetooth keyboard. I see myself in the not so distant future without a laptop. I won’t be alone.

The iPhone App Myth

While Apple certainly gets marketing traction saying how many apps will run on the iPad, you will want to get iPad native apps whenever possible. The iPhone apps look remarkably Atari 800 on the iPad. I’ve only kept those few that I can’t live without (SimpleNote and OmniFocus). While you are waiting for your favorite apps to get an iPad makeover, don’t forget about Safari. Mint and Dropbox, for example, work just fine in Safari and both experiences are better than a pixelated iPhone application.

Transparency

My most surprising observation of the iPad is how transparent it is. As transformative and revolutionary as this technology is, it gets out of the way extraordinarily fast. Flipping through RSS feeds, catching up on Instapaper (my own personal iPad killer app), or tweaking a Keynote presentation are so seamless that you forget about the iPad entirely. This isn’t just true for nerds like me. This was proven by my Mother.

My 80-year-old mother is amazing. She grew up in a small factory town in Massachusetts where they often caught dinner in a lake behind the house. During her lifetime she has seen the world go from buggy whips to the moon and from the radio to the internet. Nothing fazes her. I handed her my iPad and she started flipping through the pages of Winnie the Pooh. Even though she has never showed any interest in computers, she became absorbed with the content and forgot she was using something electronic. Then, as she was turning the page, she did something very natural. She licked her finger and turned the page. I grinned. This technology is so natural that you forget it exists. That is why the iPad is going to change everything.

  • There may also be a Mac Power Users episode very soon where Katie and I address the iPad in detail.

RocketBox Review

One of the most common complaints with Apple’s Mail.app is search speed. Several trusted friends and mac-gurus have told me how the search function in mail slows them down. My mail database contains about 25,000 items and I’ve never had much of a problem with Mail’s search. While 25,000 seems like a lot of messages, I know some people have multiples of that number and I suspect that is where Mail.app starts falling down.

Central Atomics “RocketBox” attempts to pick up the slack with mail search.

This $15 mail plugin seeks to take over where the built in search leaves off.
The first time you install RocketBox, it will spend some time chugging through your existing e-mail database. It took about 20 minutes on my machine. Once installed, you can easily turn RocketBox off and revert to the built-in search if you choose.

According to the developer, this plug-in searches your mail up to 200 times faster than Mail.app. While I suspect RocketBox’s speed improvements would be more noticeable with a larger library, for me there was no significant difference in speed.

However, RocketBox isn’t just about the search speed. RocketBox has an autofill feature that fills in a name. However, it only works with first names. If I start typing “Miles”, the RocketBox search will prompt me to auto fill “Miles Davis.” However, if I typed “Davis”, RocketBox won’t help.

Also, RocketBox does not do partial search. This is a feature built into the Mail.app search. For instance, if I type “DAV”, Mail.app will already start grinding through my database. RocketBox doesn’t start until you complete the search. It supports several different search syntaxes and boolean operators. You can combine and qualify search filters to combine names, dates, accounts, and even flags.

One of the biggest differences with the baked-in search are the results. Rather than provide a list of messages, RocketBox opens its own window and shows the content of the e-mails it finds matching your search with the specific search terms highlighted. This list can then be sorted by date or relevance. This is a nice improvement. However, RocketBox often showed the same message multiple times, which became tedious.

RocketBox is a great idea. If you are a Mail.app user and experiencing unacceptable search speeds, it may be what you are looking for. There are quite a few features in the built-in search that simply are not available in RocketBox, create smart folders from a search for instance but I suspect this first release is just a toe hold and the feature list will quickly grow. You can download a free trial.

Minimal Mac

I make no secret of the fact that my Mac related RSS feed list is pretty small. Recently, however, I discovered Minimal Mac and immediately made room for it in my feed reader. So just a few weeks after discovering this site, you can imagine my delight this morning at finding Minimal Mac linking our MPU Merlin Mann interview. The circle is complete.

ABA Techshow 2010

I’m on the ground in Chicago for the second straight year talking about Macs and other sufficiently nerdy subjects at the American Bar Association’s Techshow. I’ve already met several new friends (like iPhoneJD publisher Jeff Richardson) and am now locking myself in to polish my presentations. If you are in attendance, make sure to stop by and introduce yourself. In addition to my sessions, I’ll also be co-hosting a dinner tomorrow with Mr. MacLawyer himself, Ben Stevens and I’ll be available to chat at the conference concierge desk on Friday the 26th for two hours starting at 10 a.m. If you are here, come by and say hello. We can compare menu bars.