The magic box

I took my iPad to places it's never been before today. Hooked up to a projector, paging through Keynote slides, playing movie clips. Those are things I know how to do on a computer, and that familiarity has bred comfort. I'm confident that I can get the desktop extended or mirrored on the projection screen, that I can bring up the items I want to display, that I can switch between media.

But not until I did all those things on my iPad did I realize how much harder I had to work to do those things on a computer. With the monitor duplicated or extended, you have to work hard at showing the audience only what you want them to see, not the logistics behind the scenes. Take movie clips; I normally do this by bookmarking scenes on DVDs, switching the DVDs out one by one, letting the DVD load, selecting the bookmark, and all the while finding a way to cover the projector or get this all done on the monitor screen so that my audience isn't distracted by watching all this activity.

The iPad doesn't allow video out except for Keynote presentations and playing videos. That's a bug for some uses, but a definite feature for the way I used it today. The audience sees only what you intend to present -- not the desktop, not the application around it, not menus, not cursors It allows you to perform, not operate a computer in public. When the clip is over or the presentation ends, the iPad stops projecting. No more seeing "End of slideshow, click to exit" or the Powerpoint navigation view -- sights we've all come to expect, yet which nevertheless remain suboptimal, jarring, unprofessional.

I spent 100% less time keeping track of my technology -- to start and stop it at the right time, to navigate to what I wanted, to push buttons and keep the flow of the session moving at the same time -- and 100% more time focusing on my audience. That's the iPad magic that it's hard to show in a commercial, harder to explain, since it relies on recognizing a problem that most of us elide as unavoidable and therefore forgivable. Sometimes it takes a different approach, a different tool, to make you aware of how many compromises and work-arounds you were enduring before.

Computer free

As we all know, you can fill your house with computers, as many as you like, and they will all fail at once. We have two main computers at home, my Air and Noel's iBook. Both have failures that require them to go to the shop this week. The Air left today to have a broken hinge replaced; Noel will be calling about his battery-bulge problem tomorrow.

And of course, the moment they all fail is one of the several times a year when you have some public presentation to make that isn't a simple matter to transfer to another device. I have a Keynote presentation I give to incoming freshmen at our summer orientation session, which takes place this Thursday. I could export it to a Powerpoint and use a Windows laptop to present it -- if my Windows laptop weren't essentially a desktop right now, with a dead screen requiring it to be hooked up to an external monitor to be useful. That works in a pinch for a presentation, but it's not optimal to have to glance behind you at the screen to know what you're projecting.

Before sending off the Air, I put the presentation on my iPad (through the GoodReader file transfer and PDF reader app), and today, with some trepidation, I downloaded the iPad version of Keynote to see if I could do the presentation directly from the device. The presentation needed some serious updating for this year, too, and so I began working through the process of editing it. My trepidation turned gradually to delight. Placing elements on the slides, adding transitions and orchestrating movement, even grabbing screenshots from other apps (PDFs, webpages) and inserting them into the show was far more intuitive than using a mouse and screen interface. I especially appreciated the ease of zooming in on anything the iPad can display, taking a screenshot, inserting the image from the iPad's photo library, resizing and masking it to show just the part I need, and adding annotations and highlights.

The experience was exhilarating. I ended up going much farther in improving the presentation, replacing outdated images to more closely match what the families will be looking at on their handouts, and making the flow more intuitive. Next time I'm skipping the laptop and going straight to the iPad to make my presentation -- and I can't wait to experimenting with hooking the device up to the projector and controlling it via touch.

Step away from the dead trees

I've been a New Yorker subscriber for years.  I love the magazine.  But in the last couple of years, I've grown dissatisfied with the way it reaches me -- namely, in print.

It comes every week, this physical object of paper and ink.  They pile up on the kitchen counter, the bedside table, the recycling bin.  They add to the poundage of pages silently glaring at me, waiting for me to lug them somewhere and read them.

That's not how I read anymore.  I can access all the stories in the magazine on the computer because I'm a subscriber.  They're everywhere I might want to read them.  Why do they still insist on sending me the printed magazine through the mail?

I've been wishing for an online-only subscription for quite a while now.  And my prayers have finally been answered.  The New Yorker announced an iPad subscription today, replacing the previous model where you had to buy individual issues on the iPad app.  You can get a combined print-iPad subscriptions, or -- just for me -- iPad only.  Ahhhh ... that's what I wanted.

Let me be clear -- I don't want the printed magazine to disappear as an option for everyone.  I prefer to have the choice, though, to pay for New Yorker content without having to receive physical objects in the mail.  And I'll bet there's more like me out there.