Hey Everyone,

So, its been a couple of weeks spent with the iPad now, and in truth, its already become an essential gadget to have around me.   Its not without its flaws, but it is ace.

Before I babble on too much, here is my second bit of ‘finger art’ created last night, not too bad, but in no way great, I still need some time with this beast to master the finger…man that sounds wrong.

Drawing/Painting:

Drawing on this is pretty much as I mentioned in my last post, and little has changed, so I don’t yet feel as though I’ve improved with it, but equally haven’t fallen out of love with it either, so that’s all good.  I think my fear (being a bit of a perfectionist) is that I CANT create final art on this device, so will never truly be happy with what I produce.  I have to accept that and move on.  What it should do though is allow my sketches to be a little more polished and allow me to fire over quick concepts to my customers a little easier.

Another useful note that cancels out my previous issue about not being able to rest my hand on the device while drawing, is that if you use a Smudgeguard, it allows you to bypass this issue, VERY USEFUL!  You may look like a misdirected 80’s style reject with some bizarre one fingered glove thing going on, but it sure does help the drawing.

Ok, so, what else has cropped up since using the device for a couple of weeks…

Browsing:

I hate to say this, but the iPad is limited in this field, BUT, this could well be down to poor web programming on the whole.

The biggest gripe is accessing sites that have any form of internally built scrollbars (even the lovely javascript slider on the Apple Store cant be used on the iPad), so when you come to one of these, if it doesnt have corresponding, clickable arrows, then you cant access that menu/option, its that cut and dry.  I’ve been looking for a new car recently, and thus have been perusing many car sites, most of which (when your building a car) use some form of scrollbar within the options selection, so I’ve basically had to open the laptop to do this…defeating the object of the iPad.  Annoying.

Can this be fixed? No idea, but it seems to make sense that it could.  This current issue is probably worth keeping in mind if your creating a site that is aimed at the iPad…dont create any internal scrollbars!

Gaming:

This has only got better, playing games on this puppy is ace, I’m playing for longer on this device than I ever did on my iPhone.  Its great.  I’ve particularly loved playing Sky Smash 1918 and Sonic, both of which have seemingly become more playable (no, I have no idea why).

Ok, that’s it, blabber over.

Thanks.

Mike.