March 21, 2012 – 10:00 pm
I’m toying with the idea of trying to do the work I do using only the iPad and an external keyboard. From the point of view of portability and convenience, it would be worth attempting.
There are a few workarounds I’ll have to adopt and I’m sure there will be some niggles (like not being able to Cmd-Tab my way around applications) but I think there’s very little I won’t be able to do.
I suspect some of the activities I do regularly (like blog posts) will take a little while longer than usual – at least at first, and I won’t be able to upload audio from my Zoom H1, video from my Flip camera or photos from my Lumix digital camera – but I can use my phone and the iPad itself for capturing media – and while it won’t be quite to the usual quality, I don’t think there’ll be too much of a trade-off.
I’ve downloaded an FTP app, which I think will come in useful, and I plan to do a lot of writing, Skyping, Email, Twitter – and even some DJing over the next week. I can make Keynote presentations on the iPad and I have a VGA adaptor as well – so I may prep and deliver a class or two that way as well.
I can already think of some things I’ll eventually need to go back to the laptop for (editing and uploading large audio files for instance)… but the purpose of this is not proving that I don’t need a laptop – but that I can go away without it for a week at a time and still get all the essential parts of my work done.
Let’s try this – and I’ll blog how I get on.
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8 Comments
Hi,
I think you have picked the right time for this experiment. I tried this with the ipad 1 in Africa. I even had a solar panel for power. That said there were so many things missing at that time.. (2008).
I tried a bunch of keyboards but as I’m not a pro typist I find the screen just as fast.
Get yourself the camera connector kit. Great for transferring photos and videos for all kinds of cameras.
You might find the Zoom H1 will act like a USB mic too. I know the H2 did when I tried it.
If not using Audioboo then there are a number of audio apps where you can FTP/audio off. I think ‘fire’ is one.
And although I have only used it a few times, Blogsy looks like a decent blogging app. Good luck and I’m looking forward to seeing how you get on.
I didn’t even know the camera connector kit existed. That could make a radical improvement – especially with iPhoto now available for the iPad. If that’ll work for the Flip and the Zoom as well, then we’re onto something… Now if only I could attach two 1TB external hard drives…
If your flip doesn’t work, try any compact that shoots hd video. I got the best results through my Panasonic gh1 but found most video could be imported if it was QuickTime compable (motion jpg etc).
As for storage, try DropBox, SugarSync, and if you have a pogo plug with drones attached you can have some serious storage. The pogo plug app does come with a little cloud storage though.
There are also wifi enabled pocket drives but they are not cheap.
I’m a pro-account Dropbox user and I have 50GB with box.net that I’ve never used, so that sort of solves that problem. I’d not heard of the Pogoplug. That looks really interesting – and might warrant further investigation.
Next thing I’d like to try is video blogging using the iPad. Watch this space…
If you want quick and easy video uploads on the ipad/iphone. this was recorded on the ipad with the app Keek using the front facing camera & shooting into the sun.. http://www.keek.com/!injbaab
It’s limited to 36seconds long but for a quick update its fine. If you want to be sure it’s online for a while (you never know how long these platforms will last) then it may be best to record onto the ipad and upload into youtube.
Nice. It was hard to tell the difference between the two for a while but you clarified that nicely. :)
The WordPress app on the iPad shoots video and uploads it to your own server and embeds it in the post. I quite like that idea…
The H1 will need the 2.0 firmware update if you don’t already have it. That will let you use it as a USB mic. I don’t know if you’ll need a powered USB hub between it and the camera connection kit. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone try that set up yet. I’m curious as to whether or not it will work.
@OptionalD: Not used the H1 in that way but have used the H2 with an ipad.