5 February 2015
Federico Viticci:
The iPad, for me, is a product of intangibles. How its portable nature blurs the line between desktop computers and mobile. How a vibrant developer community strives to craft apps that make us do better work and record memories and enjoy moments and be productive and entertained. The iPad, for me, is a screen that connects me with people and helps me with my life’s work anywhere I am. Transformative and empowering, with the iPad Air 2 being its best incarnation to date. Not for everyone, still improvable, but absolutely necessary for me. And, I believe, for others.
Liberating. The iPad is a computer that lets me work and communicate at my own pace, no matter where I am.
To be honest, I think I, and many other people Iike me, have been waiting for this article from Viticci for some time. He may be one of the most notorious iPad power users out there, if not the most notorious. The thing is, I use my iPad Air 2 as my main computing device but wouldn’t even dream of doing nearly the things Viticci does. I played around with Editorial but it was a bit too much for me in the end (the plan is to learn some Python so I may one day be able to take better advantage of Editorial’s features). And Drafts is indispensable for me even without using it to its full potential.
I can handle this website from my iPad 90% of the time as well as most other computing tasks that may come up, not to mention the things I do for fun and consumption of media. The problem for me is, being an MBA student, there are a lot more things that can’t be done on an iPad or, at the very least, are extremely inefficient. I rely heavily on Microsoft Excel, which for the iPad, will probably never be as powerful as the Mac because of the way it is interacted with, as well as special software we use for financial forecasting that may never find a home on iOS.
This doesn’t stop me from using the iPad every chance I can get. I write my papers on it, I handle smaller assignments on it, and interact with classes through special programs (Blackboard, Canvas, etc.) on the iPad with ease. I will even do some minimal Excel work on it here and there when I don’t feel like firing up the MacBook.
It truly is liberating to be able to go anywhere with a device so portable and know that 95% of the things I need to do in a given day can be completed without much worry or hassle all on my iPad. Just reading Viticci’s article makes me want to use my iPad even more. I can’t wait to see where Apple takes the iPad but the question still remains, when will Federico be able to record his podcasts right from his iPad?