Skip to main content

The Best Freaking Web Browsing Machine Ever

Contrary to our recent post, we do not actually believe Apple intended the iPad as a Tizra viewer. For all the talk of Apps and iBooks, the iPad's real significance is that it does a better job than anything we've yet seen of lowering barriers to using the web.

You don't have to wait for it to boot up, it doesn't need to be recharged all the time, is small enough to keep on you most of the time, but is big enough that you don't have to squint or scroll too much when reading and can fit enough of your fingers on it to type reasonably well. Plus its touchscreen is intuitive enough and response is fast enough that you don't lose your train of thought while getting from one place to another. As Tim Bray says, "speed is a feature."

All these things come together to create something that enables us to work the web—with all its incredible power to inform and facilitate interaction—into more and more of the corners of our lives where it didn't fit before. Those places where there would be that awkward pause in the conversation while you stooped and moused around on your laptop to find that thing you wanted to show someone. Those places where people would say "yeah, but you can't use it while you're…[under the hood of your car, out in the field with a client, lying on a scaffold under the Sistine ceiling, etc.]"

We're still not ready to take it into the bathtub, but this is just the beginning. Apple's done a great job of finally making the idea of a tablet computer real and practical. Others will follow, and who knows how long it'll be before people think WWW stands for Works When Wet?

Comments

Anonymous said…
I couldn't agree more. I don't have it yet, waiting for 3g version, but for everything people say it lacks, they miss out on what it can and will accomplish. Apple has always been about pushing the envelope and challenging the status quo of what it should do.

I think as things progress it will be crazy to see how much we will accomplish with this device, now if they could just release the 3g model.

Great blog, info and tweets.

eBookNoir
Abe Dane said…
Thanks, eBookNoir! Yeah...we're looking forward to the 3G, too. For us the WiFi is just a preview of the truly mobile device to come.

Nearer term, it'll be interesting to see what's in iPhone OS 4.0 announced today.

Popular posts from this blog

Stanford's HighWire Press Picks Tizra

We're thrilled to announce a new partnership with Stanford University's HighWire Press.  It's exciting not only as an opportunity to work side-by-side with a longtime leader in online publishing, but also as validation of the robustness and flexibility we have worked so hard to build into Tizra.  HighWire has been serving up some of the most prestigious online journals in the world since 1995, and they are extremely selective about the technology they offer their customers. But the real proof of the collaboration's value is the response from the marketplace, with organizations including Project MUSE (Johns Hopkins University Press), Duke University Press , and GeoScienceWorld already signed on in advance of the product's launch.  Clearly, the increased discoverability, ease of use and agility resulting from the collaboration are what publishers—and readers—are looking for. Further details on the partnership are in the news release below.  A PDF version is ...

Leave Web Enough Alone!

Jeremy Zawodny is rightly torqued about the needless complication of tools that purport to help with information sharing. The web's always had that pretty well covered, thanks to the simple magic of the URL. Anything you find, you can bookmark, email, or with a tinyurl , disseminate on a cocktail napkin. If my dear grandfather had been born later, he probably would never have picked up the habit of mailing articles lovingly clipped with a pen knife, and instead would have referred me to his del.icio.us feed. Zawodny points to a bizarre assortment of pop-ups, forms, and other unwelcome surprises that result from the "helpful" new sharing features, and notes... they seem to be placed on the sites under the assumption that I'm too stupid to send email (to the people I presumably email frequently already) with a URL in it... Thanks for the confidence boost. At Tizra, we're more inclined to say thanks to for the opportunity to do better. Our AgilePDF™ , for exampl...

Context is King!

John Blossom's post on traditional portal strategies resonated with my recent thinking about aggregation sites ( Shorelines: portals Passe ). I made his post into a silly slogan for my subject line, but he is making a good case that even in the "piling things up" business, there are potential problems with actually piling them up. Reading it, for a minute, I had a pang about Tizra. You might be able to read it as saying that it's not worth building your own content collection at all, but I don't think that is the practical point for publishers. I think that the notion of stressing context and tuning product offerings to user groups is exactly what we enable with our product and content management tools. You need to have a branded presentation of your content to all your different audiences, and make every audience an offer that they want to buy. That takes a lot of flexibility, which is what we've concentrated on. That flexibility should be on tap, not the en...