Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic ipad worth the hype?

Malu - we were talking about getting a fic file into Stanza to use as an ebook reader, not for editing/transferring from place to place, etc.

I use Google Docs on a fairly regular basis but didn't know I could use it to import files into my Stanza ereader on my phone.

Hi malu,

I couldn't help but laugh when I saw the "Bob and Carol" opening of you note. My immediate thought is that Carol and I should collaborate in a rewrite of "Bob and Carol and Lois and Clark."

As for sharing and moving files, I tend to use email and USB thumb drives. I maintain 4 different email addresses and when I'm working on a fic, about once a week or so I'll mail the work file from one of my email accounts to another. That gives me a record that can't be lost. Also, every time I edit a fic, I save a copy on a thumb drive. I then make sure to use multiple different computers and thumb drives so that I always have at least 2 copies of the most current version of whatever I'm working on. If I were to go back 2 or three revisions, I'll have half-a-dozen copies spread across several computers and multiple thumb drives. I don't like to lose work and I don't take chances.

As you can probably imagine, I find the scene in SV where Clark asks Lois, "Don't you back up onto floppy disks?" to be rather funny.

And, yes, I've been called crazy for my level of... caution.

Bob

Originally posted by bobbart:
You should have seen me with my dissertation! In addition to having the latest version on my computer, I also kept a copy at my student office and a backup or two at my home, and I always took a copy with me whenever I went to see relatives. I was petrified of losing a year's worth of work and having to start all over.

If there had been online backup facilities available at the time, I would have used them, as well. Unfortunately, at the time, e-mails couldn't be kept on the mail server; they were downloaded to one's computer to be read. Having had such a facility would have proved helpful. Fortunately, my hard drive never crashed, my house didn't burn down or flood, and I never needed any of the backups.

But I, too, find the SV scene amusing. And very typical of early Lois -- finding fault in others rather than admitting to her own error in judgment.

cheers,
Lynn

I have an iPad 3G and have to say I love it. I have trouble now going back to my iPhone and reading anything on it anymore, whether it be the web or an email, book, or document. The extra screen real estate just doesn't compare. I used to think the iPhone was awesome for all that. Now I use it to make phone calls.

For a device that's been out for just a short while, it has some awesome apps already. Try out Alice or The Elements or Star Walk just to see what's possible on an iPad that simply can't work on an iPhone.

My kids are addicted to games like Jelly Car and Super Monkey Ball, both apps also available for the iPhone/iPod touch but they refuse to play on those anymore. Now it's iPad or nothing.

My wife is also addicted to hers. She uses the phrase, "prying it from her cold, dead fingers..." a lot. lol. For her, it's mostly used for reading, such as keeping up with her blog posts or web research or work email, or reading books via the Kindle app or Apple's own iBooks.

It's a multi-purpose device that, incidentally, can also read PDF's like a charm, unlike the Kindle.

The battery on that device is impressive as well. I watched three one-hour TV shows through the Netflix app using their instant view streamed over wifi and the battery meter had only dropped to about 85%. I could watch movies or listen to music during an entire international flight and still have some juice left over.

My iPad also has 64GB of flash on it, so I can store a ton of movies, photos (right now 12,500 photos of the kids), and music on it like the entire Lord of the Rings movies and all six Star Wars movies and still have loads of space left over.

Not that everything's awesome about it. The worst part for me is file transfer and printing, something they have plans for with iPhone OS 4.0 due in the fall. But all-in-all, very impressive for a Rev. 1 device.

So Roger, you can read fanfic on an Ipad that
is not in an email?
Can you transfer fic from your computer to it?
And someone mentioned gmail. That doesn't sound familiar?

That all depends on what format you have your fanfic in. If it's in text, pdf, Word, or any common format, yes. I actually use a $0.99 app called GoodReader, which helps in file transfer from your computer and reads many different formats, such as PDF (IMO better than built-in PDF reader, but both are good), TXT, image formats, video, .DOC, .PPT, .XLS, HTML, and a few music formats.

As I said earlier, the biggest challenge is in transferring the actual file to the iPad. But lots of enterprising developers have come up with fairly inexpensive apps that make it easy such as this almost free app I mentioned above.

Roger,

Aren't you able to download files from the Internet, for example, by using Safari, or email attachments by using Mail, on the iPad, just like with any other Mac?

As I mentioned before, if you have a Google account (GMail), the Google Docs (online storage, docs.google.com) allows you to store up to 1GB of any type of files accessible from any computer with Internet access. You can upload from your desktop and then download any time you want from the iPad (I assume).

malu

Yes, you can but I've not tried that. You can also copy/paste text straight from Safari into, say Apple's Pages (their Word equivalent) directly to read as a text document. Safari is a nice-looking web browser, too, so you can read fanfic straight from these pages, too if you don't want to download files.