The Critical Path

The iPad is now one week old, and I am pleased to report that the honeymoon period is still in full flow. We are as in love as the day we met, despite learning a little more about each other and exposing the odd niggle. I am talking about the equivalent of snoring – not necessarily enough to break up over, but annoying enough to cause arguments over breakfast.

In this case the “niggle” is about Keynote and Pages, and their seeming inability to interact with the outside world. It reminds me of being back in the day of the Blueberry iMac, my first true love. The problem with the Blueberry was trying to share anything with anyone who didn’t also have Mac love . It felt like going out with a fat girl (I love fat girls by the way), your mates thought it was so wrong, but deep down it felt so right.

Anyway, I digress.  Pages and Keynote are actually great to use, better than I imagined. My problems started when I tried to upload my own PowerPoint template to Keynote. Firstly, and amazingly, there is no integration with Me.Com, Apples cloud based storage and mail solution. To me, this makes no sense whatsoever. The Good Reader  (Nice app) will happily connect to Me.Com so why not Keynote?

The solution. It would seem, is to sign up to iWork.Com, the caring sharing place provided by Apple for the purpose of exchanging documents with the world at large. Happily my Apple ID got me in with no trouble, but in to what? Basic is great, we love clean design and no clutter, but iwork.Com is devoid of anything resembling functionality. Sadly it really does feel like they knocked it up on Friday afternoon when they realised the obvious flaw in an otherwise good product.

I decided to accept the fact that I couldn’t use Me.Com, and to live with the minimalist functionality of iWork.Com. I proceeded to upload a .pptx presentation. Compatibility with MS Office is thankfully no longer an issue in iWork applications, but clearly in iPad land something is amiss.  Following a fair amount of faffing I concluded that my MS documents were not destined to hit my iPad, which I have to say is a great shame.

There have been no other revelations to sully our new love, and I feel sure I will learn to work around this one. All in all, one week in I am still delighted, and still happy to recommend an iPad to anyone and everyone prepared to listen or read my words. Further updates to follow.