the iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on. For most people, manipulating these digital materials directly by touching them is a completely new experience — and a deeply satisfying one.I suspect the rank and file who never wanted the added baggage of a computer (antivirus software, OS upgrades, drivers, hardware upgrades, networking configuration) will be deleriously happy to have a device that just delivers the stuff that they bought a computer for in the first place.
The tech minded control types will have more to quibble about.
But I would think all users would have a problem with the choices that early content providers are making- check this out:
One big missing feature in the [Wall Street Journal] and [New York Times] iPad apps: You can’t copy text. Take a screen cap of it all you want, but you can’t get the actual text. That’s a basic function on a computer, and the iPad has a clever cut-and-paste function, but it doesn’t work here.Which is not to say that these early iPad apps will carve the iPad's future in stone - but the temptation to rein in the free-for-all of web content delivery may prove too tempting for providers.
That would seem to be a conscious decision and not just a missing feature in these quasi-beta apps. If so it will make it hard to blog or email about a story. Of course, it will also make it harder for people to rip off whole stories on splogs, and it could lesson the relevance of aggregators.
Neither paper embeds links in their stories. While nytimes.com links to a U.S. embassy news release in the third paragraph of its Pakistan attack story today, the Times app has no links.
It’s also worth noting that you can’t comment on stories in either the Journal or Times apps.
When you have the ability to browse the web on the same device and get the same features the iPad apps are denying you - you have to wonder if the user base will drive the apps back towards conventional web content delivery.
Protecting the device is one thing (see: flash) but creating yet another siloed web experience (see: cell phones) doesn't make a lot of sense.
3 comments:
You mean like this: (copied and pasted using my ipadwithin skygrid app)
But I would think all users would have a problem with the choices that early content providers are making- check this out:
One big missing feature in the [Wall Street Journal] and [New York Times] iPad apps: You can’t copy text. Take a screen cap of it all you want, but you can’t get the actual text. That’s a basic function on a computer, and the iPad has a clever cut-and-paste function, but it doesn’t work here.
That would seem to be a conscious decision and not just a missing feature in these quasi-beta apps. If so it will make it hard to blog or email about a story. Of course, it will also make it harder for people to rip off whole stories on splogs, and it could lesson the relevance of aggregators.
I believe it is a conscious decision by the designers of those apps (and I said so).
I believe it is a bad decision. Obviously apps can be written to support those functions - but clearly the WSJ and the NYT wanted to try going without them.
Which is short sighted.
It looks like the anonymous poster missed the point. The article is not claiming that you can't copy and paste at all with the iPad (for example, copying the text of this blog and posting it in the comments). It is pointing out that for whatever reason, the NYT and WSJ saw fit to create a special iPad app for their papers that specifically does not allow copying of text or hyperlinking.
Which is just plain odd, when you can still get to them on a browser, where you can copy text and follow links.
Unless I'm not getting the point.
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