Well, four days in and I had my first “oh no can’t get it done on the iPad moment.” Commence the I toldjaso’s haters!
I had to amend a contract and email it out. I had already successfully gotten it onto the iPad. But when I opened it in Pages – whether from Goodreader or Air Sharing – the formatting was a mess. It also had to replace the font (!) Surprise!!
I futzed with things a little bit before I realized that I am not (yet) adept enough at Pages to quickly fix things like this. If I’d had an hour to play with it I am sure I could’ve cleaned up the document. But I didn’t have an hour.
So I rolled my bouncy ball seat over to the iMac and did what was necessary. Took all of 4 minutes to tweak and email out.
Ultimately I don’t blame the iPad per se, but rather Pages, and the bizarre limitations Apple built into it regarding formatting and fonts. And by the way the contract was what I’d otherwise consider a fairly simple document. Just text with various bullet/number subsections.
Whether Office from Microsoft or some other aggressive dev (still hoping Google brings full gdocs capabilities….), the productivity space is ripe for the pickin for whomever gets this right…
The iPad Alone 
It makes sense. Pages is a 1.0 product right now. It will get better. I used the desktop Pages in its first generation and am very happy that it has gotten better and better. Looking forward to using it for what it can do now and looking even more forward to updates to the app.
Agreed. I have to believe that these will improve, perhaps dramatically. Or at least enough to be useful in 80/20 scenarios.
I have a document that lists the formatting issues you will run into with any of the iWork apps.
http://www.ijoel.com/groups/tech/wiki/66899/iPad_iWork_Document_Formatting.html
There are some iPad apps that edit google docs if you check the store.
And documentsToGo has announced their next update will be iPad optimized. DocumentsToGo big claim to fame is the ability to edit without losing formatting, so it will be an intersting one to watch.
Thanks i will definitely check.into the gdocs editing apps. And cool about office to go. Is that the same as office2 ?
No office2 is a different app.
I am talking about DocumentsToGo by DataViz.
They have been around for ever on many different platforms (Palm, windows mobile, blackberry, iphone, etc) –
I have the iPhone app (and used to use the Palm version) and it works well.
Waiting for their iPad update.
Another one you can watch is QuickOffice, but I haven’t heard an official word from them that their iPhone app will be upgraded to iPad, but you have to assume it will be.
Ah yes sorry i see that now! I recall them from back in my Palm days (ugh). I see too that they’re already saying the next free update will bring iPad native support. Interesting thanks!!
Just got my iPad 3G 32gb yesterday in the mail. Works great and does not feel nothing like a huge iPod touch. The keyboard works wonderfully and i can type pretty fast and with little error. I love it.
The above post was typed on my iPad, while sitting on my couch. 🙂
Nicely done, and back atcha!!
I take it the contract was a Word file (you didn’t say). Assuming that, my question would be: .doc, .docx, or something else? (Or a better way to ask this: What version of Word created the contract?) Along the lines of, Inquiring minds want to know…
Thanks for posting. Not sure of the exact answer but best guess os late model Word on Windows…