| HN Mirror

Well, I'm happy to respond, I guess.

A few years ago, I was given an iPad 1 by the company I work for as a x-mas bonus. It took me a little while, but over time I've found it taking up so very many functions in my life, and doing so with more ease than I thought possible.

To start with, I use a stylus (a Pogo Sketch Pro) constantly with my iPad. I journal daily - I now have about 300 pages of hand-written journaling done, two years worth, that I did in the Penultimate app. I also do a lot of reading on my iPad; I generally read PDFs inside Goodreader, which allows me to underline and take notes with my stylus; last month I read almost all of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, and now I'm working on Moby-Dick (an old favorite of mine.) Being able to take notes, save those notes, print out or email a single page - these things are very useful.

In fact, I use my iPad to fill in every form I find myself having to fill in. These days, lots of places (the DMV, insurance companies, etc) will send you a link to a PDF and ask you to fill it in - which, of course, seems utterly ridiculous in this era. But that's no problem for me; in fact, I prefer it, because I can fill it in pretty easily on my iPad (by hand with my stylus, or typing the data in if I want it to look pretty) and then print it out. That way, I can keep a copy of every form that I am forced to fill in. I do this with leases, with insurance cards, with applications for things, etc. It's a great way to keep track of those things when I find I need them later, too (since that seems to happen often.)

Just in general, it's allowed me to simplify my life immensely. Huge stacks of paper and file folders filled with old receipts and crumpled-up forms have been replaced by a tiny device with a few Goodreader folders. And of course, I'm the type of (ADD) person who is benefited immensely just by having a calendar app handy all the time.

Another thing - I am a jazz pianist. My iPad has become pretty much indispensable for my music. Most jazz musicians lug around three phone books' worth of music books called "Real books;" I have all three of the standard volumes in PDFs on my iPad, and several other more obscure ones too. I have hundreds of pages of other sheet music that's instantly accessible, no filing necessary. I can take notes on anything I like - my iPad saves all of it.

Also - lots of musicians like me find it really useful to practice along to a prerecorded background at home; once upon a time people used pre-recorded tapes, and in the past few years there's been a desktop program called "Band In A Box." Last I checked, a Band In A Box license costs $300; that's how it often is with these niche pieces of software. But there's a fantastic little $8 iPad app called "iReal B" that does everything Band In A Box does, and more - it gives you simple chord sheets for 1200 songs, and easily plays backgrounds for you if you need it. And in addition, I have apps that help me format sheet music for people and transpose it for other instruments when I want other musicians to be able to play along with me.

My iPad is also a really good tool for actually creating music itself. There's a pretty fantastic sequencing / synthesizer app called Nano Studio that I use to create some electronic music (like this: http://soundcloud.com/koeselitz/the-end-of-the-beginning) just for fun. There are apps like Filtatron with filters and effects I can run sounds through if I want. And the iPad is good enough to work nicely for my own recordings of me playing my piano; the Soundcloud app lets me record directly and upload immediately if I want, or there's an app called Fourtrack that just acts as a simple four-track recorder if I want several parts in the recording.

The essential thing for me is that the iPad is miniscule when compared to all the things it's replaced. And at this point, I can pretty much do anything I need to on my iPad. I can download files and then open them in any app I want to; and I have players that work with any format under the sun no matter how obscure. There were days when having an iPad seemed to be limiting in that it was somewhat difficult to move files around and manipulate them, but as far as I can tell those days are mostly gone. It would be nice to have direct filesystem acccess - but I almost never miss it now.

Sorry this is so long, but you asked I guess. Really, there are things I never would have even thought to do if I hadn't had this device.